B racket-Change-Bracket
By J. D. SCOTT IN the last Olympic Games only one gold medal was won for Britain by purely human means—a horse having played a part in winning the other one. This solitary distinction was won by Miss Jeannette Altwegg, CBE, Figure Skating Champion of the World, whose subsequent -retirement from serious skating—she left it to take up work with children, in the face of multi-million-dollar professional offers—was a pretty considerable gesture in aid bf the Amateur Idea, the more so because Miss Altwegg obviously didn't think of it in any such light. The victory created a certain amount of interest in the sport of figure skating, and people who consulted reference books found that here was a sport at which Britain had excelled from early days, and in which British entrants were still among the most dangerous in the European and World Championships. What are the reasons for this unnatural state of affairs 7 For one thing, a much larger number of people are skating. Before the war,. and certainly before about 1935, when many new rinks were built (primarily for ice-hockey), skating, and especially figure skating, was a sport much like climbing, the preserve of people who did it mostly in Switzerland, and to whom British ice rinks, like British mountains, were merely an acceptable substitute to be used during the times of the year When one couldn't go abroad. Instructor's fees—and serious figure skating requires constant professional coaching—were like guide's fees, something which was paid out as a matter Of course. Stories were told of the retainers, many hundreds of pounds a year, paid to celebrated coaches by leading amateurs. Nowadays skating, like climbing, is a sport for hundreds of thousands of people who have never set foot on Swiss ice. And more of these go on to serious figure skating, finding the money for coaching somehow or other. But that Is not.the only reason for the continued British success. For, Since the war, the Americans have come to the front in this Von (which they didn't go in for very much before) and have Provided the kind of competition you would expect. So what is the answer ?
Last Friday, I visited the Streatham Ice Rink, to have a look at the British Amateur Championships. Streatham is an' Intimate kind of rink; it doesn't have the banks of seats which intorower up from equalembley, for instance. The ice divided three W parts. On one, half a dozenwas girls were practising, On a second a bunch of white-coated men were renewing the ice-surface. The third was operational; on this, as I entered, one of the contestants, under the basilisk stare 0_,f five judges and .a referee, was skating the figure called double-three-change-double-three. As she completed her third round, the judges shuffled forward to examine the marks her !Kates had left on the ice. At their most divergent you could a, ave covered these tracings easily with a playing card. No judge talked to any other judge. At the conclusion of their examination the judges lined up and, at a brief blast on a Whistle, each held up two cards. Upon each card was a figure, the two figures together constituting a marking, to one decimal Plane. out of a total of sixty. A voice on a loudspeaker read out the markings in a carefully neutral voice, like a policeman Living evidence. Officials copied them into elaborate schedules. „IncI next contestant skated onto the operational area and took rj) position ready to skate her double-three-change-double- r'ee. There were only a handful of onlookers, relatives and cognoscenti. The quiet was broken only by the whispering crunch of skates, the peeps on the whistle, and low-voiced conversation. It was all rather like a religious ceremony, but nervous strain bristled around the place like random electricity. nine these girls were skating (they had been at it since Vile and went on until after lunch) were the ' compulsory figures.' There are, in figure skating, seventeen ' school figures,' ranging from simple ' edges' to ' threes,' which are natural 'urns, up to brackets and counters, which are turned against, so to speak, the grain of natural movement. Loops are an additional piece of hellishness. A figure can be skated beginning on either foot, either on an inside or an outside edge, and either forwards or backwards. In comparatively (comparatively) simple skating they are done on one foot for one part of the figure of eight in which they are mostly formed, and on the other foot for the other half. But all the most difficult figures, from which championship figures are selected, are skated on one foot with a change of edge in the middle. Now a bracket (say) is a difficult thing to do. Most of the people you see at an ordinary session of an ice rink—even the girls in the middle with their legs in the air, who look so frightfully expert—can't do one at all. To do brackets to a centre, so that you have a figure (c4 eight with a bracket turn at each extremity, a figure of eight which actually looks something like a figure of eight, is already high-class stuff. Now at Olympic level or near it you must do this all on one foot, with a change of edge in the middle, thiee times, with tracings so close they can be covered by a penny.
This means years of practice, practice like ballet practice, for hours a day, day in day out. This practice is violent physical exercise, as you can see when it's badly done; it: is possible, in the most literal meaning of the expression, to burst into sweat after doing a single figure three times. It means a steady grind of coaching, and skating coaches, while good for skating, are bad for conceit. This means that figure skaters, at the level at which they might be picked for an Olympic team, are amateurs with a professional standard, amateurs with the amateurism of performance beaten clean out of them. Of how many amateurs, in how many sports, in Britain, is this true ?.
Is it worth it ? That, of course, is a big question. But as, on Friday, I watched the two leaders, Miss Sugden and Miss Batchelor, skating a loop-change-loop with a perfect, flowing line and the entranced expression which, characterises extreme concentration, it seemed to me that it probably was. But of course the real pay-off of all this arduous school- figure training comes in free-skating. Free skating is what you see on television and in the ice-shows. It is based upon the school figures, and a four-minute exhibition (five for the men) forms a part of British, European, Olympic and World Cham- pionships. Free skating, with its sensation of very high speed, its technical virtuosity, its exhausting effort, its appalling nerviness, is almost inconceivably exhilarating and satisfying. If I myself could be anyone now alive for any month of his life, I should want to consider being Lord Russell in the month during which he conceived Principia Mathematica, or Mr. Eliot writing The Waste Land; but if I could only have five minutes of someone else's life I should have no hesitation: I should take the five minutes free skating with which I saw Richard Button—easily the greatest skater who ever set foot on ice—win the World's Championship at Wembley four years ago.
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