The Unusual History of Figure Skating How figure skating went from a violent game to a beloved Olympic sport.
Today, Figure Skating is the 6th most popular sport in the Olympics winter games. Since the late 1700’s, figure skating has evolved from a type of transportation and a violent game to an international sport of grace and beauty. In the beginning, figure skating was not very popular. It started to become popular around the late 1800’s. Ever since then, figure skating has been a very popular sport and today there are competitions all around the world.
There is an ongoing debate as to when and where figure skating had started. Many think that skating was first used in Scandinavia as a type of transportation between 3,000 and 1,000 B.C. The first concrete ice skating was in a book by William Fitzstephen. The book was a biography about Thomas Beckett, he writes the following, a description of a scene taking place below the northern city walls of Canterbury during the winter: “ if the moors in Finsbury and
Moorfield freeze over, children from London play. Some of the children have attached bones to their ankles, and carry well-worn sticks. They fly across the ice like birds, or well-fired arrows. Suddenly, two children will run at each other, sticks held high in the air. They then attack each other until one falls down. Often, the children injure their heads or break their arms or legs.” The sticks that Fitzstephen mentioned were used for movement, because the bone-made ice skates did not have sharp gliding edges like today’s ice skates.
Figure skating started becoming popular between the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s. The first figure skating club was made in 1849 in Philadelphia; the group’s purpose was to improve the art of skating and to rescue people who fell through the ice. The name of this new group was the “Philadelphia Skating Club and Humane Society.” By the early 1860’s, ice rinks
were formed in big cities in Canada and the United States. Once, these big cities had ice rinks, the Olympics started hosting figure skating in the summer Olympics in 1908 and the winter Olympics in 1924. Since figure skating was an official sport, it started to become popular all over the world. It was the most popular in between the World War 1 in 1939 and the World War 2 in 1945.
Today, the popularity of figure skating is growing world-wide. Figure skating today is divided into 4 parts; single skating events for both genders, pair skating, ice dancing, and synchronized skating. Men’s solo figure skating has been dominated by US, Canadian, and Russian skaters, including Brian Boitano, Kurt Browning, Elvis Stojko, Evan Lysacek, Patrick Chan, and Scott Hamilton. Ladies’ single skating is the most popular category of figure skating. There are millions of female single skaters including Katarina Witt, Michelle Kwan, Kristi Yamaguchi, Tara Lipinski, Sarah Hughes, Sasha Cohen, and Peggy Fleming.
Figure skating has been around for hundreds of years, and has grown from being an unusual way to get around into a popular sport. Figure skating might have started in the B.C.’s as a type of transportation, but it became really popular between the two world wars, since it was officially an Olympic sport by then. Today, figure skating is continually growing world-wide and so is its fan base in both males and females. Figure skating is growing fast and probably is going to keep growing for quite a while.