Figure Skaters doing gym moves on skates

[gtu07]

I just realized Nathan Chen threw a back tuck in the gala. How shall we score this?



I’ll give it a 9/10. He sort of whips it and does a men’s gymnastics style landing, which might be necessary to do this skill on skates. But he gets great height and has clean form.

 

[MaryClare]

Surya Bonaly was the original, until it was banned

 

[Kittentoes]

Scott Hamilton, baby!

 

[onodian]

Surya Bonaly was the original, until it was banned

Surya did it WHILE it was banned, and also she lands on one foot. She wins figure skating in my book

 

[gtu07]

Isn’t Surya also the reason why it was banned? And then she circumvented the first ban specifically by landing on one foot because the ban at the time said something like, “skaters must land jumps on one foot.” Obviously, she gets a 10/10 for execution. It literally looks like she could throw this on a balance beam.

 

[RedBirdie]

Backflips have been banned in skating since 1976. Nothing to do with Bonaly.

 

[gtu07]

I stand corrected. Thanks for sharing.

 

[onodian]

But there is something to the whole “landing on one leg”, at least i heard something along those lines too

 

[irichluck21]

Little known fact about Surya is that she competed in tumbling at the elite level and represented France at the 1986 Trampoline World Championships.
She won a silver medal with the French tumbling team.
She ended up leaving tumbling to focus on skating because it was her passion, but also because it was an Olympic sport.
Had tumbling been part of the gymnastics slate at the Olympics, we might have seen her in Seoul.

Her ice skating coaches said that her skill and level in gymnastics gave her a power advantage on the ice.

 

[MaryClare]

I meant that until her move was banned (I’m sure it is)

 

[onodian]

But isn’t it the story that they banned it, and then she did such a bad SP that she said “f*ck this shit” and went and threw the back LO anyways?



damm she did it right at the end too. We should get her a medal for not giving a shit.

 

[makam]

From what I recall, the backflip was banned because it was considered “gymnastics” not “figure skating”. They were wanting to limit acrobatics at the time (especially since back then, school figures were a huge part of your score). Surya’s landed on one foot so initially they thought it would be considered figure skating (since that is how figure skating jumps land) but even before the Olympics, it was never put on a list of allowed moves/variations. And yeah, at the Olympics, she was far enough down the standings that she ran out of fucks to give and decided to go out with a bang. She felt the judges kept her down in the standings at multiple previous competitions–I don’t remember if she thought it was racial or because she wasn’t balletic but either way, she very frequently did not agree with the judges in the sport and decided to go for it, rules be damned. It was pretty epic.