Learning skating for professional opportunities

[Chantal]

Hello!

I am Lebanese, I live in Lebanon, 30 years old, a passionate latin dancer with a professional career in donor relations and grants acquisition and management.

While dancing and recognizing the improvements and achievements i’ve been making, my passion to dancing is growing more intense to realize that I would love to build something out of it.

While I was on a dancing trip in the States, I attended an ice skating event that made me feel amazed and inspired to start learning this new skill. Dancing on ice is fun and would make me feel proud of myself even more if i get the chance to learn it professionally and perform.

I am not sure where are you from but I am thinking about moving to Europe and thought of asking you to guide to the best country where i can learn and whether my age would still allow me to learn this talent and become a professional ice skater dancer.

Thank you in advance for sharing some information about how to start this journey.

Best,
Chantal

 

[gkelly]

If you're starting as an adult, it is very unlikely that you would reach a skill level where you could be paid for performing as a figure skater, e.g., in ice shows.

Even skaters who started as children, trained full-time for many years, and reached elite skill levels may have a hard time finding professional performing work, unless they have impressive competitive titles or exceptional performance quality along with very strong technical skills. Or a lot of personal connections and luck.

Competitive skating is also not a "professional" sport except that the very top competitors may earn prize money and get financial support from their federations, enough to cover their expenses.

Most competitive skaters end up spending a lot more money on their training and other costs over the course of a career than they earn back from those sources. For most practical purposes, this is still an amateur sport.

If you are interested in learning to be the best skater you can be, with whatever skills you can develop given your available time and money and access to ice and instruction, then you can become an (amateur) adult skater at a level you can be proud of and have fun with as a hobby. You might be able to compete in adult competitions or to perform in local ice shows.

I'll let other posters more familiar with the European skating scene chime in about where it might be possible to pursue that kind of skating in Europe.

As an American I know that there is a strong adult skating community in the US, with some clubs more supportive of adult skating than others. Large clubs in large metropolitan areas are usually a better bet to have plenty of adult skaters.

This may also be more true in Canada than in most of Europe.

 

[Diana Delafield]

Hi! This is an international forum, so members are living all over the world. I'm in Canada, so can't really say much about Europe other than that just about any country there has active opportunities for learning to skate. You're certainly not too old to learn basic skating first, and then move from there into the "set-pattern" ice dances where specific steps are set to various specific rhythms, and then (what seems to be your goal) "free dance", either with a partner or solo, where the choice of music and choreography is your own.

You're looking at a longterm commitment, though, the number of years to get to be really good depending on how much time you'll be able to spend at the rink learning and practising. You're looking at years, in any case, not months. And it's a very expensive sport, both for equipment (I do ballroom dance as well as skate, and I can tell you that boots and blades for skating are, literally, at least ten times as expensive as ballroom shoes, and then there's the maintenance like blade sharpening, etc.) and for specialized clothing, coaching fees, ice time to practise, club membership fees, and so on.

As to getting to a performance level, that would depend on whether you're interested in just performing for your own enjoyment (cost of perhaps renting private ice and hiring someone to film you, since you can't keep turning your head to watch yourself in the glass of a rink without compromising your own safety, and it's not as easy to even see yourself in that glass as it is in the mirrored wall of a dance studio)? Or are you hoping to do ice dance professionally in one of the ice companies? That usually would involve at least taking the graduated levels of dance tests, and even minor low-level competing would probably help. There are others on this forum who have skated professionally; I haven't. I do perform in a very modest way at club shows as a pairs skater (not ice dance) but that's a tiny audience of friends with no publicity or rewards other than one's own satisfaction and a few compliments.

I'm not trying to discourage you at all! Please do give it a try, and I hope you love skating as much as those of us who've done it all our (longer) lives! I'm just trying to hint that it's a longer and more expensive and time-consuming project than you may realize. I'm sure others, particularly those who live in Europe, can give you better and more specific advice.

 

[Diana Delafield]

As an American I know that there is a strong adult skating community in the US, with some clubs more supportive of adult skating than others. Large clubs in large metropolitan areas are usually a better bet to have plenty of adult skaters.

This may also be more true in Canada than in most of Europe.

Ditto in Canada. We moved around the country a lot in the early married years, and I always looked for a club to join in each new location. Most were great and fun to belong to. There were a few that said they welcomed adult members -- and then you found that they wanted the adults baking muffins for bake sales, sewing carnival costumes, selling tickets, hiding away in a small room tabulating marks and figuring out placings at local competitions... But actually cluttering up the ice and getting in the way of the child skaters? Oh dear me, no.

I learned to ask first: "When are the adult sessions scheduled? Do your coaches also work with your adult skaters?" If I got an enthusiastic reply and a brochure with it all spelled out, I joined. If the person at the registration table looked blank and startled, I took back my chequebook and walked away.

My kids could tell you that baking muffins is not one of my strongest skills.

 

[FlossieH]

It would not be a simple case of just using your existing latin dance skills on ice instead of on the floor. You would need to completely retrain. What you are wanting to do is equivalent to starting ballet at 30, having never done any before, and expecting to be able to get a job (a professional contract, not an apprenticeship, trainee position or walk-on part) with one of the major ballet companies such as the Mariinsky or Bolshoi Ballets (both Russia), Royal Ballet (UK), New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Paris Opera Ballet or Dutch National Ballet. You would be looking at around 10 years of training (at vocational intensity, not the one or two lessons a week undertaken by recreational students) and would need your body to still have the condition required for the demands of the job by the time you had trained to the standard needed. This means you would need to have the flexibility and physical condition of a twenty year old dancer when you are in your 40s. Even in ice dance, where skaters are usually able to skate longer than in other disciplines, it would be a challenge to start out as a professional at that sort of age without having had an elite competitive career first. Most skaters start at the age of 3-6 and those who go on to become professionals will generally have reached an elite level (the sort of standard needed to compete in high level international competitions) by around 15. It is more difficult to develop things like flexibility as an adult.

Do you have the time and finances to put your career on hold while you do the training needed? You would need to be able to spend a number of years training, not just a few months. You might be able to do a little bit of part-time work (e.g. working in a bar or restaurant) to cover some of the training costs, but it would not be possible to do a full time job whilst training to be an elite/professional skater. Most people who learn to skate do not ever reach the sort of standard needed to become an elite or professional skater; even if they start very young and spend 10-15 years learning. There is no guarantee that putting your life on hold for ten years to train as a skater would give you any sort of career in skating at the end.

Have you looked at immigration/visa requirements? If you were moving to Europe to train as an ice skater, I very much doubt you would be able to get a work visa to do so because a work visa usually requires you to have a recognised employer in your destination country and a minimum income. A tourist visa would not allow you enough time in your chosen training location. You would not be able to get a student visa to move to a European country to train as an ice skater. You might, if you had the qualifications needed, be able to get a place to study something like sports science at a European university but that would not give you the time needed for serious training in ice skating. You might be able to get a job as a dancer somewhere in Europe, but then would only have time for ice skating as a hobby.

Learning basic skating as a hobby would be much more realistic than trying to become a professional when you are starting so late. You might be able to get a job or university place which would allow you to move to Europe and then could learn ice skating for enjoyment. As others have mentioned, you might be able to learn things like pattern dances once you had learnt the basic skating skills. Another option might be to join an adult synchronised skating team at a local rink. That could give you performance opportunities, but you would not be able to earn a viable income from it. In skating, it is more common to need to pay for performance opportunities (e.g. via entrance fees for local competitions) than to be paid for performing.

 

[WednesdayMarch]

Discouraging as it sounds, @FlossieH has absolutely nailed it, albeit with the omission of one other, extremely important, point. It's a biggie, so deserves its own paragraph.

Skating as an adult is a whole different ballgame. Learning to skate as an adult in your thirties is way, way, WAY harder than learning as a child, teen or young adult. And it continues to get harder, mainly because of one thing - the Fear Factor. Whilst you may consider yourself as fit, inspired, driven, flexible, etc, etc, one you get those knives on your feet and step onto that ridiculously slippery, hard and unforgiving surface, the fear kicks in for almost everybody. Things that you think look so simple suddenly turn into major obstacles purely because of the fear of what could happen to your body if you don't get it right - and I'm not just talking jumps here.

I learned to skate as a young teenager (far too late and without the necessary parental corner-fighting for any kind of success at all) and did my coaching training and started coaching in my twenties. That was all self-financed and I had to have a variety of very "unsociable hours" type jobs in order to support myself and pay for my training, plus living expenses even when teaching as coaching not something where it's easy to actually earn a living, at least not in the UK. I preferred teaching adults to children (and still do) but until I came back to skating in my very late 40s, after nearly 20 years off, I hadn't even begun to grasp the depth of the Fear Factor felt by adults. It's way beyond anything I could comprehend back in my 20s, when I was happily flinging myself into flying spins and jumps, despite really being an ice dancer. Now, in my 50s, I totally understand it! And I can skate!

So my advice to you, OP, is to start learning to skate before you move yourself halfway across the world in pursuit of a dream that you might discover is actually a nightmare. Skating, in my opinion, is absolutely The Best Thing Out There By Far but it's just as rewarding to pursue for the joy of it as it is as a potential career. Often more so. As I say so often to my clients and skating friends, it's all about the joy. When the joy isn't there, take a long hard look at what you're doing and why.

 

[LolaSkatesInJapan]

I live and train in Japan (not Japanese).
There's an older lady ice dancer who trains at the rink I train. My coach also coaches ice dancing (I train freestyle with her, not ice dancing) and this lady has sessions with my coach sometimes. She, as I heard from my coach, started as an adult and she ice dances professionally in domestic ice shows around here (as in gets paid to do it).
I also started as an adult but I'm not interested in ice dance, I do women's singles (freestyle) and never thought of getting paid, it's the opposite, I pay a lot of multiple private coaching sessions per week + personal trainer for off ice training + ice time + group coaching sessions + equipment etc. I definitely don't treat skating as hobby it is more like a life purpose to me and the main thing in my life.
I'm well informed about the freestyle skating world around here (Japan) and honestly speaking I haven't heard of any adult skater either women's singles or men's singles who went professional and gets paid to skate, but apparently it is possible with ice dance. I know of this one particular case I mentioned above, but since ice dancing is not something I do, I have no idea if this is a common occurence or if it's a rare thing around here. I can ask other adult ice dancers at my rink, or ask them if they know of any possibility of going professional as adult ice dancer skaters besides that lady.
I know you said Europe and life in Japan as an expat can be incredibly difficult (I've been here for many years) so I wouldn't advocate for a move to Japan without extensive research, good support system.

Also, I think skating, be ice dancing or freestyle, is a gorgeous sport, so rewarding yet so humbling and challenging. I was a professional classical ballerina prior to starting figure skating which I did after I had to retire from ballet, and even though a ballet background does help with some areas in figure skating, I have no confess that figure skating is way WAY harder than I could ever imagine when I started. And the more I know and am able to do in skating, the more I realize how many, many, many things I have yet to conquer on it. VERY humbling experience.
All of this to say, I think if you wish to start figure skating, you should definitely do so, you will love it. Don't treat it as mere hobby, work hard and the harder you work, the more rewarding it is, spend some time in this world yourself, and then you, yourself will realize if it's doable to go professional as an adult skater, and you can then dedicate time, and lots of research to see which part of the world you would better live to pursue your goals.