Want to learn more about figure skating history? You are in the right place! Created in , Skate Guard is a blog that focuses on overlooked and underappreciated areas of the history of figure skating, whether that means a topic completely unknown to most readers or a new look at a well-known skater, time period, or event. There's plenty to explore, so pour yourself a cup of coffee and get lost in the fascinating and fabulous history of everyone's favourite winter sport!
After the Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, professional figure skating exploded. The world's top skaters competed almost weekly in head-to-head and team competitions for serious prize money in events like the World, U. Some people lined up at box offices for tickets to these events in snowstorms; others publicly dismissed them as 'cheesefests' while privately gorging on Cheetos and watching camel spins from their chesterfields.
In the decades since 'Speedy' Cinquanta came knocking with his hand out, the reasons for the decline of professional competitions have been pondered ad nauseum. Did the skaters price themselves out of the market? Was it oversaturation? Too many rules? Not enough rules? Too many Not enough 6. That conversation has been done to death, and that's not what this feature is about. This compilation of chronological results from professional figure skating competitions, dating back to the Victorian era, paints a different picture about these events than the one we've told ourselves During the Reconstruction Era following the American Civil War, challenges and contests amongst professional 'fancy' skaters for prizes were extremely common.
Contests involving American skaters like William H. Bishop a. Frank Swift , E. Goodrich and Callie Curtis were largely dubious affairs, to put it mildly. There were accounts of skaters bringing in their own judges, penning nasty letters to the hometown newspapers of their fellow competitors and even, if the case of Curtis, masquerading as a woman to win a prize in a 'contest for ladies'.
For this reason, results from these events have been excluded. During the first half of the twentieth century, many professional competitions didn't even feature prize money or if they did, it was a pittance and not skaters' sole motivator for participating.
