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Ice Skating – Britannica Entry
While a relatively mild winter starts settling in here in the UK and the Winter Olympics fast approaching. This week’s Pub Convos we’ll focus on the origins of a slippery past time, ice skating.
Early Ice Skating:
The first ice skating is thought to have happened in Finland where it was used to conserve energy on long hunting expeditions.
Early skates were made using animal bones and would glide across the ice.
It is unknown when metal skates were invented but there are Dutch paintings which depict people skating using metal skates.
In many countries skating was considered an upper-class activity.
Ice Skating as a Sport:
Speed skating gained popularity in the lakes of Scotland and the canals of Netherlands where competitions would be held as soon as the water froze over.
The flashy side of competitive skating is figure skating which has its origins in England where the first manual on figure skating was published in 1772
The addition of the toe pick on the skates also heavily influenced figure skating as the sawed tooth front of the skates gave figure skaters a better base for jumps and other movements.
Figure skating was cramped and formal until Jackson Haines who introduced a free and expressive style in the 1860s, but it didn’t fully catch on till the early 20th century.
Modern Skating:
The introduction of refrigerated ice further propelled skating into mainstream sport and entertainment.
The first artificially frozen rink was a private one in London in 1876. The first one is the US was in the old Madison Square Garden.
This led to sports like ice hockey becoming popular and also the emergence of ice shows such as the modern-day Disney On Ice shows as an example.
The evolution of skating has come a long way from animal bones and efficient hunting to a leisurely past time where even in the warmest of countries you can still ice skate. Small disclaimer: I went ice skating for the first time in 10 years before I wrote this and I only managed to fall over once!!!
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