This blog will be centered rather loosely on the history of ice skating, with an emphasis on skating, not skaters. I expect it to differ from other blogs about skating by being geekier and more misanthropic. I don’t much care who won what competition or what they wore while doing it. But I do care what the optimal radius of hollow for skating outside at -40 degrees is and whether the mysterious radius-based artifacts from the Middle Bronze Age are actually skates. These are the kinds of enduring questions I’ll tackle here. If you’re looking for current gossip about the skating world or tips on learning to skate, you’ll be happier elsewhere. Unless, of course, by “learning to skate” you mean “learning to skate on bone skates” or “learning to skate like they did 500 years ago.” Then, this is the place to be.
I’m most interested in the early history of ice skating, before people started writing books about skating. There’s a lot of folklore in this part of skating history, including some nonsense that has been copied from book to book for over a century even though people knew better. I intend to set the record straight.