I'm posting a link to this video again, since I think it's sooo good. Really well edited to U2's "Beautiful Day", and the combination of the lyrics and the visuals are especially meaningful to me right now. Among other things, it perfectly expresses the idea: "this is why I skate", for whatever kinds of skating I do, and indeed the larger metaphor of working so incredibly hard at falling and getting up, and falling again, in order to learn to fly and to somehow become beautiful for a moment.
( what you don't have, you don't need it now / what you dont know, you can feel it somehow )

Andrew Love's video here: It's a Beautiful Day, to Speedskate

I'll make a full post about her soon, but Meaghan Buisson is an amazing woman. Achieved national level in something like 6 HS sports, and world-class level in inline speedskating while suffering from an eating disorder. Suffered a potentially career-ending injury, went to rehab, got her body eating healthy again, and now she's making a bid for the 2010 winter olympics, along with speaking out and being an activist about eating disorders. Yes, in 2006 she set Canadian national records for the shortest (300m) and longest (42Km marathon) inline races. While sweeping first place in all the distances at Nationals that year, she went on an off-day to set the world record for the solo marathon.

i'm seriously enjoying watching women's floor routines in gymnastics. very similar energy to competitive figure skating.

on the other end of the grace spectrum, i did a face-plant into sand while on a group in-line skate. gonna have a lovely chin-scar from this one! lol. totally worth it though.

There was a sand-trap on the bike trail, and the lead skater (who happens to be a really good trick & slalom skater) just barely managed to flail his way across it. He called back "SAND!!", and I figured that if he made it across without slowing down, so would I. I made it about halfway as was thinking "hey this is cool", only to be rather astonished that the ground had just leaped up and licked my face like an over-eager dog.

Ah well. I prefer falling on ice, that's for sure, even though when the ice gets chopped up, it definitely can give you "road rash", not to mention the *last* scar I got was from the rink.

It's going to be interesting to go from the wide-open freedom of speedskating -- where I tinker with technique this way and that, often learning the most when drafting behind good skaters and mimicing them -- to trying my best to follow the precice instructions of coaches in figure-skating. But there's another kind of freedom that figure skating gives me: it lets me deliberately be graceful for the sake of being graceful: something straight guys are only expected to be while dancing or skating.

While I welcomed it when I started skating, I'm now irked by the convention that male skaters must wear pants and not tights. It's more than a convention, in fact, since International Skating Union (ISU) rule 500 specifies:

2. At ISU Championships, the Olympic Winter Games and International Competitions, the clothing of the Competitors must be modest, dignified and appropriate for athletic competition – not garish or theatrical in design. Clothing may, however, reflect the character of the music chosen.
a) The clothing must not give the effect of excessive nudity for athletic sport. Men must wear trousers; no tights are permitted. Accessories and props are not permitted;
~ISU 2006 Single and Pair Skating Regulations

Male dancers wear tights, male track athletes wear tights, heck even male wrestlers and powerlifters wear those funny lycra shorts-plus-tanktop things. Moreover, male long-track speedskaters wear tights. Speedskating has the same governing body (the ISU) as figure-skating, so wtf??

So anyway, it's a rainy Friday, and I'm off to the rink in tights, not trousers.

In my first year of skating I:

* learned to love a new sport, and to love it more than any other I've done so far
* landed my first "real" jump, the toe-loop
* learned all my three-turns
* two-foot spin
* learned to love falling -- or at least to pay it no mind
* got my 1st skating injury (3 stitches above the eyebrow)
* got my foot above my hip on my spiral... feels like flying
* joined USFSA and the college skating club
* started "getting serious", prepared to test MItF, started skating 5-6x a week
* got over the slight weirdness of being a male figure skater, and a male skating fan.
* met Sasha, and told her that I started skating after watching her and Johnny
* discovered youTube (because people posted skating events on it)
* made a bunch of friends, sadly most of them online or occasionally encountered
* learned that a patch of ice is a place where I can escape from all depression and anxiety, and where I can feel graceful and unbound from stereotypical male convention, *and* from gravity and friction.
* caught up with all the top-40 pop hits I'd never listen to otherwise, because they play them at rinks. a lot of songs are great to skate to, even if they're pretty cheesy otherwise
* started measuring the cost of things in terms of skating: "that movie costs as much as an ice session...", "i could buy those speakers... or... a month's worth of lessons".

Having just watched a few MMA fights broadcast by bodogfight, I'm now catching up on figure skating worlds on youTube.

Why does the combination of MMA cage fighting and figure skating seem so natural to me, and yet so incongruous to most people? March madness mostly makes me yawn, although watching the last few minutes of games that go to the buzzer can certainly thrill. Perhaps if basketball were as rare on TV as MMA or figure skating, I'd like it more.

Anyway, I'm certainly not the only one. Martial artist and former Olympic skater Elvis Stojko, last I read, was training for some full-contact fighting matches. It's one thing to be a fan of both sports, like me, but to step into the ring at the pro/amateur level in both? That's crazy.

Full contact fighting and skating just don't have the same level of physical cross-over as say, dance and skating. Nor is stepping into a ring with someone who's intent on smashing your face something that can be approached with the casualness of a boxer or speed-skater taking up celebrity ballroom-dancing.

EDIT: haven't found new info on Stojko's full contact training. I'm not sure if it's *real* full contact equivalent to boxing, muay thai, or MMA, or the lighter-faster point-sparring type stuff. Sad to say I have little interest in the latter.

Another report on the decline of TV ratings for figure skating. This one, by public radio's "Marketplace" makes a good point missed by others that 30-45 year old women may well have more spending power than the young male audience that ESPN seems to want to court.

A couple of descrepancies and a couple of comments though: (1) "Skate America" is a sporting competition and is one of the International Skating Union Grand Prix events. Marketplace's correspondant was wrong in categorizing Skate America with made for TV shows like "skate with the stars".

(2) Yes, an Olympic Games happens every two years, but the Winter Olympics still only happens once every four years. Figure skating, ice hockey, skiiing, speed skating and the other high-profile winter sports are quite distinct from summer olympic sports, and it's hard to imagine "oversaturation" due to staggering the Games. If anything, *not* having two Olympic Games in the same year may help "desaturate" the market for skating.

(3) Many reports on the decline of ratings for skating neglect to make a comparison with other established sports. Is the X-games and other non-sporting television eating market share from, say, the NHL as well? Or is it only Figure Skating that's in decline?

(4) Mr. Ryssdal confesses with a bit of regret that though he is a sports fan he missed watching the USFSA nationals, and he also mentions Kimmie Meisner's win. What's left out is the intensely competitive showdown in the Men's skate between Johnny Weir and Evan Lysachek. It was sports drama at it's best, with both competitors attempting moves they had never landed before in competition: one succeeded beyond expectations, and the other, having lost, was seen weeping due to the intensity and emotionality of the moment.

It's quite regretable that such athletic skill and drama doesn't get the marketing it deserves.

The bbc reported on an Indian 800m runner being stripped of her Asian games silver medal after failing a gender test. What really surprised me was that in a radio interview, a doctor pointed out that the test is no longer genetic. Now I understand that a certain genotype can be expressed differently in the body, so genetics *alone* is not sufficient, but mustn't there be a genetic basis to any sex determination in humans? The doctor said that anatomical investigation is the most effective method, while the news articles mention that endocrinologists and psychologists are also consulted.

We're dealing with elite athletes, who by definition, are on the extreme of whatever statistical groups they belong to. I trust there is sound science behind the gender testing.

The test is called a "gender test", which confuses things even further, since the word "gender" has social connotations, while the biological definition of sex does not.

Further discussion on this can be found here in the _scientists_ community.

Athletes do fail gender tests. Biological hermaphrodites exist, as well as clear cut men and women who are physiologically extreme for their gender. Physically, to say little of psychologically, biological reality does not conform to the discrete, binary gender categorization. To put the political consequence bluntly: why did god fuck-up so badly in designing animals if sexual behavior is supposed to be a clear-cut binary thing with dire spiritual consequences for deviance?

The Cup of Russia will be on ABC today. It's the second to last of this season's Grand Prix series. You might want to take a peek, especially the men's program, because Brian Joubert had a thoroughly ice-shattering performance, in which he did three quad jumps. "Quad jump?" you're thinking, "don't all jumps use the quads?". Well, yes, although in figure skating the quads aren't recruited quite as much, due to the inability to spring off of ankle extension. But a "quad" jump in figure skating is basically when you jump up off of one foot, and spin around four times in the air before touching-down on one foot. Very few elite men's skaters can reliably do them (and few women have ever even attempted them, Sasha being one of them). To do three in a single program has only ever been done by two other skaters (Tim Goebel and Micheal Wiess, *I think*).

My two favorite Men's skaters also took part, Johnny Weir and Emanuel Sandhu, and I won't spoiler you as to how the competition went.

This entry is directed to non-skatingfans, as the competition took place over a week ago (indeed the last Grand Prix of the season, the NHK Trophy in Japan, has pretty much concluded this weekend). Yeah. Skating's so unimportant a sport that we get the broadcasts one week late. Possibly be some kind of copyright agreement between ABC/ESPN and the host countries or ISU?

ETA: Meh. I misread the paper on skate boots and jumping -- it doesn't say anything about using less quadricep strength in a jump with boots on. Anyhoo, far more practically important research shows that figure skating boots cause injury to elite skaters -- and yes, they do make boots that supposedly mitigate this, but of elite seniors, only Alissa Cizny wears them. And while I'm dropping google scholar links, here's one showing that skaters' quad jumps differ from their triples in that the skaters take a tighter air position rather than putting more power into the jump. Sounds easier than it is, of course, and I'd guess that it takes a lot more strength to hold a tighter air position at such a high rate of spin.

Browsing Wikipedia for information on skate blades led me to the entry on Sledge Hockey. It's ice hockey for amputees, is played on sledges, and follows most of the regular hockey rules, including checking. As I'm someone who skates, enjoys and appreciates all kinds of skating, and who loves the feeling of gliding on ice, it was a delight to find out about sledge hockey.

Here's a video. Wow!

( The last few months have seen an intense atmosphere in NYC's central park, due to many serious athletes training for the marathon, including some very fast handcyclists.  )Well, as it turns out, at the NYC Marathon the elite wheelchair runners who use chairs without cranks, gears, or chains are plenty fast. They run on streamlined ultra-light, $10,000 versions of the everyday hospital wheelchair, powering up hills by turning the wheels without any added mechanical leverage. (Wheelchair racers push directly on the wheels and are like runners in that they have no gears, handcycle racers have gears and are like cyclists). The mens winner in `06 was Kurt Fearnley, who made a course record of 1:29:22, despite a mid-race crash. This translates to an avergage speed of about 17.3 mph (FAST), and is fast enough to have been third in the handcycle category -- a seperate and non-prize winning division at the NYC Marathon. 1:29:22, incidentally, makes Fearnley's time twice as fast (almost to the second) as Lance Armstrong's 2:59:36 -- an arbitrary coincidence that still lends honor to both athletes, if you think about it.

Here's a nice photo of the Women's winner, Amanda McGrory (also sufficiently speedy to have finished third among the women handcyclists), alongside Fearnley, in which they are posed with flags draped on their shoulders making them appear to be flying. An interesting article about biking alongside Fearnley as a guide in the 2005 marathon describes both the feel of wheelchair racing, and the mish-mash inclusiveness that can be part of the NYC marathon -- the author represents the Fast and Fab bike club, aparently the queer bike club in NYC.

In browsing around for information to write this post, I came across an interesting blog by wheelchair dancer (who has some very nice photographs), and a wiki entry on wheelchair dance sport, which seems to be like ballroom dance, with wheelchairs in duos, or combined with an able-bodied partner.

Somewhat tangetial to the topic of sport is a webpage describing wheelchair Jujitsu techniques to defend against someone coming from behind and trying to push your chair hard, presumably as an ill-concieved lark. Like many so-called self-defense techniques, it may or may not work in real life, but it sure would be something to see it happen on the street!

Lance Armstrong after his marathon. Keeled-over, hands on knees, he looks like I do after I've run three miles. From the start, I expected him to make his goal of 3 hours. After all, the marathon was a one time thing, compared to the twenty or so racing days of the Tour de France. I figured that no amount of pain would have stopped him. He made it with mere seconds to spare, clocking in at 2:59:36. What I hadn't expected was that he'd say that of "20 years of pro sports, endurance sports, from triathlons to cycling, all of the Tours, even the worst days on the Tours, nothing was as hard as that and nothing left me feeling the way that I feel now in terms of just sheer fatigue and soreness."

Apparently Lance hadn't trained enough.

Why have I, and much of the press, along with many spectators focused on cheering for Lance? I don't know. He's only one of some 38,000 runners who started. He's certainly among the faster ones, finishing in the 800s, but nothing compared to the pro-elites with whom he was given special permission to start. Livestrong gives him philanthropic street cred, but he's certainly not the only person who ran for charity, nor the only cancer survivor who ran.

I think we cheered for him because the marathon makes him seem simultaneously human and super-human. As a cyclist, his dominance of an event which is regarded as the most physiologically challenging known, put him in the stratosphere of human physical acheivement. It also made him a celebrity, a status which he leveraged to gain even more publicity for his Livestrong foundation.

Cheering for Lance on a bike was an act of living vicariously. By associating ourselves with a paragon of a very specific and limited kind, we made ourselves feel better about our own daily challenges (or perhaps escaped from them for a few moments). Cheering for Lance in his running shoes gave the same thrill, but it was given more weight by the seeming fact that he actually *needed* the help of his fans.

http://sports.yahoo.com/box/news;_ylt=Akf3Ciue3YACHYbDpscNJQOUxLYF?slug=ap-tysonsreturn&prov=ap&type=lgns

No, he's not attempting a comeback, but rather will be doing a few exhibition rounds to make a bit of money. "I think I'm useless to society. I don't think I'm worthy of the people who come out to see me, but they do," he said, apparently joking.

When all's said and done, at least he got out of the game before he suffered permanently debilitating bodily injury.

He ought to join up with Billy Banks and try to get in on the Tae-Bo franchise. Or perhaps he's better off staying out of "the business", whether it's the fight business or the entertainment business, and just being a regular old piece of human meat.

In a campaign to get Apple computer to "go organic" Greenpeace writes:

Hello, I'm a Mac and iToxic

Let me introduce you to Apple’s latest release: hundreds of tons of contaminated, unrecycled products. Apple is selling you a fresh, clean image and innovative technology, but behind their messaging is a dirty little secret: their products are made with poison. That’s because under their skin, Apples are full of toxic chemicals like polyvinyl chloride plastic and brominated flame retardants.

When old Apples get tossed, they can end up at the fingertips of children in China, India and other developing world countries. They dismantle them for parts, and are exposed to a dangerous toxic cocktail that threatens their health and the environment.

All electronics have nasty stuff in them. I'm not sure why Greenpeace is targetting Apple over Dell and HP, who also have heavy PC advertising going on. The recent Dell/Apple battery recall involved batteries that were manufactured by Sony. Likewise, there are many parts, from the Intel CPUs to disk drive cables, that are manufactured by third-parties, and that may well be shared -- or at least equally toxic -- across PC dealers.

At least Greenpeace chose to e-mail me this time (despite the fact that I'd unsubscribed previously), rather than including me on a mass snail-mailing of fund-raising propaganda written in soy ink on recycled paper. The fossil fuels burned to power the CPUs involved in Greenpeace's e-mail blast, however, did add to the organization's CO2 production.

In the preface to his Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken writes

Management is being told that if it wakes up and genuflects, pronunouncing its amendes horoable, substituting paper for polystyrene, that we will be on the path to an evnironmentally sound world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The problem isn't the half measures, but the illusion they foster that subtle course corrections can guide us to a good life that will include a "conserved" nature, and cozy shopping malls, ...

Proponents of socially responsible business ... are inintentionally giving companies a new reason to produce, advertise, expand, grow, capitalize, and use up resources. ... But flying a jet across the country, renting a car at an airport, air-conditionaing a hotel room, gassing up a truck full of goods, commuting to a job, -- these acts degrade the evnvironment whether the person doing them works for the Body Shop, the Sierra Club, or Exxon.

To create an enduring society, we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative. Business will need to integrate economic, biologic, and human systems to create a sustainable methed of commerce ... where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natuaral, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism. That is what this book tries to imagine.

Remains to be seen where he takes it from there. But thirteen years after that was published, Greenpeace is still in the business of mass-marketing feel-good half-measures. For them to criticize Apple's hip-consumer image is an excercise in irony. I concede, however, that a larger critique of the environmental potential of commerce for both good and bad is warranted.

First, Andre Agassi received a mind-blowing standing ovation at his retirement at the US Open. Andre's father is an Armenian of Iranian descent. Kind of interesting how we think of Andre as all-American, while our (popular-media) impression of Iran has mostly to do with nukes, religious zealots, and terrorism.

Second, check out this picture of the Iranian Women's in-line speedskaters at the world championships. Picture was taken by one of the Canadian team members, whose blog about the event is at: http://2006worlds.blogspot.com/

The women are wearing old 5x84mm skates (everyone skates on 4x100mm skates these days), but talk about global village!

male skater as fashionista (doesn't display in the Opera browser, for some reason).

After an immediate reaction of discomfort, I came to love that photo. It really shows the gender ambiguities in figure skating. By replacing the ice skates with heels, but retaining the posing and costuming, Johnny is moved from a context where some expression of stereotypically female traits is not only accepted but expected, to the general social context wherein mainstream mores have it that men never do such things.

It's caused a bit of a flap on at least one skating forum, with some participants disturbed at Johnny's behavior. But really he's only doing off-ice what they love him for doing on-ice.

And it's really sexy, if I do say so myself.

Have you heard of Rohan Murphy? He's a wrestler at Penn State. His legs were amputated as a young child, and he found that wrestling was the only non-wheelchair sport that he could compete in. He had a record of some 30 wins to 3 losses as a senior in high school, and managed 1 win to 8 losses at Penn State's Division I program. As a 125 pounder who is all upper-body, he's considerably stronger than his opponents even though he lacks leverage. He recently won a Bronze medal in powerlifting at the Paralympic World Championships.

full story and photos.

Oscar De La Hoya is asked on the Late Show, "It never gets old knocking a guy out like that does it? Do you just go around knocking guys out like that left and right on the street?" It's probably a cliche among cliches but I love his answer:
"No it never gets old -- No, not on the street; I don't fight for free".

same-sex pairs skaters asked to stop holding hands. You want PDA, go look at Torvill and Dean's 6.0 winning Bolero, in which Dean all but smooches Torvill.

Assuming the facts are correctly reported, one of two things happened: the pair were doing pair moves during non-pairs sessions and asked to stop because it was potentially dangerous (or potentially more lucrative to make them pay for pairs ice); or they were doing pairs moves during a non-pairs sessions and despite the presence of other pairs skaters (as distinct from casual skaters holding hands) they were singled-out to stop because they were a same-sex pair. Can't tell which it was.

The fact that this all happened in Berkley makes me wonder. What's going to be next? Chelsea Piers instituting a zero-tolerance for "unmasculine choreography" policy?

Edit: Scratch that. What's next is to prevent you from video-taping your daughter's routines in the name of protecting children from pedophiles. Beneath the surface of the headline, it seems the problem is only that the rink needs a policy to give some kindof credentials to parents so they can be identified.

By and large, at public skating sessions you'll find two very different styles of skating: ( hockey and figure )

Skating is fun

Last week a young girl was practicing her figure skating, and then did something rare: with a huge grin on her face she picked up speed and did a hockey-stop, carreening into the boards near her friends. Her figure-style skates bit into the ice, and without the surrounding plastic that hockey-skates have, the steel blades rang-out rather than roared. The sound was more that of a sword being drawn than the white-noise scrape of hockey.

Dancing can be macho too

Incidentally, I've found a third skating style at my rink -- the dance-skater (not to be confused with ice-dancers, who follow a discipline within figure skating). The dancing is done on hockey skates, and is reminicient of the club-style dancing you might see at a roller rink or in Central Park at the skater's circle near the cherry hill fountain. Quick, rhythmic changes of direction and edge happen, and I suppose in that way is quite like ice-dance, although I'm not good enough to recognize let alone compare techniques. I also see two-footed spins done on the heels, like one might do on rollerblades. Very little upper-body or arm movement, save shuffling the hands to the beat and the disco-pout that's there in spirit if not actuality, to lend aggressiveness to the movements. The long graceful arms of figure skating are too nineteenth-century and feminine for these guys, and you'll only see them doing a spiral in half-mocking (but respectful) imitation of their figure-skater friends.

Fat laces

Remember the fat-laced Adidas that Run-DMC made popular in the 80s? I've seen fat-laces on skates, usually worn by the rink staff on hockey-skates personalized with graffitti. In addition to being markers of 'cool' fat-laces on skates are also markers of skill, because, as any beginner skater who's flopped around in cheap rental skates knows, it's not easy to find and hold one's edges without ankle support. A good skater however, can skate with thier laces untied.

Ice -- it makes children of us all.

A thread on iceskaters discusses yet another article on whether skating is a sport.

I was ready to dismiss the article, but I went back and finished reading it. Sie makes one very good point, but messes another up.

The good point: skating is judged partly on presentation, spectacle (music and costuming), and external, physical beauty. *That* makes it different from most other sports, including subjective ones like diving, freestyling and even bodybuilding (where music and costuming don't come into it). Therefore I'd say that not all of figure skating is sport. That's not saying it's not a sport btw.

The mistake: what about the fighting sports? He seems to give them a free pass by saying there are KO's and refs are needed for safety's sake. How often do KOs happen vs. decisions? Furthermore, how often do real KOs happen, vs TKOs (which in MMA can have a lot to do with the reputation of a fighter)? Not often at all. ( why fighting decisions are subjective ) THIS IS NOT due to corruption, but is an inherent subjectivity built into fights that must please an audience rather than choose the better fighter.

Still, Prince Nassim's outlandish tiger shorts did nothing when De la Hoya whooped his butt and won by decision. Nor did de la Hoya's boyish good looks win him any decision. Production values don't earn you squat *in* the boxing ring.

The article is right about physical beauty counting more in skating than in other disciplines. I think it helps one skater edge-out another (and in practice maybe it counts even more than that). I'd like to think -- and nothing in the rules prevents it -- that an "ugly" skater, whose lines are as perfect as sasha's or weir's competes on an even footing with sasha and johnny. Any athlete's body is beautiful. Say one is densely muscled and looks more like venus williams than sasha. Skating has a bit of "ballet envy" and even if said athlete could attain the same position and grace of shasha, she might get deducted for, i don't know, having non-symmetrial elbows or something. Facial features shouldn't matter at all. Ideally good makeup is all that's needed. If one is severely disfigured, I wonder if they'd allow some kind of bland featureless mask?

Why do I firmly place figure skating (but perhaps not Ice Dancing) in the realm of sport? Because skaters push their athletic limits in competition, and even the world's best skaters will fall (as they did today at the Olympics). A ballet dancer, whose dicipline is just as athletic as ice skating, will never do a move in a performance that sie can't do perfectly 99.99 percent of the time. What counts is getting the perfomance perfect, not striving for excellence and surpassing oneself. Not so in figure skating; one must push oneself to and beyond the limits of one's ability in order to beat the competition. That is the very essence of sport, even in competitions with no judges, rankings, or victors. It's the quintessence of two ancient greek wrestlers testing one another at the gymnasium.

Good article, but it should have been questioning and examining the unfairness and extent of judging based on production values or purely physical looks (rather than grace, which is beauty through position and motion). Instead it teleoported through the headline grabbing non-sequitr of "Sport vs Nonsport". To say figure skating is not a sport because it judges based on a well-prescribed asthetic standard, is as absurd as saying chocolate is not a candy because it contains theobromine.