Here's Donald Jackson in 1962. He was one of the first skaters to do several different triple jumps. (Notice that he skates to
Carmen!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alrsemq_mzQ
When Jackson came back to skate for awhile in the eighties, Button said something about how skaters from those days held their landing positions longer than more modern skaters.
One thing that gets me about Sonia Henie when I watch her is her upper body carriage. She bends and almost hunches her shoulders. The open shoulders and erect back of today, so beautifully exemplified by Dorothy Hamill and Yuka Sato, didn't seem to exist at the time.
I wonder whether the introduction of dance training for skaters might have helped the change. It's interesting to think of Laurence Owen, who was coached by her mother, Maribel Vinson Owen, a contemporary of Henie. Laurence clearly had dance training, but Don Jackson, her contemporary, didn't. I guess in the West the feeling was, why would a guy do dance training....That might have come in with the Soviets, and then of course John Curry.
Here's Owen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0114AudgYms
Of course, if any of those skaters were young and training today, they'd train with modern methods and would land their jumps just as rotated as anyone. Sonia Henie, for example, was unusually athletic for her day. Today, she would not be attempting single jumps to pass the tests.
