59 Fun Facts About Ice Skating

Research suggests the earliest ice skating took place more than 4,000 years ago in which country?

Finland's south is crowded with small lakes, and the study worked out that skating across them on bone blades, not walking round, saved a winter traveller about a tenth of their energy.

Which people are credited with adding sharpened edges to ice skates in the 13th or 14th century?

The Dutch gave skates sharpened steel edges that bit into the ice, so skaters could push off with their feet and no longer needed poles to shove themselves along.

The world's first mechanically frozen ice rink, the Glaciarium, opened in 1876 in which city?

London's Glaciarium was a spin-off: John Gamgee, a vet, had been working out how to freeze meat for long voyages, and his pipes made ice so cold that a thick mist hung over the skaters.

Figure skating made its Olympic debut after Rome gave up the 1908 Summer Games, citing which volcano's eruption?

Vesuvius erupted in April 1906, and Italy cited the cost of the disaster when it gave up the Games; the hosts who stepped in added figure skating, held at a skating club in late October, months after the summer events.

Which American is called the 'father of modern figure skating' for his mid-1800s innovations?

Jackson Haines, a ballet dancer, brought dance to the ice; his own country rejected his style, so he took it to Vienna, where it was welcomed and grew into a school of skating.

A triple Axel takes three and a half turns because the skater takes off how?

Facing forward: every other competition jump takes off backward, and all of them land backward, so the Axel needs an extra half turn. Norway's Axel Paulsen first did it in Vienna in 1882, at a meet where he also won the speed race.

Whose wedge haircut became an American craze after she won figure skating gold at the 1976 Olympics?

Dorothy Hamill's bob had women everywhere asking for a 'Hamill cut', and she turned professional that spring to headline a touring ice show.

Which figure skating jump is named after a Swedish skater who won ten world titles?

The Salchow: Sweden's Ulrich Salchow first landed it in competition in 1909. He skipped one world championship held in a German rival's home city, fearing unfair judging, and still won ten.

Madge Syers prompted a separate women's world championship by doing what?

Entering the men's event and taking silver: no rule barred women in 1902, and the winner reputedly offered her his gold medal. She went on to win the first two ladies' titles.

Which skater won three straight Olympic golds, then became a Hollywood star?

Sonja Henie had finished last of eight at her first Olympics in 1924, aged 11. She won the next three Games, then signed with Twentieth Century-Fox and starred in a run of hit films.

Which country won its first Winter Olympic gold in 2002 when every skater ahead of its racer crashed?

Australia: Steven Bradbury was last in the 1,000-metre short-track final when all four rivals crashed on the final corner, and 'doing a Bradbury' became Australian slang for an unlikely win.

Which American became the youngest Olympic women's figure skating champion, aged 15, in 1998?

Tara Lipinski landed a triple loop–triple loop combination at Nagano to beat the favourite, then turned professional shortly afterwards and never skated at another Olympics.

The 'figures' that gave figure skating its name, dropped in 1990, were what?

Traced patterns: skaters carved precise circles and figure eights into the ice, once worth 60 percent of the score. Television did not show them, one reason their weight was cut until they vanished.

Torvill and Dean won 1984 Olympic gold with twelve perfect 6.0s, skating to which piece of music?

Boléro, by Ravel, drew a 6.0 for artistic impression from all nine judges. Jayne Torvill had been an insurance clerk and Christopher Dean a policeman in Nottingham before skating took over.

Who partnered Meryl Davis to America's first Olympic ice dance gold?

Charlie White and Davis, put together by a coach as children, won in 2014 after settling for silver in 2010. No American couple had done better since ice dance joined the Olympics in 1976.

Which East German skater won back-to-back Olympic golds in 1984 and 1988?

Katarina Witt won her second title in what was billed the 'Battle of the Carmens': she and American rival Debi Thomas had each chosen to skate to music from Bizet's opera.

Which skater won the United States' only gold medal at the 1968 Winter Olympics?

Peggy Fleming's win in Grenoble marked American skating's recovery from the 1961 plane crash that killed the entire US team on its way to the world championships, her own coach among them.

Which skater was the first Asian American to win a Winter Olympic gold medal?

Kristi Yamaguchi won at Albertville in 1992, where she also met her future husband, US hockey player Bret Hedican. In 2008 she won Dancing with the Stars.

Which American won five world titles and nine US titles but never an Olympic gold medal?

Michelle Kwan went to the 1998 and 2002 Games among the favourites and left with silver and bronze. In 2022 she became the US ambassador to Belize.

Which skater became the first American woman to land a triple Axel in competition, in 1991?

Tonya Harding landed it at the 1991 US Championships and took the title. After her skating career ended in scandal three years later, she spent a spell as a professional boxer.

Nancy Kerrigan was attacked weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics with what weapon?

A police baton, swung at her leg just above the knee as she left a practice session in Detroit. She recovered in time to win the Olympic silver medal that February.

Yuzuru Hanyu's 2018 win made him the first man to retain the Olympic figure skating title since which American?

Dick Button won in 1948 and 1952, the second while a Harvard student and with a triple loop no skater had landed in competition before. Hanyu matched him 66 years later.

Which American skater defended his world title in 2019 while on spring break from Yale?

Nathan Chen, a freshman, flew to Japan and won by more than 22 points, coached by video chat from 3,000 miles away. He took Olympic gold three years later.

Which American landed the first clean, fully rotated quadruple Axel in 2022?

Ilia Malinin was 17, and months earlier had been left off the US team for the Beijing Games. Both his parents skated at the Olympics for Uzbekistan.

A long-track speed skating oval's 400-metre lap matches which venue?

Outdoor running track: the lap is the same, but skaters race two at a time and must swap lanes once every lap, because the inner lane is shorter than the outer one.

Speed skating first reached the Olympic programme at the 1924 winter sports week in which town?

Chamonix: the first gold medal of any Winter Olympics went to American speed skater Charles Jewtraw, in the 500 metres. He later gave it to the Smithsonian.

After sweeping five golds at the 1980 Olympics, speed skater Eric Heiden turned professional in which sport?

Cycling: Heiden won the 1985 US professional road race and started the 1986 Tour de France, though a crash kept him from finishing. He later became an orthopaedic surgeon.

Which skater won eight Winter Olympic medals between 2002 and 2010?

Apolo Ohno won two golds, two silvers and four bronzes in short track, and between Games took the 2007 Dancing with the Stars title.

Short-track speed skating first appeared at the Winter Olympics as a demonstration sport in 1988, in which city?

Calgary: pack racing had last been tried at the 1932 Lake Placid Games, where Europeans objected that it favoured the Americans, and it stayed off Olympic ice for the next 56 years.

Why was the Netherlands' Elfstedentocht skating race held just once between 1987 and 2025?

Thin ice: the race of nearly 200 km past eleven cities of Friesland needs 15 cm of natural ice along the whole route. In 1986 the country's crown prince finished it under a false name.

Frank Zamboni's 1949 machine did which rink job in minutes that had taken a crew over an hour?

Resurfacing the ice: Zamboni sold block ice until refrigeration shrank the trade, so he opened a rink instead. He built his machine around a war-surplus Jeep engine to spare a crew the scraping, washing and reflooding.

Which 16-year-old edged out Nancy Kerrigan for the 1994 Olympic figure skating title?

Oksana Baiul, who lost her mother at 13, won the first Olympic gold medal for independent Ukraine, then left for a professional career in the United States.

Which ice show did arena managers launch in 1940?

Ice Capades was set up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, by arena managers who wanted a show to fill their own buildings.

Which diarist watched the future King James II skate on broken ice in St James's Park in December 1662?

Samuel Pepys followed the Duke of York into the park and wrote that the ice was 'broken and dangerous', 'which I did not like, but he slides very well'.

Which royal once had to be rescued by his wife after falling through the ice at Buckingham Palace?

Prince Albert broke through the ice into deep water while skating on the palace lake in 1841. Queen Victoria, watching from the bank, kept her presence of mind and helped him out.

Which country won figure skating's first Olympic team event, held in 2014?

Russia took the lead in the second of eight segments on home ice in Sochi and never lost it, with veteran Evgeni Plushenko skating through serious back problems.

Which skater won the 2010 Olympic women's title by 23 points with a record score?

Yuna Kim, the clear favourite, scored 228.56 to break her own world record. Eight years later she lit the cauldron at the Pyeongchang Olympics.

Which American skater won the same Olympic event in 1988, 1992 and 1994?

Bonnie Blair won the 500 metres three times, having started out in short track, where she was world champion in 1986. Women's speed skating had only joined the Olympics in 1960.

In a short-track relay, how does one skater usually hand over?

Push from behind: a touch is all the rules ask, but a push hands the tiring skater's momentum to the fresh one. Teams may swap whenever they like, except in the last two laps.

In which 2007 comedy do two banned rival figure skaters exploit a loophole to compete together?

Blades of Glory: Will Ferrell and Jon Heder play champions banned from men's singles for brawling on the podium, who realise that nothing stops them entering as a duo.

What are the fast travelling one-foot turns that ice dance couples perform side by side called?

Twizzles have been called 'the quads of ice dance': both partners must spin across the ice in unison, close together but never touching, so the slightest slip shows.

Which American speed skater fell at the 1988 Olympics hours after his sister died, then won gold in 1994?

Dan Jansen had been a favourite at three Olympics without winning a medal until his very last race, the 1,000 metres at Lillehammer, which he won in world-record time.

Which Canadian landed the first ratified quadruple jump in competition, at the 1988 World Championships?

Kurt Browning landed a quadruple toe loop in Budapest only weeks after finishing eighth at that winter's Olympics. He then won the next three world titles.

Which Japanese skater became the first woman to land a triple Axel in competition?

Midori Ito landed it in 1988 and a year later became the first world champion from outside Europe and North America. Japan chose her to light the Olympic flame at Nagano in 1998.

The ISU replaced its 6.0 scoring system partly in response to a judging scandal at which Winter Olympics?

Salt Lake City 2002: a French judge said she had been pressed to vote for the Russian couple, then took it back. Within days the Canadian runners-up were given gold medals of their own.

Along with the upright and the sit spin, what is figure skating's third basic spin position?

Camel: the skater spins on one leg with the body and free leg stretched level with the ice, a shape taken straight from ballet's arabesque. Britain's Cecilia Colledge first performed it in the 1930s.

The death spiral is a required element of which figure skating discipline?

Pairs: the man pivots in place, holding his partner by one hand as she circles him stretched just above the ice. Professionals had used two hands until Canada's Morrow and Diestelmeyer, 1948 Olympic medallists, did it with one.

Synchronized skating was originally known as what kind of skating?

Precision: the sport dates from 1956, when Dr Richard Porter formed a team in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to entertain the crowd between periods of college hockey games.

The first World Figure Skating Championships were held in 1896 in which city?

Only men competed in the early years, until Madge Syers entered the men's event in 1902 and finished second.

What is the area called where figure skaters wait for their scores in front of the TV cameras?

The kiss and cry: by some accounts a Finnish official, Jane Erkko, made the name up on the spot when television crews preparing for the 1983 World Championships asked what the area was called.

Which 1984 Olympic champion, unbeaten for four years, went on to found the Stars on Ice tour?

Scott Hamilton was an unlikely champion: a childhood illness had stunted his growth, and he stood about 5 ft 3 at his peak. He later came through both cancer and a brain tumour.

The International Skating Union, founded in 1892, is based in which Swiss city?

Lausanne: the ISU began when delegates met in the seaside town of Scheveningen to agree common rules, and it governs figure skating, speed skating and short track.

Which ice dance duo's fifth Olympic medal, in 2018, made them the most decorated figure skaters in Games history?

Virtue and Moir of Canada, partners since they were seven and nine, took two seasons off after settling for silver in 2014, came back unbeaten and won two more golds.

The world's first organised skating club, formed in the 1740s, was based in which Scottish city?

Edinburgh: to join, a candidate had to skate a complete circle on either foot, then jump over first one hat, then two, then three stacked on the ice.

By 2022, which country had won more than twice as many Olympic short-track golds as any other?

South Korea had 26 golds to second-placed China's 12. One of its champions later changed countries and names, and as Viktor Ahn won three more golds in 2014.

The National Skating Association, set up in 1879 to regulate fen skating, was founded in which English city?

Cambridge: a local journalist thought the Fen racers deserved national recognition and feared betting was corrupting their sport, so he proposed a governing body modelled on the Jockey Club.

Which skater won the 1988 Olympic men's final billed as the 'Battle of the Brians'?

Brian Boitano and Canada's Brian Orser had traded the world title in 1986 and 1987, so the gold looked sure to go to one of them. Boitano took it, but only narrowly.

Which American won the women's figure skating gold at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics?

Alysa Liu had finished only sixth at the previous Games. Her win was the first by an American woman since Sarah Hughes in 2002, and she added a second gold in the team event.

Where did the United States' figure skaters finally receive their 2022 Olympic team gold medals?

At the Paris Summer Olympics: the Beijing ceremony was called off when a rival skater's drug test came back positive, and it took nearly two years of legal argument to move the Americans up to gold.