For Chicagoland residents, check out the best outdoor rinks from Chicago Kids. Ice-skating can keep your whole family active and engaged, more so than other winter sports. Fairly inexpensive and open to all levels, you and your kids can skate in one place without the skill separation other activities can create.
With different styles like figure skating and speed skating, everyone can pursue their interests within the bounds of the rink. When we say the whole family, we mean the whole family. I asked her whether she felt the same shift as I did in the late s at her own rink, in which fewer kids seemed to be getting involved in the sport.
People would throw stuffed animals to their friends, the benches were stacked, and anytime you competed you felt like you were in the Olympics already. Mary Louise Adams, the professor of kinesiology, has a theory about how to fix skating.
For the sport to survive, it must include those who are never going to go to the Olympics and even those who never aspire to. People fell in love with superstars like Michelle Kwan not only because she won competitions but because her charisma on the ice was impossible to ignore. Since starting to post regularly on TikTok in December, he now has more than half a million followers. Figure skating has long suffered under a deeply conservative culture, both athletically and culturally.
Meanwhile, queer skaters have been implicitly encouraged to remain in the closet by judges most of whom are old and white and institutions ditto. In this world, it seems, nobody really wins, even the people who go home with gold medals.
Like many skaters, it was an injury that ended my competitive career. While training for the New England regionals at age 12, I felt a stubborn shooting pain in my right shin every time I landed a jump, and so after weeks of convincing myself it was nothing, I ended up in physical therapy to treat a presumed stress fracture.
It was benign and otherwise harmless, but it would spell the end of my illusion that I could, against all odds and mostly theoretically, ascend to the national stage. A comparable model could be something like dance, where the competitive sector lives alongside a massive commercial industry and its status as a performance art.
The possibilities of what skating could be — expanding the idea of pairs and ice dance beyond one woman and one man, better outreach and resources for adult skaters, adding competitive categories for specific skills imagine watching a dozen skaters attempt quads one by one, without having to judge them on costume or choreography — are endless to an infuriating extent.
There is so much that the sport could change for its own good, if only it wanted to. The days of American dominance on international podiums are gone. The competitive side of figure skating will in all likelihood remain rough. The joy of skating — of whipping through cold air, of mastering moves on four millimeters of steel that physics can barely explain, then passing those moves on to the next generation of wobbly-legged children — should be for everyone. For figure skating to survive in any meaningful way, it has to be.
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