- Joined
- Jul 26, 2003
These days in Novice dance competitions, where compulsory dances are still skated, they are not boring because the teams get to pick their own music, provided it has the correct time signature and correct number of beats per minute. Picking music is easier because it is easy to slow down or speed up music appropriately to meet the bpm requirements with music editing programs. The sad part is there are no compulsories in at least Juniors. I miss them!
And yes, I remember the precision of both Torvill & Dean and Trixie Schuba's repetitions. It was reported that Trixie cut her tracings so deeply that she deliberately offset the third tracing by a tiny amount so as not to trip. Also her figures were noticeably bigger than the other competitors because she was a stronger skater. And the circles were perfectly circular, and perfectly on axis. Remember the skater had to be able to do this without any guidelines on the ice!
Torvill and Dean were the greatest of all time on 6.0 style compulsories. As many as 3,000 people would show up at Europeans to watch perfection. To get perfect overlay of tracings, the skaters had to be in amazing physical shape to maintain completely even speed throughout the program
I saw them do CD's in 1981 at Hartford Worlds. I knew how hard it was to just do figures and get them to overlay perfectly. None of the other dancers were even close.
Anything done that well can be mesmerizing.
IJS CD's had how exactly the difficult turns were to be done defined very precisely as to how the toe or heel of the skate had to be placed. It was different from the way 6.0 skaters did them. I remember one of the Russian coaches laughing that he had not learned them that way, so coaching CDs in IJS was difficult.
I like being able to watch whole competitions these days.
I remember pulling up Heather's Figure Skating Page just to be able find when skating would be on TV.
I remember taping 1988 Europeans on some 3 hour program block of random sports only to find the only skating on it was Katarina Witt's SP, and all that was discussed was whether her skirt was illegal.
And yes, I remember the precision of both Torvill & Dean and Trixie Schuba's repetitions. It was reported that Trixie cut her tracings so deeply that she deliberately offset the third tracing by a tiny amount so as not to trip. Also her figures were noticeably bigger than the other competitors because she was a stronger skater. And the circles were perfectly circular, and perfectly on axis. Remember the skater had to be able to do this without any guidelines on the ice!
Torvill and Dean were the greatest of all time on 6.0 style compulsories. As many as 3,000 people would show up at Europeans to watch perfection. To get perfect overlay of tracings, the skaters had to be in amazing physical shape to maintain completely even speed throughout the program
I saw them do CD's in 1981 at Hartford Worlds. I knew how hard it was to just do figures and get them to overlay perfectly. None of the other dancers were even close.
Anything done that well can be mesmerizing.
IJS CD's had how exactly the difficult turns were to be done defined very precisely as to how the toe or heel of the skate had to be placed. It was different from the way 6.0 skaters did them. I remember one of the Russian coaches laughing that he had not learned them that way, so coaching CDs in IJS was difficult.
I like being able to watch whole competitions these days.
I remember pulling up Heather's Figure Skating Page just to be able find when skating would be on TV.
I remember taping 1988 Europeans on some 3 hour program block of random sports only to find the only skating on it was Katarina Witt's SP, and all that was discussed was whether her skirt was illegal.
