Moscow to hold Worlds 2011

The Worlds will be held at the Megasport Arena in Moscow, Russia, on April 24-May 1, 2011.

After reviewing the countries that offered to host the Worlds, ISU decided to allot the World Figure Skating Championships 2011 to the Figure Skating Federation of Russia, which has assured the ISU of its full cooperation including in areas such as easy access to entry visas and security. The preparation for the updating of all relevant details (time schedule, Announcement, entry confirmations etc) have already begun and the ISU will revert as soon as possible with the necessary information.

Read the full story on the ISU site.

Skating in the Tropics

Alaine Handa, on what her favorite thing about Singapore is...


Alaine lived & skated in Singapore for many years before moving to the US. She now lives in New York City. She is a choreographer, dancer, make up artist, dance educator, and has a dance company, A.H. Dance Company.

Where will the World's be?

Following the postponement of the World's after Japan's quake & tsunami, the ISU has announced that it may consider holding the event in another location.

ISU has received bids from Russia (Moscow), Canada (Vancouver, British Columbia), the United States (Colorado Springs, CO, or Lake Placid, NY), Finland (Turku), Croatia (likely Zagreb), Austria (maybe Graz).

News report on
- Figure skating-Moscow bids to host world championships from Reuters
- 6 Countries Offer to Host Skating Worlds from USA Today

World Figure Skating Championships postponed due to Japan's quake

The ISU has announced that the World's will not be held on the scheduled date. In the latest release, ISU states that "The postponement of the Event or alternatively the final cancellation is under evaluation."

Full news story from ISU.

World Championships may be affected by Japan's Quake

This ISU World Figure Skating Championships scheduled to take place in Japan next week might be cancelled, after one of the most devastating earthquakes and tsunami hit Japan.

Although the ISU initially announced that the World Championships will continue as scheduled, it later announced, on 13 March, that it will "continue to monitor the situation in cooperation with the JSF and the Japanese authorities in order to come to a conclusion as to maintaining or cancelling the Championships in Tokyo scheduled for next week." (Full story on ISU site)

Reports have it that Germany is pulling out of the World's.

The Physics of Figure Skating

The Physics of Skating ~ from Delaware Online
The article describe how the grace, style and athleticism of figure skating depend on basic scientific principles of friction, momentum and Newton's third law.

There is also a video interview with coach Joel Savary:


Here's a transcript of what said:

To make a good skater you have to incorporate style, beauty as well as great athleticism, so it is a very unique sport because you have to be both athletic and showing the artistic side. So if you can incorporate both of those together that will make you a great skater.

There are a lot of different jumps - there's toe jumps, where you use the toe to assist you into the air, such as the toe loop and the flip jump and the lutz jump, and there's edge jumps, which is the salchow and the axel and the loop jump, which do not use the toe to assist you into the air - you just got to take that edge to lift you. And then of course you have the number of rotations you do on each jump, so you can go from single jump all the way up to - people are doing quads now, so there are 4 rotations, and people are really pushing for 4 1/2 in the future.

There are so many spins. People are advancing spins now all the time. We have sit spin, you know classic spins like sit spin, scratch spin, laybacks. We've flying spins, death drops and all these new spins in different positions like the ladies are doing Bielmann spins, where they're grabbing the leg and pulling it to the head. There's just a lot of new spins coming up. Being flexible allows us to more interesting positions in spins.

You pull in to generate the force of spinning faster - and this is in the jumps and this is also in the spins. The tighter position you can get with your legs being as tight as you can and your arms being as tight as you can and being completely straight will get you to rotate much faster.