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Yeah, that was something I noticed, even when looking at the governing body's website. Quad roller skating seemed to be the main thing, while inline roller skating was the poor relation that you just don't talk about. Which kinda surprised me, because I would have thought that inline would have been bigger, as it is more similar to the more popular cousin of ice skating.
The skater I was looking at, Anastasia Nosova, came to my attention because she started off on ice. And she wasn't doing so badly. She had the highest scores in the SP and overall in Advanced Novice Ladies at the inaugural Cyprus Championships. (I'm being careful with my wording here, because I think she was competing as a guest skater). But then something happened (her Wikipedia page doesn't specifically say what, but it sounds like a serious accident), which prompted her to switch to roller skating.
To a non-skater like me, inline would be the logical choice of the type of roller skating to do for somebody who is used to skating on ice. Yes, the wheels are significantly wider than a blade, but you would think there would be lot of transferrable skills. Certainly more than there would be with quad skating, where the physics would be vastly different.
For that reason, I am surprised that there are not more figure skaters that switch to inline artistic roller skating when their competitive career is drying up or just plain over. It would give them an option to continue their competitive career, albeit in a different fashion, if the desire to compete was still burning.
And this would seem a particular good idea in Russia, where figure skating is not the obscure sport that it is in most of the rest of the world. We all know how deep the pool is in Russia, and how quickly the revolving door turns. For skaters who now found themselves on the sidelines, this could be a way of prolonging their career.
Look at the results for the earliest competition on ice that I could find results for Anastasia Nosova - a domestic competition in Moscow:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190510134947/http:/www.fskate.ru/results/tour/752.html
She was the penultimate finisher of the skaters that competed in both segments. Yet she went on to win all the Majors in inline artistic roller skating.
Now look at who else was in that competition:
Position | Name | Total Score |
|---|---|---|
1 | Elena RADIONOVA | 132.96 |
2 | Alina MAXIMOVA | 119.17 |
3 | Anna POGORILAYA | 116.35 |
… | | |
8 | Evgenia MEDVEDEVA | 99.91 |
… | | |
12 | Ekaterina ALEXANDROVSKAYA  | 91.14 |
… | | |
14 | Maria SOTSKOVA | 77.72 |
… | | |
16 | Elizabet TURSYNBAEVA | 60.65 |
… | | |
18 | Anastasia NOSOVA | 55.37 |
There is a lot of success and talent in that selection of names.
Imagine the buzz that inline artistic roller skating would have got if any of those names had switched to it after they found they were surplus to requirements in the Russian figure skating team. If a girl that scored a good bit lower than they did on knifeblades could be so successful on wheels, imagine what they could have done!
Now imagine how many people it would have got watching the sport...
With figure skating being so popular in Russia, inline artistic roller skating could have a real opportunity here to raise it's profile if some top figure skaters who had fallen foul of the revolving door made the switch. Anastasia Nosova has proven that it can be done successfully, and she wasn't even one of the top skaters on ice.
Whether that could be done in other countries where figure skating is not a mainstream sport is another matter. But, as Nosova has shown in her videos on YouTube, one of the advantages over figure skating is that you don't have to be near an ice rink. You can practice in any open space, even a car park! Competitions can be held in a school gym!
For countries where there is not easy access to ice rinks, starting out doing inline artistic roller skating could be a cheap starting point for youngsters to get into figure skating. But, it would be much harder to learn the ice skills retroactively.
It would help if the two sports worked together more.
I have often thought that there needs to be a major re-alignment in the way that ice sports and their roller equivalents are governed. It is not good to have all the ice sports governed by one huge body, and all the roller sports goverened by another huge body. It would be better to have the winter (ice) and summer (roller) versions of each sport governed together by their own body, which is separate from the other sports.
But, it'll never happen. Too many people with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.
CaroLiza_fan
I'm very curious to see what he's up to considering it's now aages since he roller skated!
She placed 22nd out of 34 skaters, with a couple of American skaters and a few other countries' women in the lower-ranking half of the entrants. The top 15, with the exception of one skater from Germany, are all representing the usual roller hotbeds -- Italy, Spain, Portugal, and assorted South American countries. I'm assuming from the Canadian's Italian name that she either learned to skate there, or her parents are from there, or some such connection.
