Sports gene ...quads, men's vs women's, teens vs adults | Page 2 | Golden Skate

Sports gene ...quads, men's vs women's, teens vs adults

Joined
Jun 21, 2003
- and also in sacrificing the sacred artistry of ladies skating for the sake of triples. The writer stated that all jumps beyond the double Axel should be banned in ladies competition. A lot of the commentary from that time seemed to focus on the threat to artistry if the free skating became "just a jumping contest" ...

This is a good point. Figure skating is a unique sport in this regard. Even among men, muscular quadsters like Elvis Stoiko and Max Aaron were looked down on because they were perceived to be less svelt and graceful.
 
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Shanshani

On the Ice
Joined
Mar 21, 2018
Speaking of Midori Ito, I think that if she had had the equipment and training skaters do now, she could totally have landed quads as a fully grown woman.

All this stuff about the gender, physiology, and sporting records is interesting, but I do wonder if it's missing some points that concern figure skating in particular. Figure skating is kind of an unusual sport in that many more ladies participate than men, whereas with most other sports it would be equal or the other way around. Therefore, it seems to me that the talent pool ladies single skating draws from is likely to be a lot deeper than men. Consequently, it might be easier for athletically relatively-closer-to-average men to make it to the international stage, whereas ladies would have to be more exceptional. If that's the case, then we might not see as big of a difference between ladies vs men as physiological differences might dictate if gender participation were more equal or skewed the other way around.
 

gkelly

Record Breaker
Joined
Jul 26, 2003
Skating also relies on other skills that are not based in skills that adult male bodies are more conducive to than adult female ones.

For the most part those other skills are less objective/quantifiable and less exciting for lay spectators to watch, which is why they seem to have diminished in importance compared to jump rotations.

But it would be perfectly possible to design rules for skating competition that would emphasize areas where women tend to do better than men and/or that emphasize primarily gender-neutral skills.

In which case it might be meaningful to have co-ed competitions or at least for women's achievements and scores to be comparable to men's.
 
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