| 'Figures' don't add up in competition anymore By Sandra Loosemore Next February's United States Figure Skating Championships will be the last to include actual "figure skating" -- the art of tracing figures on the ice. Indeed, it might be the last figures competition anywhere in the world. Compulsory figures competition has not been part of Olympic-track skating at the national or international level since 1990. At that time -- when nearly all other countries did away with figure requirements and competitions entirely -- the U.S. created a separate competition track for figures.
But faced with dwindling participation over the years, in the summer of 1997 the USFSA's Governing Council voted to end figures competitions after this season. Meanwhile, figures have also been phased out in other countries that did not eliminate them entirely in 1990. In Canada, for instance, even proficiency tests in figures were ended more than a year ago. Compulsory figures are derived from the basic "figure eight" -- a pair of circles about three times the height of the skater with one circle skated on each foot. There are four basic variations: inside and outside edges, forward and backward. At the next level of complexity, a turn is added at the halfway point of each circle. There are also three-lobed figures with a "rocker" or "counter" turn executed at the points where the lobes touch, and a family of smaller figures, the "loops." At the championship level, skaters perform figures such as a "paragraph double three," in which the skaters trace two circles with two turns on each circle, all on one foot from one push-off. It's extremely challenging because the circles must be exactly round and of matching size, the placement and shape of the turns exactly symmetrical, and the turns themselves must be executed on a true edge without scraping. FIGURE SKATING BEGAN AS a competitive sport in 1896, and for roughly the first half of its existence, competitors skated twelve figures over two days that were worth 60 percent of their total scores. The remaining 40 percent of the score was based on free skating. In 1948, the number of figures skated was reduced to six because the increased number of competitors made it impractical to judge so many figures. This was, of course, at a time when competitions were still being held outdoors in uncertain weather conditions. But a progressive devaluation of figures began after 1968, first by reducing their weight to 50 percent, then by reducing the number of figures from six to three and their overall weight to 30 percent to make room for the introduction of the short program in 1973. In 1989 and 1990, the final two years in which figures were part of international competition, only two figures were skated and they were only worth 20 percent of the overall results. TELEVISION WAS THE DRIVING FORCE behind all these post-1968 changes. Figures competitions don't make for particularly exciting television broadcasts, and since figures were never shown on television, many casual fans found it incomprehensible that competitions could be won by skaters who had built up huge leads in the figures portion of the event but gave mediocre performances in the part of the competition shown on TV. At the 1972 World Championships, for example, Austria's Beatrix Schuba, who many people regard as the best practitioner of figures ever, won the ladies' competition despite placing only ninth in the free-skating portion of the event. Meanwhile, Janet Lynn, considered one of the best free skaters ever, finished third overall. She had won the free skating but could do no better than a distant third in the figures. There were other reasons why television contributed to the death of figures in international competitions. Increased coverage of skating in the 1970s and 1980s also increased the respectability of the judging of the sport. Since everybody could now watch skating and judging, it was hard to get away with judging on politics or reputation instead of the actual performance. But since figures competitions weren't televised, fans could not be certain that the judges were on the level. Such "dirty judging" might not actually have been occurring, but the lack of public accountability gave figures a bad name. Ironically, though, when the vote to finally eliminate figures from international competition was taken, the change was opposed by the U.S. and Canada -- the two countries where television has most influenced the sport -- and supported by the European federations. So in the end it was not television that made the difference, but the relative scarcity of rinks and practice ice for figures in Europe as compared to North America. SKATERS AND COACHES ARE STILL DIVIDED on whether compulsory figures were of any benefit in teaching skating skills applicable to freestyle. On the positive side, skating figures required skaters to learn discipline and concentration and a high level of control and balance. On the negative side, many skaters found figures boring. The time and money required to practice figures were a hindrance to perfecting free-skating skills, and the emphasis on tracing and geometric precision rather than being able to do the turns with an easy carriage and flow did little or nothing to encourage good free-skating habits. In the U.S., the thing that really killed figures as a separate competition discipline was the decision in the mid-1990s to replace the remaining figure proficiency test requirements for skaters in the main competitive track with a new test track called "moves in the field." The "moves" are designed to show mastery of many of the same turns and edge-control elements as figures, but in a freestyle footwork context. While these step sequences are quite challenging and beautiful in their own right, the shift in emphasis resulted in a loss of critical mass of participants to sustain figures as a discipline in its own right. When the new rules emerged, the demise of figures quickly followed:
Sadly, what is lost with the end of figures is a significant part of skating history. Much in skating is traditional lore, passed on from coaches to students in successive generations. Soon there will not only be no one who can do a paragraph double-three figure, but no one who can even remember what they looked like. And the only remaining legacy of this once-vital part of the sport may be in name only. It is, after all, still called figure skating. Sandra Loosemore is CBS SportsLine's figure skating writer. |
