Streatham Sapphires – relocated!

Streatham ice arena sadly closed its doors in December 2011, but coaches, skaters and staff moved to the brand new facilities of Planet Ice in Brixton.  Reduced to few in number, Sapphires have nevertheless kept the name for the moment since a new arena is eventually to be built at Streatham.  In the meantime we keep slowly improving and are as keen as ever to get some new recruits – so if you work your way through Skate UK group lessons you can join us and discover the fun of team skating.

ISU Ice Skating World Championship

The next big event in the skating calendar will be the World Championships in March, this year close to home in Nice, France. Eurosport may have some coverage (check here: http://tv.eurosport.co.uk/), otherwise videos are posted quite quickly to Youtube.

You can also look out on You Tube for videos from the recent 2012 European Championships in Sheffield.

You can get information on the schedule and news on the following site:

http://www.lifeskate.com

London’s Outdoor Rinks 2012

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 as well as 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.timeout.com/london/feature/1554/ice-skating-in-london

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.