Skating in the pre-Tonya Harding era
I wrote this in 2007…but I stand by it!
In a previous life, I used to figure skate. My idols were Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, a brother/sister dance team from Aylmer, Quebec that skated for France after being criticised for being too weird by the Canadian figure skating establishment.
In 1990, they performed an incredible program entitled “Missing”, choreographed by Christopher Dean (of Torvill and Dean fame), a piece calling attention to the disappeared of Argentina. In 1991, their free dance was a sequel. When I found this on the gold mine that is YouTube this weekend, the shivers I experienced while watching it were the very same as when I saw the program the first time, over 16 years ago.
If there was ever an argument for the artistic potential of figure skating, this is it. There is nothing particularly spectacular about any element of the program, but it’s just amazing overall. Now that there’s all sorts of new rules governing ice dance, folks like the Duschesnays would never be able to perform something like this.
I’ve always said that figure skating would be so much better if it weren’t a sport. There’s a whole lot of artistic potential that is lost in lieu of the conventions of competition. There’s just no room for the Gary Beacoms of the world. Sure, Beacom is a rather eccentric fellow who, among other things, was jailed for refusing to pay taxes and insists on keeping his money in gold coins rather than relying on banks. He also doesn’t believe in stop signs and speeding limits. But man oh man, he’s incredible. His understanding of the physics of skating is apparent from his programs. Very few jumps and spins, just the use of his edges…it clues you in to why it’s called “figure skating.”
When I used to skate we had to do what was called “patch” session. Each skater got a patch of clean ice to use to do what is called compulsory figures. You’d basically draw various shapes and loops on the ice, making sure to balance your weight just so, in order to make sure that the turns and loops you drew were precise. I remember begging my parents for my own “scribe” — basically a giant compass used to mark the ice for practice (they gave me one — it was bright pink and blue and I loved it).
The jumps that are so popular are simply these “figures” done in the air. A loop jump, for instance, employs the same body positioning as a loop drawn on the ice. In fact, compulsory figures were worth 60% of the marks in figure skating for quite some time. Sure, figures aren’t particularly fun to watch on TV, but they are incredibly hard to do. In what I think was a big mistake (though probably good for business), figures were completely eliminated from competition in 1990 — and this meant that new skaters stopped practicing them altogether and some of the most interesting figures (like the damn “Swiss S” that I spent quite a bit of time practicing — even though it was never part of my figure tests!) have become no more than curiosities.
What makes Gary Beacom amazing is that he is able to demonstrate just why it’s a shame that figures are no more. He’s a master of the discipline…I remember when I first saw him skate. I couldn’t believe it. See what you think…
UPDATE!
In looking into figures, I found out that the World Figures and Fancy Skating Competition was established less than a decade ago! And that “Swiss S” I worked so hard to be able to do? It’s one of the selected figures for the competition. I can’t tell you how strangely thrilled I was to find this out. Here’s an excellent article from the Wall Street Journal about the competition and how figures expands opportunities for skaters of all ages. Maybe I need to get that scribe out again.
