Author: Bev

The first book on skating

Bev7 Comments

Cover image

Robert Jones’s A Treatise on Skating, first published in 1772, is generally considered the first book on skating. It went through several editions between 1772 and 1855, with numerous additions and changes over time.

Aimed at beginners, it has two parts: a section on basic skills, including choosing and putting on skates, stroking and edges, and a section on more advanced maneuvers, such as the spiral line and the flying Mercury (shown in the cover image). It provides a nice overview of what skating was like back in the day. People didn’t do fancy jumps or spins, or even figures. The advanced skaters seemed most interested in dramatic body positions as they glided across the ice.

In 1855, W. E. Cormack updated Jones’s Treatise in response to an unspecified event that occurred three years earlier. I think this may have been the publication of Cyclos’s book, which was the first attempt at systematizing skating. Later, Henry Vandervell and T. Maxwell Witham took this further with A System of Figure Skating in England while Demeter Diamantidi, Max Wirth, and Karl von Korper did the same in Austria with Spuren auf dem Eise. These books laid the foundation for the schedule of compulsory figures, which was the foundation of figure skating for nearly a century.

Based on Cormack’s comments, I think there may have been some resistance to systematizing what had previously been an abstract art, just as there has been resistance to creating a code of points for scoring skating in the ISU judging system.

The link above is to my edition of Jones’s book, which includes both the full text of the original an Cormack’s updates.

References

Robert Jones. 1772. A Treatise on Skating. London: J. Ridley.

John Cyclos [George Anderson]. 1852. The Art of Skating with Plain Directions for the Acquirement of the Most Difficult and Elegant Maneuvers. Glasgow: Thomas Murray and Son.

Henry Eugene Vandervell & T. Maxwell Witham. 1869. A System of Figure Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. London: Horace Cox.

Demeter Diamantidi, Karl von Korper, and Max Wirth. 1881. Spuren auf dem Eise: die Entwicklung des Eislaufes auf der Bahn des Wiener Eislauf-Vereines. Vienna: Alfred Holder.

 

Figures removed

Bev

Back in the day, skaters used to do figures as well as freestyle. Figures are patterns on the ice that skaters draw with their blades. There is a standard list; figures on it are called compulsory figures or school figures. When they were required in competitions, they counted for a percentage of the skater’s overall placement. That percentage gradually decreased until it reached zero. This post is about what happened to figures.

First of all, figures weren’t actually removed. They were separated. From 1991 to 1995, figures were competed as a separate event from freestyle. This makes sense, since the two skills are rather different, and skaters could have been good at one instead of the other. A similar scheme is used in intercollegiate competitions, where short and long programs are competed separately and the scores are not combined. Non-qualifying competitions also have a variety of events for skaters to choose from.

But why separate them?

Often the reason given is that figures are boring to watch, and that TV ratings influenced the ISU’s decision. Janet Lynn is a famous example of this: TV viewers saw her fantastic free skating in the early 70s, but missed her less impressive figures. Trixi Schuba, whose free skating was good, but not spectacular, won the Olympics in 1972 due to her fantastic figures. People who only saw the free skating did not understand why Trixi won.

I’m not convinced by this argument. It seems to me that the ISU would not have been easily swayed by TV viewers. In fact, the ISU seems to have been less than enthusiastic about TV. I think the more likely reasons are those cited as officially given in Skating on Air: that figures took a lot of time to practice (this is very true!) and that having them in competition was very expensive for the local organizing committees. As figure skating shifted from a sport solely for the rich upper class to a sport for regular people (as described by Mary Louise Adams), these considerations became more important.

Another point in favor of getting rid of figures is made obliquely by Ellyn Kestnbaum. She says that being looked at is feminine, while making a mark is masculine. As figure skating shifted from a men’s to a girls’ sport, so did the importance of freestyle over figures. Girls are to be looked at, hence the pretty dresses and fancy moves of free skating. Men are supposed to make a mark, going along with the drawing of figures: they remain after the skater has left, while freestyle is ephemeral.

Once figures and freestyle were separated, entries into the figures events declined sharply, and eventually they were discontinued. The final discontinuation seems to have been due to lack of interest more than anything else. The fault seems to lie with the skaters rather than the governing organizations or the media. Skaters those who want to see figures brought back to life should make it happen by skating them.

References

Mary Louise Adams. 2011. Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ellyn Kestnbaum. 2003. Culture on Ice: Figure Skating and Cultural Meaning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Kelli Lawrence. 2011. Skating on Air: The Broadcast History of an Olympic Marquee Sport. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Frostiana

Bev1 Comment

front-coverI recently finished putting together a new edition of Frostiana, a book published in 1814 to commemorate the last frost fair held on the Thames in London.

Frost fairs were held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the river got cold enough to allow people to set up booths and generally be active without worrying about falling through the ice. People bought things, skated, and had a lot of fun despite the cold weather.

Frostiana is interesting for its content, which includes a detailed description of the 1814 frost fair and a chapter on skating with many clever and funny anecdotes interspersed, and famous for supposedly having been printed on the Thames. I say “supposedly” because I don’t believe it.

The title page includes the claim “Printed and published on the Ice on the River Thames,” but later in the book, the publisher includes the note “As an additional object of curiosity, it may be proper to mention, that a large impression of the Title page of this work, was actually printed on the Ice on the River Thames!!” (Thurber 2018, 30).

This says that actually, only the title page was printed on the ice. I visited the copy in the Newberry Library in Chicago and had a look. It did indeed seem that the title page was not part of any quire; it had been glued in separately. So the claim that this book was printed on the ice is hyperbole. The printers’ heroic efforts extended only to the title page.

More details can be found in my edition of Frostiana.

References

B. A. Thurber, ed. 2018. Frostiana: Or a History of the River Thames in a Frozen State. Evanston, IL: Skating History Press.

Knattleikr

Bev

When I was in graduate school, whenever I met someone who studied Old Norse, I’d ask if they knew anything about skating in the literature. Usually, after a few minutes’ thought, the answer was, “there’s the hockey game in Gísla saga…”.

The hockey game is knattleikr, a ball game that was usually (but not always) played on ice. I keep hearing vague rumors about people thinking players used bone skates, but I haven’t found any concrete references supporting it. I’m glad nobody really thinks that, because it’s not true. Bone skates did not allow the agility necessary for a violent ball game. It is extremely difficult to stop and turn on them. Imagine playing hockey without being able to stop or turn!

That’s not to say knattleikr was anything like hockey. The sagas are pretty vague about the rules, but it clearly involved one or more balls and a stick (knatttré) for each player or pair of players. The stick may have ended in a basket, like a lacrosse stick. The practice of pairing players of approximately equal strength, which is occasionally mentioned in the sagas, is paralleled in historical lacrosse.

Knattleikr probably did not take advantage of the slipperiness of ice. The game required a large, open area to play in that provided space for spectators. A field would have worked as well, and probably did in the summer game described in Gísla saga and the fall games in Hallfreðar saga and Eyrbyggja saga as well as the game played “on land” in Blómstrvalla saga.  Playing on slippery ice may have added a new dimension to the game by requiring the players to be more agile, but it was clearly not necessary: knattleikr was not an ice-based game.

For more details and full references, read my paper about knattleikr in Scandinavaian Studies.

Layback & cross-foot spins

Bev

I wrote about the cross-foot spin in a previous post. This post is about how its neglect led to different requirements for male and female skaters.

The cross-foot spin became a short program requirement for men parallel to the layback spin requirement for women in 1975. It also began to parallel the layback spin in the test structure and remained on the Junior Free Skate Test through the 2006–07 season. In May 2007, at Governing Council, the requirement was changed to a “[s]pin in one position.” The rationale given for this change was “[t]o make the junior free skate test requirements consistent with the junior well-balanced program requirements.”

Today, the layback spin first appears on the Juvenile Free Skate Test, the fourth of eight tests in the series. Ladies must perform a layback, sideways leaning, or attitude spin. Men must perform a camel spin—the spin everyone must do on the previous test! The layback spin reappears on the Novice Free Skate Test, where everyone has the opportunity to perform it—all skaters get to choose to do a layback, camel, or sit spin; other tests are even more open about which spins are allowed. The cross-foot spin is not explicitly mentioned in USFS’s test requirements, but the openness of the requirements at higher levels means it is permissible for anyone to perform.

The outcome of these rule changes is that women must learn one more spin than men. And they must do it early.

 

Figures & science

Bev

The nineteenth century was when the system of compulsory figures was being formalized and governing bodies were created. Vandervell & Witham’s A System of Figure-Skating was the first `scientific’ treatise on figure skating. At the time, most figure skaters were rich  men: they had the disposable income to spend their  time — all day, on days when the weather was suitable — skating and thinking about skating. This was also an age when science was getting done. Rich men, perhaps even the same rich men, were also spending their time discovering the secrets of the universe.

There are a lot of similarities between skating figures and doing science. In both, one must be patient and meticulous. Every minor error must be examined and corrected. It can take many days, or years, to get a minor point right. And at the end, one has results that may not seem impressive to the uninitiated.

Was it a coincidence that these two activities involved the same people? Or was science a fundamental shaper of figure skating?

References

Henry Eugene Vandervell & T. Maxwell Witham. 1880. A System of Figure Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. 3rd ed. London: Horace Cox.

Takeoff edges

Bev

One feature that differentiates jumps in figure skating is the takeoff edge. Jumps can start on any edge, but nearly all finish on the backward outside edge. The flip, for example, begins on a backward inside edge. In contrast, the Lutz takeoff is on a backward outside edge. These two jumps are otherwise identical: a skater rotating counterclockwise in the air begins both on the left foot, applies the right toe pick for leverage, rotates in the air, and lands on the right backward outside edge.

The difference between them is the takeoff edge. Many skaters have trouble taking off from the backward outside edge on a Lutz because it travels counter to the direction of rotation in the air. As a result, some cheating goes on: skaters tend to drop over to the backward inside edge on the takeoff and do flips instead. This is called “Flutzing” and is a serious problem, even among high-level skaters. Some skaters tend to do the opposite, pulling their flip takeoffs onto the outside edge. To encourage skaters to take off from the correct edges, judges crack down on both errors at low levels.

The importance of differentiating between these two jumps makes it very odd that two other jumps with the same difference are not differentiated between. These are the toe loop and the toe Walley. In a toe loop, our counterclockwise skater begins on a right backward outside edge, applies the left toe pick, rotates in the air, and lands on a right backward outside edge. In a toe Walley, the process is the same, except the first edge is a right backward inside edge—counter to the direction of in-air rotation.

Unlike flip and Lutz, these two jumps have fallen together. Skaters talk about doing a “double toe” without mentioning which double toe (loop or Walley). This generalization is also reflected in competitions: Under “Technical Requirements,” the USFS Rulebook notes that the two jumps are not considered different:

“Because the triple toe loop and the triple toe Walley jumps are very similar in nature and equal in value, the skater may execute only one or the other of them but not both.” (146)
Why is the takeoff edge important in one case but not the other?

The cross-foot spin

Bev

The cross-foot spin is a figure skating move that was once quite popular but is rarely performed today. Laurence Owen performed one at the end of her 1961 National Championship-winning free skate (jump ahead to 4:30 if you just want to see the final spin combination):

While I was looking for a video, I found lots of videos labeled “cross-foot spin” that actually depict scratch spins. The skater typically crosses the free foot over the skating leg and lowers it to the skating foot to gain speed (by decreasing the moment of inertia) during a scratch spin. So yes, by the end of the spin, the skater’s feet are crossed, but that’s not a cross-foot spin. In a real cross-foot spin, both feet are on the ice. The skater begins with a (usually back) scratch spin, then lowers the free leg all the way to the ice.

The cross-foot spin is sufficiently old that its origin is unclear, but it seems likely that it became a recognized skating move during the nineteenth century, when free skating was rapidly developing as a significant part of figure skating. Vandervell and Witham (1880:289) quote a description of it from Swift and Clark (1868), which Foster (1874) considers one of the most important skating
books:

“The cross-foot spin is done by starting off on a `one-foot spin,’ and crossing the balance-foot over and placing it upon the ice on the other side, the toes to be as near together as possible.”

When it is done done well, the cross-foot spin is extremely fast. Maribel Vinson (1940:192) describes it as “far and away one of the most effective of all the spins, but its effectiveness is paid for by the difficulty of perfecting it. The balance for a long fast cross-foot is tricky, and only a very few skaters in the world have been absolutely consistent in its performance. Sonja Henie, in her competitive days, had the fastest I remember seeing among girl skaters, and Roy Shipstad’s is outstanding in any company; Audrey Peppe has a very fine one, too.”

Gary Beacom (2006:65) describes the cross-foot spin as “the most fun you can have on a pair of blades—if you do it correctly, that is. Finding a perfect centre and then sucking every part of the body into it as the spin crescendos into a very fast, very long, and very quiet whirl is a feeling of absolute harmony.”

In decades following Laurence Owen’s triumph, the requirements for free skating tests and competitions became more specific. In 1961, there were no specific requirements for free skating, other than it be finished within a prescribed time limit (USFSA, 1960:9–35), leaving competitors free to select their favorite moves. By the 1980s, the cross-foot spin had fallen out of favor (Ogilvie 1985:289).

The cross-foot spin is rarely performed today, but not entirely forgotten: it remains an option for Ice Skating Institute skaters, who must perform their choice of a “Cross-Foot Spin, Layback Spin or Sit-Change-Sit Spin” on the Freestyle 6 test. There is also hope that it may be revived in international competitive skating. The latest edition of the U.S. Figure Skating Rulebook, which follows the regulations of the International Skating Union, includes the cross-foot spin under the rubric of upright  spins (page 233). As skaters look for more creative and difficult moves to perform in order to maximize their scores under the new system, they may find that the cross-foot spin is as fun and effective as their predecessors thought it was.

References

Gary Beacom. 2006. Gary Beacom’s Vade Mecum. Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing.

Fred. W. Foster. 1874. “Skating literature.” Notes and Queries, 2(5):107–08.

Robert S. Ogilvie. 1985. Competitive Figure Skating: A Parent’s Guide. New York: Harper & Row.

Frank Swift and Marvin R. Clark. 1868. The Skater’s Text-Book. New York: John A. Gray & Green.

USFSA. 1960. The Twentieth Annual USFSA Rulebook: 1961 Edition. Boston: United States Figure Skating Association.

Henry Eugene Vandervell & T. Maxwell Witham. 1880. A System of Figure Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. 3rd ed. London: Horace Cox.

Maribel Y. Vinson. 1940. Advanced Figure Skating. York, PA: Whittlesey House.

AD 200

Bev

Many books and articles on skating history (I won’t name names) state that metal-bladed skates first appeared in Scandinavia in about AD 200 without citing any evidence, except maybe the claim that Old Norse literature mentions them.

I haven’t been able to find anything to support this statement. There wasn’t any Old Norse literature at that time (Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, lived around 1000 years later; Codex Regius, the manuscript containing the Poetic Edda, was written around the same time). There are runic inscriptions from around 200, but they say things like “I, Hlewagistiz of Holt, made the horn” that are not really helpful for skating history.

The oldest evidence for metal-bladed skates that I’ve been able to find so far is  described in an article by Olaf Goubitz. It is a skate excavated in the Netherlands  that dates to the thirteenth century, which is about 1000 years later than the supposed first skate.

So where did the AD 200 date come from?

The earliest reference to it that I’ve found is in Vandervell & Witham’s A System of Figure Skating. This was a very well-known book in the late nineteenth century, and it includes a short piece on skating history, translated from Swedish, at the beginning. They “subjoin a translation, merely premising that it fixes the  introduction of the iron skate at two hundred years after the birth of Christ” (2). There’s the date. But here’s what the translated-from-Swedish text actually says:

“The origin of skates in their present form of a wooden shoe with iron runners cannot be reckoned further back than the so-called Iron Age or about two hundred years after the birth of Christ, because iron first came into general use then throughout the North.” (2)

This means that metal-bladed skates couldn’t have been made before AD 200 because people didn’t have iron until then. There’s no evidence that skates were the first thing people made from iron.

References

Olaf Goubitz. 2000. “Nederland’s oudste schaats?” Kouwe Drukte 3.9:4–5.

Henry Eugene Vandervell & T. Maxwell Witham. 1880. A System of Figure Skating: Being the Theory and Practice of the Art as Developed in England, with a Glance at its Origin and History. 3rd ed. London: Horace Cox.

 

Pons asinorum

Bev
euclid-1-5
The diagram for Euclid I.5. From Oliver Byrne’s 1847 edition.

The Latin phrase pons asinorum (asses’ bridge) is used for something that is difficult for beginners, but quite simple once you’ve learned it. It’s the nickname of the fifth proposition of Book I of Euclid’s Elements: “In isosceles triangles the angles at the base are equal to one another, and, if the equal straight lines be produced further, the angles under the base will be equal to one another” (Heath, I.251). Euclid’s proof of this proposition is, like skating a backward serpentine, notoriously difficult for beginners. This difficulty and the diagram of the proof (pictured), which looks kind of like a bridge, earned the proposition its nickname by 1780 (Heath, I.415).

The pons asinorum of skating is generally considered the backward serpentine figure (Richardson 1940:34).  Figures are patterns that skaters produce on the ice with their blades. Skating figures requires a lot of concentration. The goal is to get the line on the ice exactly right, then to go over it precisely. The lines left on the ice, called tracings, are the important part. Tiny mistakes in the tracings, invisible to a spectator watching from the sidelines, can determine the outcome of a competition.

The backward serpentine consists of three circles in a row that just touch. The skater starts at the intersection of two of the circles, skates (backwards on one foot) halfway around the middle circle, then, without changing feet, glides all the way around the end circle. Once after reaching the other intersection point, the skater changes feet (“push…with vigor,” advises Maribel Vinson Owen (1962:98)) and completes the remaining 1.5 circles on the other foot.

This figure isn’t very advanced. It has no turns, and the backward change of edge, its main feature, is one of the basic building blocks used in more advanced figures. But it’s quite difficult to learn.

The status of the backward serpentine as the pons asinorum of skating has been challenged. Ernst Jones (1952:154) thinks the backward inside three turn is more deserving of the title because “it gives many skaters a very bad time before they master it.” This is more applicable to today’s skating because skaters struggle with backward inside threes on their moves in the field tests and neglect backward changes of edge.

I also submit the Axel as a candidate for the pons asinorum of skating today. It’s the first jump that many skaters struggle with because of its forward takeoff and the necessary one and a half revolutions in the air.

References

Sir Thomas Heath. 1956. The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements. New York: Dover.

Maribel Vinson Owen. 1960. The Fun of Figure Skating: A Primer of the Art-Sport.
New York: Harper & Brothers.

T. D. Richardson. 1938. Modern Figure Skating. 2nd ed. London: Methuen & Co.

Ernst Jones. 1952. The Elements of Figure Skating. London: Allen & Unwin.