Why figure skating is hard

November 1st, I am thankful for God and Jesus. I put my faith in them, they protect and help me through the happy and the sad in life. I could not imagine a world without them. November 2nd, I am thankful for sweets. I love them. Sweets can make me joyful when I am upset.

They make my sweet tooth go at ease. Especially Lava Cakes. November 3rd, I love my family. They push me to be the best I can be. My family supports me and always cheers me up when I am down. My family cares so much about me and will do anything for me if it is legal.

I really couldn't imagine a world without them. November 4th, I am thankful for my teachers. They might give me a lot of hassle and work to do. Yet they come through by trying to help however they can. Teachers can be funny and kind of cool.

November 5th, I am thankful for my character traits. My hard-working trait, my try to be amazing at things trait, my sweet trait, my fashion trait, and my smart trait, and my love trait. But I also am thankful for those who stick around when my bad traits come out like my sassiness, my moody trait, my sensitiveness, my grumpy trait, my angry trait over dumb things, and even my trying to be amazing at things trait because I always try to be perfect.

Thanks, friends, and family for sticking around. Arthur Bozikas has penned a memoir that is heart-breaking and gutsy, as well as being full of hope and gratitude.

This book is guaranteed to lift up readers and have them believing in the resilience and transcendence of the human spirit, making it a must read for years to come. When reaching adolescence, most teenagers want more freedom, independence and control in their lives. For Arthur, it was the opposite, as he discovered that his lifespan would only last up to adulthood. After becoming an adult, Arthur was waiting for his death. It was at the eleventh hour, at the age of twenty-one, when Arthur was introduced to a miracle treatment, but only after the damage of iron overload from all the blood transfusion was done to his body.

Grateful to be given a chance to survive for a few more years, Arthur decided to do something with his life; to get married, buy a house and also to have children, knowing he had no prospect of any future for himself.

At the age of sixty, Arthur and his wife Helen celebrated their thirty-five-year marriage anniversary. Recently we caught up with Bozikas so we could learn more about this amazing human and very talented writer. Why was you story Iron Boy one that you felt you needed to share with the world?

I promised myself if I made it to the age of 40 years old, I would put it all down in writing. I didn't know it will take me another twenty years to do it?

When reading Iron Boy, the book struck me as a story on struggle, but more so about survival and endurance. How has that challenges you faced growing up helped shape you as an individual today especially as it pertains to business and entrepreneurship? This is the first of its kind worldwide, from the prospective of a patients' point of view and not from a specialist or doctor.

I wish I had something like Iron Boy when I was young and very afraid of my prospects! As a professional CEO for over twenty years, the challenges in business is that you need to equip yourself with the right information or you are dead in the water!

People with my condition now do have my book to prepare for the future because there is one and it's up to the individual to believe! Being married for 35 years is a huge accomplishment, what is the secret to your success that you can share with younger couples looking to hopefully have the same success in their marriages? I think if both couples feel like they can't wait to share a new idea with one another or are not prepared to go anywhere without their partner by their side, then this is the only secret that any younger couples must desire for a successful marriage!

These two examples will resolve all arguments that every couples get into a marriage too or later! From a life lesson perspective what are some of the key points that you hope others can take away from your story 'Iron Boy' and even more so what is something that you hope you leave behind to your children that you hope they can apply to their own lives?

The very nature of the Olympics is all that is the best in sport. The bringing together of nations in friendly competition. The highest level of athletic achievement and the highest personal achievement of any athlete.

Sports are not entered into the Olympics on a whim. The fact that figure skating has been in the winter Olympics for nearly years speaks volumes for the sport. The scoring of figuring skating is both quantifiable and subjective.

The quantifiable part, where levels of difficulty are examined and the levels of achievement are judged along side are quite predictable. This sits well with people that like hard rules by which they judge if an activity is a sport or not. The subjective part of the scoring, is the interpretation of how well it was done, as a whole artistic piece.

Some people need to know how may goals were scored, how high was the jump or what time was something completed in. The fact that an event has to be judged, causes for some people, a reason to doubt whether an activity is a sport. This is because some mindsets believe, that a judged event is there to impress the judges, rather than compete against other individuals. This in my opinion is a nonsense, because the judges scores are directly pitted against your rivals. That is how you walk away with gold or with nothing.

There is a group of people that believe that judged sports are not a sport. They believe that if you can count how many times a hockey puck enters a goal, then that is quantifiable, but if you rely on a judge, a human judge, there is an element of subjectivity. Some believe that as soon as there is an element of subjectivity there is room for error, bias or corruption.

With sports like figure skating, then new points allocation system makes the awarding of points so much fairer and more accurate than before.

Plus many of the points are awarded objectively, only some are subjectively awarded. If you were to remove judged sports from the Olympics, you would be loosing diving, dressage, freestyle skiing, snowboarding, gymnastics, ski jumping, synchronized swimming and more.

As soon as there is any artistic or free style element, you would have to boot a sport from the Olympics. That is not a way to look at sport. This should keep the objective scoring sports fans happy. The Grade of Execution is the awarding of points according to how well an element is performed. If it performed well, then it earns so many points, if its performed not so well, it earns less. Elements have a base value, according to how hard they are.

If they are awarded extra points, that is because the element has hit certain criteria, known as bullets. All this adds up, to give a very precise TES.

I have written it in an easy to understand guide style, to read it click here. This is the part of the scoring that takes into account the artistic element of figure skating.

Even in this subjective area of the scoring, there are five sections, only three of which are actually totally subjective. The five areas of scoring that make up the Program Component Score PCS are skating skills, transitions, performance, composition and interpretation of music. The skating skills and transitions are reasonably objective in terms of the way that they judged.

In the skating skills, judges are looking for speed over the ice and power that seems effortless and depth of edges. The transitions are just that. The transitions between elements, the foot work, the ease at which they appear, the level of difficulty, variety and amount. The performance is judged on the unison, the style that the program is skated in, the way that the skater carries them self.

The composition is about where the elements are skated on the ice, do they form a theme, are certain elements always skated in the same place. Does the program tell a story over the ice etc and the choreography in general. The interpretation, is the interpretation of the music. This is the passion that is put into the performance, as well as how well the skating was performed to the music. Were elements skated in time with the music and were some of the nuances in the music demonstrated by the skater.

Figure skating is hard, make no mistake. The illusion is to make it look easy, but I assure you, that is an illusion. If being a true athlete in terms of physical ability was ever an argument against figure skating not being a sport, that is fairly easy to dismiss. Figure skaters require fitness, strength, balance, flexibility and a state of mind to match. You rarely see all of these elements in any sport. Figure skaters are athletes. They are athletes competing in what is a very difficult sport.

The levels of fitness required are incredible. Levels of cardio vascular fitness required to skate a long program at competition level are huge. Then there is strength. These are, ultimately, the exact kinds of people figure skating should want to convert into fans, even if most of them would typically be considered too old to start skating.

Hong began skating when she was 6 despite the high expense and the fact that her parents had immigrated from Cambodia as refugees. She remembers what it was like to go through puberty as a figure skater.

But the more difficult change was when the IJS overhauled the scoring system. Whereas her specialty was her grace and choreography as opposed to the more high-scoring jumps, the new system devalued what made Hong a skilled skater.

I asked her whether she felt the same shift as I did in the late s at her own rink, in which fewer kids seemed to be getting involved in the sport. People would throw stuffed animals to their friends, the benches were stacked, and anytime you competed you felt like you were in the Olympics already.

Mary Louise Adams, the professor of kinesiology, has a theory about how to fix skating. For the sport to survive, it must include those who are never going to go to the Olympics and even those who never aspire to. People fell in love with superstars like Michelle Kwan not only because she won competitions but because her charisma on the ice was impossible to ignore.

Since starting to post regularly on TikTok in December, he now has more than half a million followers. Figure skating has long suffered under a deeply conservative culture, both athletically and culturally.

Meanwhile, queer skaters have been implicitly encouraged to remain in the closet by judges most of whom are old and white and institutions ditto. In this world, it seems, nobody really wins, even the people who go home with gold medals.

Like many skaters, it was an injury that ended my competitive career. While training for the New England regionals at age 12, I felt a stubborn shooting pain in my right shin every time I landed a jump, and so after weeks of convincing myself it was nothing, I ended up in physical therapy to treat a presumed stress fracture.

It was benign and otherwise harmless, but it would spell the end of my illusion that I could, against all odds and mostly theoretically, ascend to the national stage. A comparable model could be something like dance, where the competitive sector lives alongside a massive commercial industry and its status as a performance art. The possibilities of what skating could be — expanding the idea of pairs and ice dance beyond one woman and one man, better outreach and resources for adult skaters, adding competitive categories for specific skills imagine watching a dozen skaters attempt quads one by one, without having to judge them on costume or choreography — are endless to an infuriating extent.

There is so much that the sport could change for its own good, if only it wanted to. The days of American dominance on international podiums are gone. The competitive side of figure skating will in all likelihood remain rough. The joy of skating — of whipping through cold air, of mastering moves on four millimeters of steel that physics can barely explain, then passing those moves on to the next generation of wobbly-legged children — should be for everyone.

For figure skating to survive in any meaningful way, it has to be. A few of them seem to keep an eye on this geezer doing stuff.

Do comment at times on my antics. I have lots of fun on the ice, have got the hang of L crossovers and nice stroking. Bent knees and all that. Love to glide, a few strokes gets me to glide the length of the rink on either L or R blade. Getting good at doing them backwards as well. Playing with figure eights is like meditation. Can do it for half hour and not notice the passing of time until finally seeing the clock.

I am not taking nor do I intend to get lessons, would take all the fun out of it for me. Especially since I do skate for the fun of it. So get out there and play. There must be moderation in everything. Including moderation. I thought ice skating was hard and then I took beginner lessons. It turns out I had a real facility for it, as long as someone gave me some guidance on what to do. Also, I enjoy being coached. It's not often in an adult's life when you have someone cheering for every tiny advance you make!

Yes ice skating is hard! It's very hard! I tell my brothers or anyone who has ever doubted the difficulty of it.. While skating is hard, it takes alot of patience, falls where you aren't too badly injured , persistance, humility and a sense of humor honestly sometimes you just have to laugh at it, at yourself, and at the challenge.

Keep trying. Yes, this time stopping was hard and maybe next time it will be Like alot of things in life, skating takes work, practice, and has it's ups and downs no pun intended. But if it's something you really want to learn Silly background story It was such an amazing feeling!!

I'll bet you'll get that exciting rush of good feeling when you stop on your own and then your first 3 turn, then your first jump, and then holy crap you're doing doubles