tharrtell said:
Rgirl, interesting thoughts about the tradition of figure skating limiting the sport, in some sense. There is a big industry out there dedicated to making even the smallest advances in sports. To use some of those advancements does seem like a no brainer to me. Just because something wasn't done in the past doesn't make it an invalid method of training - athletes/coaches take the best information at any given point in time and apply it. Will it change? Yes. Will advances that are later found to be inaccurate be used? Yes. Does that mean a sport shouldn't try to move forward? In my opinion, no. I am aware that there have been many advances in figure skating, but they have been in the form of adding rotations - building on what is already there.
It is hard for me to understand this mentality because of my point of reference which is that of triathletes who are notoriously hypersensative to the science of training and advances in technology. People will spend significant $ (when I say significant, I mean upwards of a grand) on a set of wheels that will make their bike a bit lighter in an effort to go faster. They will make weekly therapist appointments - massage, ART chiropractic, etc. in an effort to keep their bodies healthy and in top form. They will pay for cutting edge coaching. All of this to go a bit faster in a race ... and these people aren't even professionals! Not to say I do this stuff, but I'm surrounded by it, so that's where I'm coming from.
I think some of this is overkill, but I also think there is some common sense in it. A strong body can only help. Sport specific weight training, aerobic work, a strong core - I think that will help everyone.
Tharrtell, I hear ya. Perhaps some of the reason the attitudes in figure skating don't surprise me is that figure skating is much like dance, which was my most intense background for many, many years and while I can no longer do it, I still study and write about dance medicine. As a dancer, it was all tradition. We even looked down on people who tried to use scientific methods to research better training methods for dance. Hah! was the attitude. What do these people in their labs who were just never good enough to be dancers think they can teach us about this thing that is so subtle, so technique based, so artistic? A lot of it was hubris on our part, but also the dance scientists who first started teaching courses in kinesiology would often reinforce our prejudices because they'd come bombing into class saying to the instructor, "The way you're telling them to do that is ALL WRONG!" You can imagine the reception that got.
Also, I think figure skating and dance are linked because neither can be quantified by time, distance, weight lifted, or anything like that. With triathletes, you can measure increases in speed, even small ones, which gives the athlete the ability to say, "Yes! My intervals are 4/1000ths of a second faster! Yeah, man! What I'm doing is working!" In figure skating, what do you measure when so many factors go into making a great skater? Also, as I think I said before, coaches in skating are used to being "the great and powerful Oz." That's not a role many coaches want to give up.
Anyway, when I had to stop performing because of an injurying and got a master's in sports medicine, the more I studied and applied what I was learning, the more I thought, Boy, what idiots we are as dancers. We didn't even know the basics about training for the endurance to get through a particularly difficult piece of choreography. We'd just rehearse sections of it and not do a full runthrough until a couple of days before the premiere and gee, we'd wonder why we barely got through the piece alive. We'd get injured when we'd do a piece with extreme positions, like standing on the sides of our necks, without preparation, and when we got injured it was because you weren't using good technique. We'd pay big money for some injury-prevention system guru to come out and teach us "floor barre" and though it worked different muscles for a while, it didn't help anybody.
As a choreographer, when I applied certain training techniques to make sure the dancers were in peak condition to be able to execute the dance I'd made, such as double runthroughs, making them wear weight belts, things like that, boy, did those dancers hate me, lol. But once they'd gotten through the rough portion and had built up the necessary and proper endurance, they were thrilled at how easy it was to do what had been very difficult choreography. They said the very same thing Cohen said in her interview (and you guys thought I'd never get back on topic
), "Wow, I can't believe that we're not out of breath! I don't think I've ever danced when I wasn't out of breath before!" This group of dancers won awards, the instructors were thrilled, yadda yadda, but did they want to continue doing any of the things I'd done? No. They'd been teaching dance this way for 200 years (in ballet) and 50 years in modern and that was just fine with them. Plain old resistance to change.
I think it's just a difference mindset: One group, like triathletes for example, will try anything and everything to improve. They know the difference between gold and silver can be less than 1/1000th of a second. Dancers will do a lot of things too--get Rolfed, go to chiropractors, take vitamins, take classes from those injury prevention quacks, learn what muscle did what, but nothing outside the "circle of tradition." You'd think that nothing woud succeed like success and in some ways in dance that has happened. Dancers today are leaner from FINALLY doing weight training when they finally realized that it wouldn't give them giant Goodyear Blimp muscles if they didn't do high resisitance, high rep. Dancers work out because everybody works out, but it's a start.
Anyway, even athletic research in figure skatingi is way behing the times. I did a Pubmed search for all the research articles they had on dance--everything--and came up with 1428 research artcles. I did the same thing for figure skating and got 67 research articles. In figure skating, a couple of articles go back as far as '79, then there are a few around '87-89, but by far the bulk of them are since about '97. Figure skaters are really isolated. Even dance is more "sociable" because dancers take classes in groups and perform in companies. For skaters, it's a one or two person deal, that's it.
Knowing how much my own mind changed once I got out of the insular world of dance, it just doesn't surprise me that figure skating is the way it is. It doesn't make sense, but since when have people had that as a priority?
Rgirl
PS to Mathman: Thanks for summarizing the article on Sasha's off-ice training. You piqued my interest enough for me to sell my soul and read the whole article. Oh, wait, I don't have a soul to sell. Well, I find something
PS in General: Hype-schmype. Being at the Garden last night and seeing all those empty seats reinforced the idea that figure skating needs to put butts in seats to make money off competitions. Okay, NYC has a lot of competition for one's entertainment dollar. But what gets people going to competitions is interest and interest comes with knowing the skaters. Or having one of them be involved in whacking another one on the knee, but I'd call that a bad PR move. The skaters don't call up the NY Times and say, "Hey, want to do an article on me?" Every skater who was top five in the world last year has some kind of PR person, believe me. BTW, Sarah didn't just quietly go to the Olympics and win. She was on the cover of TIME magazine. Sarah was TIME's preOlympic choice to win! Michelle was NEWSWEEK's choice. Nobody was hyping Sasha to win the Olympics. It was, after all, her first international competition. So I think all this hype about Sasha getting so much hype is just hype. When Naomi Nari Nam won the silver at Nats the year Sasha was out with the back injury, articles on NNN were EVERYWHERE, just as articles on Sasha had been everywhere the year before when she'd won silver at Nats, just as articles on Michelle had been everywhere when she first burst on the scene, only to be out-everywhere'd briefly by Tara. It's not what they write about you before you've done anything that anybody remembers. It's what they write about you AFTER you've done it that counts. People who know skating still remember Janet Lynn even though she never won an Olympic medal or a World gold. Mark my words, there will be a great big chunk of skating history devoted to Michelle Kwan, and deservedly so, whether you love her or think she's "boring." She's already "done it"; now it's just a question of how much she'll do and on how big a scale. I say it's going to be big. Big, big, big.
Rgirl
