Nthuz,
If you find out anymore information on the figure skating hinged boot Bill Fauver is working on, would you please either post it or PM me? As Mathman will attest to, I have been going, well, ntuhz trying to find info on the FS hinged boot since I saw a report on it prior to the Olympics on NBC news. If you do a search on any large search engine, all you can find are links to info on the hinged speed skating boot, which is a completely different design from the hinged figure skating boot and works by having the back part of the boot hinged on so it makes a clapping sound and allows the speed skater to gain more speed. The FS hinged boot is hinged at the ankle to allow for greater ankle range of motion, which supposedly will allow the skater to use more of the ankle to get up in the air for jumps and also allow the landing forces to be more evenly spread out among the low back, hip, knee, and ankle rather than focusing so much force on the hip.
On the NBC news report they showed a sports medicine specialist and figure skater (woman in her 50s) skating on her own design of the hinged FS boot and discussing the results of biomechanical analyses they'd done with the boot, so I just assumed that soon enough I'd find something about it in the sports medicine literature or somewhere on the 'net. But nope. This really interests me, as you'll see if you go to Mathman's link to my posts, so any crumb of further info you hear, I'd appreciate your posting it or PMing me. Thanks!
Rgirl