![]() ![]() "The axel is a particularly treacherous jump because it's the only one with a forward takeoff, which adds an extra half turn to the jump," Hacker said. What you'll notice is that the jump is actually three-and-a-half rotations. ![]() Here are the six jumps in ascending order of difficulty the points they are worth in competition (we hesitate in saying difficulty because some skaters might have an easier time with one type of jump versus another): The Toe Loop What sets these jumps apart from one another is how they start. All jumps end with a skater landing on a back outside edge (in skating right-handed skaters usually land on their right foot, jump and spin counter-clockwise, while left-handed skaters land on their left and so on). The final component to the jumps and what differentiates a Salchow from a loop is the take off and landing. And we have some idea of what an edge is so we can tell them apart. Shifting between edges is as simple as taking a tiny lean or a bit of pressure to the outside or inside of your foot. "A skater uses these edges for everything - the edges are essentially what give the blade traction with the ice," she said explaining that skaters are constantly switching between edges throughout a routine. If you stand with your feet parallel, the inside edges are on the inside facing each other, and the outside edges are on the outside," Hacker said. "The skating blade has a hollow and therefore two edges: the inside edge and the outside edge. Thankfully, Hacker has skated before and can explain. "Edges" are a bit more difficult to comprehend for a person who's never figure skated before. You'll see a skater kick the front of their blade into the ice before a toe jump. The toe-pick is pretty easy to explain (easier if you've ever watched The Cutting Edge). If someone is facing the jump head-on, you're watching the Axel. the knee bend), you can use the process of elimination to narrow down the kind of jump it might be to three.įurther, the Axel is the only jump that begins with a forward approach. Are they using a pick or an edge? By determining what they're doing (using the toe-pick vs. The takeaway here is that you can start to tell the jumps apart by looking how the skater is taking off. In edge jumps, the skater essentially just uses knee bend to launch," Hacker told The Wire. "In toe jumps, the skater plants the toe-pick of his free leg and uses it to help launch him into the air. The cool names like Salchow, Lutz, and Axel came from the skaters who invented them. The six most common jumps in competitive figure skating can be divided into two categories: toe jumps - the toe loop, the flip, and the Lutz - and edge jumps - the Salchow, loop, and the Axel. Figure Skating National Team member Katrina Hacker to help us explain jumps in plain English. With the power of GIFs, we can now go beyond that to actually see these jumps - what makes the Axel so treacherous or the Lutz so difficult. To the untrained eye, a skater just transforms into a spinning blur for a few nanoseconds, and then lands (or doesn't) while we hold our breath. For most of us though, the benchmark of a good skate is not falling (part of the reason people were surprised that Mirai Nagasu didn't make the Olympic team despite skating a clean program). That's what makes the Olympics' skating competition so wonderful and so heartbreaking: skaters don't necessarily have to be the best, they just have to be the best for seven minutes (see: Lipinski, Tara). For skaters, all those hours, jumps and training are boiled down to around six or seven minutes. No other sport comes close to the drama, the athletes, the subplots, and politics that figure skating has. Let's make no bones about it: the headlining sport in the Winter Olympics is figure skating. ![]()
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