Perhaps the most anticipated event of the Winter Olympics, figure skating dazzles audiences with daring leaps, dizzying spins and glamorous costumes. The art and athleticism of modern sport, however, bears little resemblance to its origins when skaters diligently traced geometric patterns – or “figures” – on the ice.
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Ice skating evolves over the centuries
The earliest evidence of ice skating dates back to around 3000 BC, when people in Scandinavia and Russia deposited and shaped the shins of large animals such as horses, deer and sheep into skates for winter travel on frozen lakes and streams. Since these primitive skates attached to their feet lacked edges, skaters relied on poles and sticks for propulsion.
In the 14th century, the Dutch forged skates with sharp steel blades and edges that allowed greater speed and control. Following the restoration of King Charles II to the British throne in 1660 from exile in the Netherlands, the popularity of ice skating spread across the English Channel.
The technical discipline of figure skating developed in 18th century Britain as people saved more time for recreational activities. The first organized figure skating club – which formed in the 1740s in Edinburgh, Scotland – required new members to pass an entrance test in which they circled with each foot and jumped over a stack of three hats. In 1772, Englishman Robert Jones wrote the first figure skating instruction book, A treatise on skating, which offered instructions on how to create shapes such as circles, winding lines, spirals, and figure eights on ice.
The book helped popularize an “English style” of figure skating in which competitors were judged on the precision of the designs carved into the ice rather than the techniques used to make them. In the late 1800s, figure skating competitions required participants to perform compulsory figures, 41 designs derived from a figure eight, as well as “special figures” of the skater’s own imagination.
An American ushers in a revolution in figure skating
An 1875 illustration of skaters in New York’s Central Park.
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A skating craze swept across the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. Technical innovations that allowed skates to be clipped onto shoes made ice skating affordable, and it was one of the few socially acceptable recreational activities to be done in mixed company. After opening in 1858, New York’s Central Park frozen pond drew up to 30,000 people a day and made ice skating a popular pastime.
Growing up in New York, Jackson Haines resented the prevailing “English style” and its lack of artistry and fluidity. A trained dancer once recruited by PT Barnum to entertain audiences with his roller-skating skills, Haines developed a flowing style of figure skating that included ballet moves, leaps and pirouettes accompanied by music. Overall, the American crowds hated it.
Haines left the United States for Europe, where he found audiences much more receptive to his innovative style while touring the continent in 1868. Haines delighted audiences in Vienna by incorporating the waltz into his skating and taught his avant-garde “international style” to others in the city. In 1882, his proteges at the Vienna Skating Club hosted the first major international figure skating championship in which Norway’s Axel Paulsen introduced a new type of jump – with one and a half revolutions – known as the Axel jump.
Figure skating’s first star of the 20th century was Sweden’s Ulrich Salchow, who won a record 10 men’s world championships between 1901 and 1911. He first performed the jump that now bears his name in which skaters take off on the back inside edge of one foot and land on the back outside edge of the other foot.
Competitive figure skating was reserved for men until England’s Madge Syers finished second to Salchow in the 1902 world championship. Although the International Skating Union (ISU) had no rule prohibiting women from compete with men, she supposed such was unnecessary because the very idea offended Victorian sensibilities. The ISU subsequently banned women from competing with men before introducing a world championship for women in 1906 and pairs in 1908, a year in which figure skating found its greatest stage.
READ MORE: The man who invented figure skating was laughed off America
Figure skating becomes the first winter sport at the Olympic Games
Peggy Fleming (centre) receiving the gold medal at the 1968 Games in Grenoble, France.
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Figure skating made its Olympic debut in 1908, during the Summer Games. Salchow won the men’s gold medal, while Syers won the women’s gold and bronze with her husband in the pairs. Figure skating returned to the 1920 Summer Olympics before moving to the Winter Olympics when it was first held in 1924.
Until 1936, figure skating was the only Winter Olympics event in which women could compete, and gold medal-winning skaters went on to become some of the most famous female athletes in history. Few stars were as bright as Sonja Henie. After finishing last in the 1924 Winter Games at the age of 11, the Norwegian phenom went on to win gold at the next three Olympics. The Olympian later performed in sold-out ice shows around the world and became one of Hollywood’s biggest box office draws in the late 1930s.
After American skater Peggy Fleming’s gold medal at the 1968 Winter Olympics was broadcast live and in color to a global audience, television transformed figure skating into the hallmark event of the Winter Games. Compulsory figures, which were the very basis of the sport but made for boring television, were given less weight until their eventual elimination in 1990. The more telegenic discipline of ice dancing, which developed from adaptation of the waltz by the Vienna Skating Club in the 1800s, became a separate Olympic medal sport in 1976.
Olympic figure skating attracted television audiences, but never more so than during the 1994 Winter Olympics, when the sport’s biggest scandal culminated with Americans Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding taking to the ice for the final night of the program feminine. It remains the sixth highest-rated show in American television history and reflects the evolution of the sport from its beginnings in circles and figure eights.
READ MORE: 8 Outstanding Female Figure Skaters at the Winter Olympics
