Adventures in skating historiography
The weather's getting colder, and there's a second round of lockdowns on the horizon. With the pandemic raging and the rinks shutting down again, it's time to take matters into your own hands. This winter, skating goes back to the days before indoor rinks with artifically frozen ice were readily available. Today, backyard ice rinks… Continue reading Building your own rink
Isabella Grenander. Image copyright the British Library Board. courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive. Henning Grenander is one of the big names in the early days of figure skating. He was born in 1974 in Sweden and won worlds in 1898, when it was held in London. In the same year, according to Hines, he… Continue reading Mrs. Grenander
In 1852, George Anderson, a member of the Glasgow Skating Club, published the following advice on skate sharpening under the pseudonym Cyclos: The edges should ... be kept sharp by occasional grinding, perhaps once in a season, or even less; and in doing it, the iron should be held across the face of the grindstone,… Continue reading Skate sharpening in 1852
This event is now in its sixth year! To celebrate, here is a timeline. This information is drawn from the World Figure Championship website, the World Figure Sport website, the various versions of these sites archived in the Wayback Machine, and my own notes and recollections. 2015 Lake Placid, NY The competition took place on… Continue reading Timeline of the World Figure Championship
Figures were once the backbone of figure skating on ice (hence the name in English), but experienced a steep decline in popularity after they were dropped as a competitive requirement in 1991. Today, ice skaters rarely do them. In roller skating, in contrast, figures continue to thrive---on quad skates. They don't really work on inlines.… Continue reading Roller skaters still do figures
The radius of hollow is very important to skaters because it determines how the blades feel on the ice. It's set during sharpening. When you get your skates sharpened, you can request a particular radius of hollow. What if you don't know what hollow your blades have? Or if you want to check that the… Continue reading Blade gauges
Freestyle slalom skating is interesting because it preserves some moves that have been lost in modern figure skating, like grapevines and the full range of pivots, and because it doesn't try to be like ice skating. Instead, it takes advantage of the architecture of inline skates. It's also still developing. USA Roller Sports has set… Continue reading Freestyle slalom moves and levels
Since my last post on them, I've been tracking Mr. W. A. V. Waldron and Miss B. Waldron through Ancestry.com. Here's some of what I've been able to piece together. William Arthur Vaughan Waldron was born in 1876 in Kent and died in 1933 in Penzance. Tracking this name through the census records revealed the… Continue reading The Waldrons again
When you read old skating books (or this blog), the Field comes up a lot. This post explains what it is and why it's important for skating history. The Field's logo. Image © The British Library Board. Courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive. The Field began in 1853 as a weekly magazine in 1853 aimed… Continue reading The Field
Johan Ekeblad. Courtesyof Wikimedia Commons. Johan Ekeblad (1629--1697) was a prolific Swedish letter-writer who spent a lot of time on the Continent. According to the Swedish Academy, publisher of a great dictionary that's rather like the Swedish version of the OED, he was the first to use the word skridsko in Swedish. This word is… Continue reading Johan Ekeblad