Does Anyone Here Ever Watch Artisitic Roller Skating?

I know this is a figure skating forum, but I thought this might be an interesting question to pose. Do any of you have an interest in this discipline? I wonder why it has not successfully been included in the Summer Olympics. Any answers out there?

I started watching clips of competitive roller skaters on youtube some years ago. I knew they could be great spinners from hearing about former roller skaters who'd switched to ice skating like Lipinksi and Keilmann. For whatever reason, I did not expect the skaters to be able to attempt the same jumps that figure skaters try. Some of the techniuque of certain moves is noticeably different and others are strikingly similar. But when you check out some of these skaters, it's remarkable what difficulty they achieve. Some of their jump combos are just sick. It just seems like it would be harder to do the high risk moves on wheels as opposed to blades that can carve into the ice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rGC_JYOa4Y&feature=related (men)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRSdsU9hZ1Y&feature=related (pairs)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yRMdcCKbPw&feature=related (pairs; really cool lifts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An16XdWHFW0&feature=player_detailpage#t=40s (ladies)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eph3id_2aU&feature=related (dance; CD)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DgFaQzcUMU (dance, FD)

This is one of my favourite weird and wonderful YouTube side tracks ( I have a few of those ).. It's very fascinating !

The high risk part is so true-both ice and the floor are hard when you fall,but only the floor will give you a nasty friction burn, often called "rink rash".

It's amazing to me how skaters can spin on the rear 2 wheels, too!


In roller, compulsory figures are still done. Check out the floor during this Viennese waltz. At this rink, you can see clearly that the figures are painted permanently on the floor. (Roller compulsory figures are thus a lot easier than figure skating compulsory figures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eph3id_2aU&feature=related

I haven't looked more than casually at roller skating. I will check those links.

See, we ice skating fans can't feel sorry for ourselves. We get to see skating sometimes on TV. Imagine being a roller skating fan, or even a competitor. No one would even know you existed, and you'd never get to see any of the meets televised. It's true devotion to stick with a sport under those conditions.

Wouldn't it be fun to see it in the Olympics? It could be a summer sport, so we ice skating fans could have a substitute to watch in off years, while we're waiting for Sochi and beyond.

From what I understand about rollersports trying to make it into the Olympics, the IOC doesn't want to prolong the Olympics (the whole thing takes up almost a month), so one of the reasons they have had in keeping it out is that roller events might prolong the games. Another is the IOC doesn't want to add any more judged sports. Roller hockey and roller speed skating have a higher chance of being added than artistic roller skating.

Ballroom dance was given the same response, so to try to meet the IOC's demands, they changed their name, they popularized dancesport, and were given a demonstration spot in 2000 (have yet to be added). In 2005, rollersports was listed as one of the four sports being considered for inclusion into the Olympics. Sabatino Aracu, president of FIRS (the ISU of roller skating; it governs speed, artistic, and hockey; quad and inline compete separately), has suggested that inline speedskating be the first discipline to be added (like Speedy, he is a former speed skater).

It will happen! Just not soon enough...

Thanks for the info blue dog. Most helpful!

:thumbsup:

I do rollerskating in Portugal...

This is not a olympic sport because few countries dominates, mainly Italy. For example, last world championships 3 italian ladies won all podium.

Spain, Argentina, Germany, France are great countries also. Russia doesn't go to european or world champs. The Asian countries are weak.

In jumps, some underrotated jumps count, or two foot! The main competition is Man and they do all triples, except Axel. In woman, very few do all triples.

In spins, we have others than Figure Skating.

I think the two sports are very different and I love Figure Skating.

I think this should be an Olympic sport! It's beautiful and it deserves to be on the list of Olympic sports.

Cool videos

Oh how I wish that Tanja Romano would take up ice skating, she's incredible and does all 5 triples!

I'm a roller skater and I really think that it should be an Olympic sport! It has all the rights...
But I think that a lot of changes really need to be made in its system. Some of us complain the judging system in Ice skating but guys..I found it worse in roller skating. I did a course for judges last year and it's really too difficult to understand it. It has our old 6.0 system but max point is 10.0...plus competitions are really strange. You don't have a Sp and Lp...in singles there are still compulsory figures (and lines are painted on the floor because is the only way to understand if they are correct or not)..and we have skaters who compete for the overall competition (compulsory, short and long) and some who competes only for the long. They should adjust it IMO...
This year the Grand Prix took place..but competitions were not in big cities or at least known city but in really small one and really few people knew it. Moreover the competion wasn't a real competition. Was more like a gala...with medals.
Apart for some countries its a really weak field. Here in Italy we consider the National Championship way more challenging than Worlds.This is something it should be fixed if or when roller skating will become an Olympic sport...
Some changenges are needed to make it more comprehensible and easy and then we can start to hope to see it at the Olympics.