Why is figure skating a sport

Figure skaters require fitness, strength, balance, flexibility and a state of mind to match. You rarely see all of these elements in any sport. Figure skaters are athletes. They are athletes competing in what is a very difficult sport. The levels of fitness required are incredible. Levels of cardio vascular fitness required to skate a long program at competition level are huge. Then there is strength. Most of the time, a figure skater will be on one leg or another, over a bent knee, supporting all of their body weight.

Many figure skaters are jumping double, triple and even quadruple spins in jumps. When thinking about pair skaters or ice dancers, they have to lift someones entire body weight, sometimes over their head. In the case of pair skaters, they also have to throw them. You have to become flexible off ice to have the ability to perform on ice. Figure skaters spend hours in yoga and stretching routines to give them the flexibility to perform on ice. Carbohydrates, protein, macro nutrients, vitamins, hydration.

The list goes on. Many professional figure skaters are eating according to a nutritionist created diet. There nutrition follows the phases of their training. This is true of many sporting athletes. The loss of performance under pressure can be felt by any athlete.

This is magnified in figure skating where tiny mistakes result in point deductions and a slight error can cause a fall. If all this is not enough, the greatest illusion about figure skating is yet to come. The grace and effortless power. It is one of the few sports where you are required to almost hide all of the hard work and preperation to make it look easy. Figure skaters are required to show grace and make it look like skating over ice with blades strapped to your feet is the most natural thing on earth.

Many figure skaters days start at 4. Then often back onto the ice, sometimes several times. Hydration, sleep and many more factors. This is for a normal training season for a figure skater. It takes years of training at this level to compete at an international level.

Thousands of hours on ice, many falls and a dedication that comes with a true passion for the sport. I can only wonder what the preparation for the Olympics might be.

Figure skating is a sport and the skaters are most definitely athletes. Figure skaters are athletes and figure skating is a sport.

Like so many athletes that are competing at the highest level, its a young persons game. Figure skaters usually retire in their late twenties to early thirties.

There are a few skaters that have skated later, but not many. Of course figure skating that is not being performed at such a high level can go on for years to come. There are people out there that would argue that figure skating is not a sport because of the subjectivity of part of the scoring. As you may have realised by now, I definitely think it is a sport. But is it becoming too sporty, too focused on points?

With the advent of the quad jump, it seems that the person that perfoms the most quads is the winner. There have been several former international skaters saying that the sport has lost some of its elegance in race to win points.

Critics have complained about arms flailing around and the loss of grace in the name of technical point scoring. So the argument for the future may be, not whether figure skating is a sport, which it undoubtedly is, but how can we encourage the art form before it is lost to points. But in a world of high profile figure skaters, even ice dance seems to have succumb to some point scoring mindset. OK so skating in competition has always been about scoring points. That has always been the way.

The trouble is, not that the skaters are not athletes, part of the point of this article is to show that they are, in a professional sport.

Rather that they are becoming super athletes, almost beyond the reach of normal people. Even ice dance is guilty of the points scoring mindset. You can almost see in some ice dance programs that the point scoring elements are packed in end to end, sometimes at the sacrifice of grace, beauty and the telling of a story. I am not going to mention any names, but there is beautiful ice dance being skated by some top level skaters at the moment that is truly beautiful and graceful.

It seems that points can still be awarded for a technically difficult program that is beautiful and elegant. It seems that weaving the grace into a modern, very technical program is possible, but I suspect not easy. There are four types of figure skating, single, pair skating, ice dance and synchro. Can they all be judged as a sport when the disciplines are so different.

The answer is yeas, because they all carry a common theme. They are all judged primarily objectively in a quantifiable way through the Grade of Execution. Here is why. The jumps, the sheer pressure on technical point scoring. You would see this level of requirement with hard and fast rules in any Olympic sport. The athleticism, the sheer level of physical training that that it takes to do a quad jump makes single skating a sport in its own right.

Pair skating is a sport. Just because it has dance in the title, does not make it an art. Yes there is an artistic element to the scoring, but no different to the rest of figure skating.

The objective, quantifiable part of the the scoring, the Technical Element Score TES is as hard and fast as all other areas of figure skating. Ice dancers are driven to perform unbelievable lifts, spins, twizzles etc to try to capture these points. Ice dance is a sport. Synchronized skating, or synchro as it is known comprises many of the elements of single skating, including jumps, spins, twizzles etc, but is done as a synchronized team. The demands on the skaters are similar to any other discipline of figure skating, with the added difficulty of complete synchronization.

It seems that every four years this happens. People start arguing what a "real sport" is and if figure skating should be part of the Olympics.

Yesterday someone tweeted that "figure skating is not a sport and should not be part of the olympics! The tweeter insisted figure skating is an artistic, recreational activity and not a "real sport" like baseball, hockey, or football.

Which leads hin to "since figure skating is not a sport and should not be part of the olympics". I googled the matter and found that the "figure skating is not a sport" crowd like to come up with there own definitions of what a sport is; "must involve a ball", "must have teams", "should not be judged", "must have a highest, fastest, score".

It seems like a good idea to look up the definition of the word in a dictionary. Let's see what Oxford, Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, and others give as the precise meaning of the word. I looked up the definition of the word sport in five separate dictionaries and found it to be pretty consistent:. So figure skating meets the criteria of the definitions from all these dictionaries and therefore:.

Two of the critics on blogs who made statements that figure skating is an "art form" or "recreational activity" and not a "real sport" were a baseball fan and a golf enthusiast. No, of course not. This dismissive attitude is common towards sports that are viewed as feminine.

Sports like skating, gymnastics, cheerleading—these are in no way exclusive to women, but they are often associated with women and have prominent female stars. They are also often thought of as lesser or non-sports. The belittling of these sports is bad enough when they come from the general public. Your job is to be a sports reporter.

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