ISU Ice Skating Grand Prix

If you want to keep up to date with the action of the world’s top ice skating champions look out for the ISU Grand Prix season. The Cup of China has just finished and coming up in November are the NHK Trophy in Japan,  Skate America, Skate Canada, then the Grand Prix final in Japan from 3rd to 6th December.

You can look out on You Tube for videos of the skaters or try to catch it on Eurosport, although that’s much more difficult than it should be because they just don’t seem to have a website or scheduling in the UK.  Read complaints about that here:

http://uk.messages.eurosport.yahoo.com/Winter_Sports/threadview?m=tm&bn=UKS-WI-general&tid=1569&mid=1594&tof=-1&rt=1&frt=1&off=1

You can get information on the schedule and news on the following two sites:

http://www.lifeskate.com/skate/2009/10/2009-2010-isu-grand-prix-of-figure-skating-series-schedule.html

http://www.sportcentric.com/vsite/vnavsite/page/directory/0,10853,4844-136494-137802-nav-list,00.html

London’s Outdoor Rinks 2009

Picture above: Somerset House by Simon Whitaker
Don’t hobble round the edge of London’s outdoor rinks this year – go along to one of the all year round rinks for some lessons and then amaze your friends with your speed and control – or skips, jumps and twirls! Check out details on the “Ice Rinks” page.

New rinks are added every year to the list of London’s festive outdoor arenas. This year Oxford Street and Wembley Stadium are added to the usual favourites at Broadgate Circus, National History Museum, Hyde Park, the Tower of London, Somerset House, Canary Wharf and Hampton Court.

Find details of booking and tickets here:
http://www.visitlondon.com/events/special/ice-rinks-winter-2009

Streatham Sapphires

October update

Once the excitement of the Streatham summer competition was over numbers in the team reduced dramatically due to holidays and other interests. The core team members decided to make a commitment to building a team to take part in adult synchro competitions. Recognising this will mean a lot of hard work we focused on practising core skills, getting our knees bent, gaining control and speed.

We’d managed to get our numbers up to 10 members for the competition, but in September we were reduced to 6. A new member, Adrian, has now joined us and we’re working hard to find more skaters to get our number up to 12 – the minimum for an adult team to meet the requirements of governing body, NISA (National Ice Skating Association) http://www.iceskating.org.uk/.

We’ve added lots of new steps into our programme which at the moment we are far from mastering. Lots of three turns, mohawks (let the wonderful Dmitri show you how http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTrTX-r7PHM) and quick switches between steps are tripping us up at the moment. We’re undaunted though and all have faith that we’ll have it mastered in time for the Christmas show.

Streatham Sapphires

Diary of the Streatham Sapphires

http://www.youtube.com/user/shelaffs#p/a/0/364dIfNNa_s

Summer Festival

When we started in October 2008 we knew nothing about synchronised skating and not so much about skating either! It was the idea of a lady called Sezay who has since left us, but we are grateful that she got us started. We were a mixed bunch of varied abilities and ages but we learned the basic holds and moves and eventually managed to get round the rink roughly at the same time, if not exactly synchronised.

Our coach, Sarah Christou, skated with a professional dancing on ice team and keeps us learning and advancing. We were also joined by someone from a former championship UK team who has the patience to come down to our level and keep us practicing once the lesson is finished We’ve discovered it’s not something you can do now and again, a bunch of us are committed to the team and prepared to go every Wednesday come what may (well we can have holidays off and major illness if essential) and as a result keep improving week by week.

We plan to take the UK by storm one day and take part in adult synchro competitions. We did our first competition at Streatham earlier this year, far from perfect, but we got silver medals. We need to have at least 12 team members for a fully fledged adult team and are putting in lots of effort to find new members.

We’ll record our weekly diary here and if you can skate to Skate UK level 10 or above, then why not come along to Streatham one Wednesday and join in to see if you like it. It’s a great way to keep advancing your skating when you finish the skate UK levels, if you feel you’re just a bit too old to become the new UK figure skating champion.