What Kind of Skating Website is Missing?

[tony]

We have forums, fan pages, bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and some awesome specific reference sites including the amazing retrospective threads here on FSU, but what is missing in the figure skating web?

I like writing. I once had a blog but the emergence of Instagram and other social media being direct 'breaking news' from the skaters themselves and me not wanting to venture into the Perez Hilton world of reporting, I lost interest in keeping up with my blog. You can only complain about the judging system so many times and in so many different words

But I noticed that there isn't really a comprehensive historical website with results, marks, links to skater performances if available, music info, other important information organized all in one place. This is just past the 20-year mark of the time I started recording everything imaginable on US TV as a pre-teen because of the abundance of skating events and all of them being televised.

So, if there was a hypothetical reference/historical website that had a little bit of all of the info in one place, what would you like to see? What would be most important (event recaps, scores, music info, element info, direct links to YouTube performances, notable news coming into the event)? Any other features such as discussion areas for specific events, a feature to score the programs yourself, etc? And most importantly, would it be of real interest to anyone?

 

[Vagabond]

@Tony Wheeler I enjoyed your blog. I am also bemoaning the demise of Winter Olympic Memories and the possible end of Sports Reference.

I would like to see something like https://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/winter/1980/FSK/womens-singles-short-program.htmlor this that would have the scores for non-Olympic competitions as well as the Olympics, with, if possible links to performances, interviews, contemporary news articles, or whatever might be available.

 

[WillyElliot]

Sandra Loosemore had the SkateWeb-Frogs on Ice website. I haven't looked it up in years though.

 

[aftershocks]

There's Stats-on-ice and SkatingScores.com for event results. Wiki is helpful for some of the historical record and performance data. Obviously, there's Youtube for performance clips. Ryan's skateguard blog is excellent and prolific for a wide variety of historical anecdotes, biographies, profiles, reflections. Sylvia has an excellent site for unseen skaters. There are several sites dealing with pairs and ice dance, including Claire's wonderful divine sport blog. Allison Manley's former podcast is still archived, and P.J. Kwong's interview podcast is excellent. There's also glorybox's Iced Coffee podcast, and random interviews like the recent How Stuff Works 'Committed' podcast episode, entitled 'Toepick' which featured an interview with the Knierims. And in GSD, we have the wonderful spreadsheet reference compiling current season program details, as provided by Sylvia and Claire. Many thanks to them!

It would definitely be nice to have a site where a lot of information is provided in one location. For the off-season, I'm definitely hungry for more in-depth fs coverage and opportunities to share news and thoughts with other fans. It's kind of disparate and catch-as-catch-can on FSU.

A lot of people enjoy the organized predictions games during the season. I would love to see more skater interviews, even if brief fun talks with skaters during the off-season. The 'getting to know' skaters videos this past Olympics season was enlightening with the various Day in the Life, 23 Questions, What I would tell my younger self, etc clips with skaters, and the increasing number of skater vlogs.

I think it might be interesting for there to be developed some kind of weekly or bimonthly news chat/ fs debate or panel discussion podcast, but one that's ambitiously and seriously put together. And I'm thinking of fresh, enlightened and informed discussion in a serious, yet fun and all-encompassing vein. But also not too status quo and not trollish nor snarky either.

 

[Foolhardy Ham Lint]

Skating is a niche sport and in many cases as you have detailed, it is fans and friends of skating who help build interest by making these kinds of websites themselves.

There are blogs and vlogs out there, but given the huge amount of time and money it takes to operate a passion project, continuity and the proper resources will always be an issue.

What is missing is a portal the likes of Sandra Loosemore's Skate Web Page. For many years, she used to update it with almost every skating related article and website online.

 

[Foolhardy Ham Lint]

We have forums, fan pages, bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and some awesome specific reference sites including the amazing retrospective threads here on FSU, but what is missing in the figure skating web?

I like writing. I once had a blog but the emergence of Instagram and other social media being direct 'breaking news' from the skaters themselves and me not wanting to venture into the Perez Hilton world of reporting, I lost interest in keeping up with my blog. You can only complain about the judging system so many times and in so many different words

But I noticed that there isn't really a comprehensive historical website with results, marks, links to skater performances if available, music info, other important information organized all in one place. This is just past the 20-year mark of the time I started recording everything imaginable on US TV as a pre-teen because of the abundance of skating events and all of them being televised.

So, if there was a hypothetical reference/historical website that had a little bit of all of the info in one place, what would you like to see? What would be most important (event recaps, scores, music info, element info, direct links to YouTube performances, notable news coming into the event)? Any other features such as discussion areas for specific events, a feature to score the programs yourself, etc? And most importantly, would it be of real interest to anyone?

Is this a prelude to a comeback, Tony? *fingers crossed*

 

[Foolhardy Ham Lint]

It would definitely be nice to have a site where a lot of information is provided in one location. For the off-season, I'm definitely hungry for more in-depth fs coverage and opportunities to share news and thoughts with other fans. It's kind of disparate and catch-as-catch-can on FSU.

Sandra Loosemore used to do this with a page she ran, but it hasn't been updated for many years.

 

[Foolhardy Ham Lint]

An interesting article about Sandra Loosemore's contribution to the sport from skating's resident historian, Ryan Stevens.

http://skateguard1.blogspot.com/2014/10/then-and-now-figure-skating-internet.html

 

[Vagabond]

Is this a prelude to a comeback, Tony? *fingers crossed*

First Daisuke, then Tony.

Who's next?

 

[aftershocks]

Thanks @essence_of_soy. I hadn't seen that particular feature on Ryan's blog from 2014. I enjoyed reading it, so thanks for sharing. This sentence rings very true:

"The fan base is not going to significantly grow unless skating coverage is easily accessible to everyone..."

 

[Eeyora1]

When I graduated high school the librarians gave me a frog pencil because I would go on skateweb so much. I also got a chocolate computer mouse for freezing the computers so much. I also miss skate music list. This is crazy but I also miss the site that used to host Angela Nikodinov’s website. For a while they had fan pages where they had almost a concise history of the costumes each skater wore in addition to programs. I also was obsessed with Heather W’s Michelle Kwan page.

 

[tony]

When I graduated high school the librarians gave me a frog pencil because I would go on skateweb so much. I also got a chocolate computer mouse for freezing the computers so much. I also miss skate music list. This is crazy but I also miss the site that used to host Angela Nikodinov’s website. For a while they had fan pages where they had almost a concise history of the costumes each skater wore in addition to programs. I also was obsessed with Heather W’s Michelle Kwan page.

These are the good old days being remembered! I also used to frequent figure-skating.com which hosted Nikodinov's site and many others as well as a forum and many interactive skating-general pages, and there were several music pages around the internet that were really helpful. @Louis even had a really great reference site that I still creep on via the Wayback machine. Heather had Michelle's page as well as the TV guide which she still keeps up to date. There was a pairsonice.com website that was also wonderful but now all of this is gone and combined with SkateWeb not being updated, that is in part why I noticed the real lack of a major historical site.

 

[Eeyora1]

These are the good old days being remembered! I also used to frequent figure-skating.com which hosted Nikodinov's site and many others as well as a forum and many interactive skating-general pages, and there were several music pages around the internet that were really helpful. @Louis even had a really great reference site that I still creep on via the Wayback machine. Heather had Michelle's page as well as the TV guide which she still keeps up to date. There was a pairsonice.com website that was also wonderful but now all of this is gone and combined with SkateWeb not being updated, that is in part why I noticed the real lack of a major historical site.

You’re work doesn’t go unnoticed either. You were a huge Butyrskaya fan? I feel like social media just lives in the now.

 

[Spun Silver]

What occurs to me, that you might be well qualified to do, is to promote discussion of figure skating as art -- both choreography and performance. It has always irked me that almost no one knows the name of the choreographer of Mishkutenok and Dmitriev's Liebestraum, and even when you do find it out, almost nothing can be found about him in English (and I don't know if he did it alone or with the contributions of M/D, Moskvina or anyone else). The contributions of Camerlengo and Miyamoto to Daisuke Takahashi's career would make an excellent topic. An article on the whole oeuvre of Mao Asada would be great (and long). And so on -- people, including many here, will have their own ideas. I'm sure that some will say the more skating is treated as art, the less seriously it is taken as sport, but IMO the ISU will take care of that risk. This kind of discussion exists here but only in snippets. To have a site that did it more thoroughly could make an impact on the sport IMO. Lots of good photographs and videos would be a wonderful feature, bringing the discussion to life.

 

[skateboy]

I love the idea of direct links to YouTube performances.

Of course, we can (and do) look up programs all the time, but it would be great (albeit a lot of work!) to look for a certain skater/team and find a list to all the available links of his/her/their performances.

Thank you for starting this thread!

 

[Spun Silver]

A lot of work indeed, esp considering how often YT vids are taken down!

 

[SamuraiK]

we really need some top quality youtubers . It's kinda sad that the "best" we have is annoying post-Jenny TSL.

There's also been some really nice "top" yt videos uploaded recently (like this one) which I hope provide much buzz to the sport.

 

[SamuraiK]

But I noticed that there isn't really a comprehensive historical website with results, marks, links to skater performances if available, music info, other important information organized all in one place. This is just past the 20-year mark of the time I started recording everything imaginable on US TV as a pre-teen because of the abundance of skating events and all of them being televised.

Yeah, we do need one site like this. I like deep-edge but is mostly JPN centered. I guess it takes more than just one interested fan but lots of them with the talent and resources.

 

[Elisheba]

I would love to see historical retrospectives of events. Maofan7 used to do some here in the offseason and they were always amazing

 

[zebraswan]

I really wish there was a searchable database of program music & choreographers. I suppose it would be almost impossible to create an accurate one going back many decades, but that's what I would most want to see.

 

[alchemy void]

Like @aftershocks mentioned, skatingscores.com is a fantastic reference run by @Axel Rittberger. Here is the original thread announcing the launch. It only goes back two seasons at this point, but this is what I kind of envision an comprehensive historical website should look like.

But I noticed that there isn't really a comprehensive historical website with results, marks, links to skater performances if available, music info, other important information organized all in one place. This is just past the 20-year mark of the time I started recording everything imaginable on US TV as a pre-teen because of the abundance of skating events and all of them being televised.

I'm dating myself here, but years ago Skatabase had a nice database of competition results and jump lists. It would be great to have a ridiculous historical stats site like baseball does with baseball-reference.com. I'd definitely be interested in helping to gather data or even try to write some code if there's interest in a collaborative effort. And, really, with how much data there is out there that needs to be collected, the only way launching something like this is feasible would be to have a decent amount of people working together.

 

[tony]

Like @aftershocks mentioned, skatingscores.com is a fantastic reference run by @Axel Rittberger. Here is the original thread announcing the launch. It only goes back two seasons at this point, but this is what I kind of envision an comprehensive historical website should look like.



I'm dating myself here, but years ago Skatabase had a nice database of competition results and jump lists. It would be great to have a ridiculous historical stats site like baseball does with baseball-reference.com. I'd definitely be interested in helping to gather data or even try to write some code if there's interest in a collaborative effort. And, really, with how much data there is out there that needs to be collected, the only way launching something like this is feasible would be to have a decent amount of people working together.

I might be dating myself too but I remember Ellyn IIRC was in charge of Skatabase, but then it got transferred to something like eskatefans or some other random skating site and then it really went downhill and the interface became impossible to navigate.

 

[Enchanted]

@Tony Wheeler I liked your blog and would be happy to see it back.

Social media cannot replace the blogs entirely because in blogs, it is easier to write broader analysis.

 

[aftershocks]

I really wish there was a searchable database of program music & choreographers.

I don't think anyone was keeping very good track of music and choreographers decades ago. There weren't as many choreographers, nor as much emphasis on music selection in the same way as today. Wiki has some information, but not much re past skaters. Probably, there's a bit of information on old broadcasts which might be researched, but that would take time, access, financial resources, etc.

 

[Foolhardy Ham Lint]

I think a great way to raise funds would be to make a Tony Wheeler 2019 Calendar (preferably shirtless). I'd be happy to do the design if he supplied the photos.

 

[antmanb]

The old skatabase was the kind of thing I was thinking would be good to have around. To some extent since IJS the protocols are a good replacement for the information.

Does icecalc still exist? I remember having a debate on here in the last year about specific judges scoring and ordinals under 6.0 and couldn't find any of the scores. In the end I had to dig around to find the skate order at the competition in question and then look up the performances on youtube to get the scores from that and then figure out the ordinals.
Full lists of scores and skate order for 6.0 competitions might be something of interest for historical purposes?

 

[Simone411]

So, if there was a hypothetical reference/historical website that had a little bit of all of the info in one place, what would you like to see? What would be most important (event recaps, scores, music info, element info, direct links to YouTube performances, notable news coming into the event)? Any other features such as discussion areas for specific events, a feature to score the programs yourself, etc? And most importantly, would it be of real interest to anyone?

@Tony Wheeler, I like everything you mentioned here. I would definitely read your blog if you started writing again. And speaking of historical websites, videos of past events and skaters, I need to start working on skating videos again for my YouTube channel.

There are several members here that also have YouTube channels with historical skating, and I appreciate every member that has shared their skating videos. I can say by experience that there's a lot of effort put into making those videos not to mention how time consuming it is, and we all have one thing in common. We love to share what we have so fans have the opportunity to see all the wonderful skating of the past.

 

[SkateFanBerlin]

Like to see someone creadible who could get tough interviews. Some of those dragon-lady interviewers in Russia come to mind. U.S. interviews are always so frothy.

 

[tony]

Does icecalc still exist? I remember having a debate on here in the last year about specific judges scoring and ordinals under 6.0 and couldn't find any of the scores. In the end I had to dig around to find the skate order at the competition in question and then look up the performances on youtube to get the scores from that and then figure out the ordinals.
Full lists of scores and skate order for 6.0 competitions might be something of interest for historical purposes?

You have to dig around on archive.org to find much of the resources that were available pre-2001 or so, which is what I really noticed when doing my own research/watching older competitions. That led me to wanting to put something together that had a little bit of everything, but I also wanted to know what other people were missing (most).

 

[aftershocks]

I was on Youtube and came across this new figure skating audio podcast 'In the Loop,' put together by hosts from different countries. They speak about wanting to bring more accessibility to understanding the sport for new or confused would-be fans.

They are up to five episodes, but I haven't yet finished listening to the first. Sounds good so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8B6pmhBY7U

ETA:
They discuss how they became fans of figure skating, mainly via Youtube clips. One is a recent fan who says: "As a newer fan, accessibility is a big thing. I find myself squandering for sources... I'd love to be more into the sport, but I can't find ways to do that because of the lack of accessibility..."

So very true! One sounds Australian, another said she's from Sweden, but she can't relate to the major media coverage in the U.S. She's interested in the sport, but finds herself in a vacuum trying to follow it. Exactly! Fans around the world are obviously up against similar frustrations in regard to being able to follow and enjoy figure skating, and getting up-to-date news, and understanding what's going on, without the status quo limitations. The people who run figure skating really need to be listening!