- Joined
- Dec 7, 2022
I am always astonished that any lady can take up pairs at a later age. To me, it’s similar to trapeze. In the glory days of the circus the top flyers (boys and girls) often came from trapeze families and had been launched through the air (and caught by their fathers) since they were toddlers. Later in life, your body just refuses to put itself in a position where serious injury seems inevitable. The body says to the brain, “you might be a reckless fool, but I’m not.”
Like, the average untrained person cannot force himself to fall over backward with the assurance that somebody behind you is going to catch you.
On the men’s side, if your partner is not light as a feather, the trick of just a simple carry lift, to me, is a prodigy of maintaining a secure edge while wrestling with center of gravity, etc. Even just skating around with a real feather (or without one), sometimes skaters fall for no apparent reason.
Maybe the real solution is to phase out this dare-devil discipline altogether.
Yep. Didn't dare to say it, but... if there just aren't enough male partners around to have girls and women rather safely (both physically and emotionally) engaged in this discipline, without parents paying for the male partner, without stark power imbalances... maybe this should not be one of the four main disciplines, no matter how traditional it is or how beautiful it looks when it's done perfectly.
Maybe synchro skating for instance is just a healthier discipline.
I know there are pairs girls and women and teams which are perfectly fine and healthy and everything. But if the whole discipline has major systematic problems that cannot be solved... another possibility might be to get more men into pairs' skating so that the pool is simply bigger... (or even find solutions in the judging to make same sex couples possible).