Is figure skating a real sport? 

Technical progression since the 2002 Olympics

A lot of my friends dismiss figure skating as a “real sport” and I don’t blame them. They see skating as a competition where athletes get dressed up in sequins and receive subjective scores. To an extent, this is true, but that’s not why I think skating is different from other traditional sports.

Usually, in sports, athletes run faster, jump higher, or score more points in a game year after year. Records get broken as athletes push themselves to the brink of their physical abilities.

In skating, I’ve noticed the trend of scores getting inflated at major competitions each year and this is how “records are broken” which is totally weird to me. Records aren’t broken because the programs are getting more difficult. If you look at the technical side of skating, it’s progressed at a very slow rate. Case in point: Yuna Kim can come back 4 years after Vancouver and easily enter Sochi as the odds-down favorite to capture gold. Heck, Evengy Plushenko can come back 8 years after winning gold in 2006 and still be considered a contender.

Yes, the judging system changed and affected the style of skating, but I can’t help but feel we’ve been at a technical standstill for 1 or 2 Olympic Games. Sochi feels like the first Games since SLC’s quadfest (Alexei, Evgeny, and Timothy Geobel landed 7 quads between them in the free skate) where there’s a noticeable shift in the technical difficulty of skating programs. Terry Gannon, in this morning’s broadcast of the team figure skating finals, asked commentators Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir if a men’s skater would be able to win the gold without a quad, and they answered vehemently in unison, “No.” Finally.

The last 8 years have not been an exciting show of consistent technical prowess, save for Yuna Kim. Evan Lysacek won gold in Vancouver without a quad. Shizuka Arakawa won in Torino with just 5 triples in her free skate. It’s nice to finally see the top men consistently landing quads and the top women landing triple triple combinations at Sochi (and Mao Asada continuing to go for that triple axel). It just took us a while to get here.

I don’t doubt that more records will be broken at this Games, but I hope it’s actually for technical ability and not simply because a skater delivers a clean Olympic program in her home country. I’m looking at you, Julia Lipnitskaia.