Promoting figure skating

I think the problem with figure skating is structural. It's hard to generate attention for a sport that, well, barely happens.

You've got a random 8 week period in the fall where 7 big events happen, then Nationals, then Euros a month later, then Four Continents a month later, then Worlds another month later and then nothing of significance until October, which is, for all intents and purposes, the start of the new season.

Look at all the big sports in America- baseball, hockey, football, basketball, etc. These sports all have seasons where a team plays at least once a week, and in many cases have 2-6 games per week depending on the sport. Even during the offseason, there's so much happening with team changes and FA signings and such that there's always something to talk about. In figure skating, the offseason is incredibly long and there's nothing to talk about, mainly because it is an individual sport.

But usually, individual sports will have barely any offseason to make up for that downside. Look at golf; there is no offseason, since the beginning of the FedEx Cup starts a few weeks after the end of the previous one, and even the big names will only take a month or two off. Tennis has four major events spread out throughout the year and has only a one or two month offseason, with big names participating in big events every few weeks in the season.

It's hard to grab the attention of sports fans with a season that's so lopsided and unbalanced like it is in figure skating, especially since nothing happens in the figure skating offseason like in team sports. I agree that better streaming and accessibility should be provided, and this could help the issue in some way, but I think you're always going to run into this structural problem.

karne said:

See, I think the other way: the USFS needs to STOP relying on something that happened MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS AGO to get attention for the sport.

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I didn't say the attack, I said Tonya Harding.

I get she is seen as a disgrace to the sport, but I think at this point, it's been more than 20 years. I get others would highly disagree with me, but if Tonya Harding can provoke the imaginations of someone like Sufjan Stevens...I think there's some good of perhaps embracing her and her role in the sport.

Manitou said:

As I said in the previous post, Comcast Xfinity has an Olympic Channel where the entire Grand Prix was practically live and complete.

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Which is nice, but I don’t know how many people have Comcast Xfinity. I certainly don’t And many others don’t get the Olympic Channel and have to rely on Ice Network and regular NBC broadcast to have a legitimate way of watching figure skating in the US.

kiches said:

Which is nice, but I don’t know how many people have Comcast Xfinity. I certainly don’t do I and many others don’t get the Olympic Channel and have to rely on Ice Network and regular NBC broadcast to have a legitimate way of watching figure skating in the US.

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Regarding the Olympic Channel statement from NBC:
"Besides Xfinity, providers who carried the channel at launch included Altice, AT&T U-verse, DirecTV, Dish Network, Spectrum, and Verizon Fios, along with Hulu's live TV service; NBC stated that it would be available in 35 million households at launch."

Ic3Rabbit said:

Regarding the Olympic Channel statement from NBC:
"Besides Xfinity, providers who carried the channel at launch included Altice, AT&T U-verse, DirecTV, Dish Network, Spectrum, and Verizon Fios, along with Hulu's live TV service; NBC stated that it would be available in 35 million households at launch."

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Despite all those other providers, I’m still one of the people outside of any of those options which is why I paid for Ice Network - which could really benefit from easy mobile streaming compatability. All of those listed above are paid services, I’m sure that automatically excludes families of lower income that only have broadcast TV channels.

I remember when I first started following the sport that I had a hard time figuring out legitimate ways to watch figure skating until I realized Ice Network was it. Other than that it’s illegal streams, videos posted onto YouTube, or waiting for NBC to show it 1-2 weeks later. If I had a way just to purchase the right to stream just the Olympic Channel I would, but I don’t think that option exists.

Shandy said:

I know that quite a few people have been drawn into (or back into) FS thanks to the anime Yuri!!! on Ice. A lot of FS fans seem to dislike it because of comparisons drawn by anime fans between the characters and real-life skaters, but I think it's a valuable tool (kind of a "gateway drug") to get people interested in the sport. If friends or acquaintances enjoy YOI, you can hype FS to them as a way to connect the show to real life. If they're not interested in FS at all but like anime, why not try recommending YOI and starting from there?

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The irony is that YOI is kind of the antithesis to everything USFS is trying to promote. While USFS wants to keep figure skating a sport for pretty princesses, YOI is all about gay men landing a bazillion quads.

As other posters have noted, I think it’s very telling how there have been two major figure skating pop culture moments over the past year - YOI and I Tonya - that USFS clearly won’t touch with a 10 foot pole. The org should be having a big conversation on how to bring in I Tonya fans especially to the sport this year (through more creative social media usage, gamification pushes and other outreach and brand building, maybe even new innovative televised events) and I’m not sure it’s happening.

I’m sure money is a huge issue but there seems to be a real hesitation on USFS’s part to embrace the view most people have about the sport (glitzy, dramatic, a little odd) and run with it by trying to really appeal to that niche audience. Even if they had the money I’m not sure they’d do it.

tars said:

Establishing ministry of sport with federal funding, like in 99% of civilized countries.

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Interesting. I do believe price will deter a lot of people. Imagine the sticker shock when little darling needs boost that cost as much as some peoples rent.

I read about someone who practiced fencing in france. When he moved to usa he had to quit bc of the cost. In france it costed 1/6 as much to train as it did in the usa.

Well USFS can't do anything with I, Tonya cause they BANNED Tonya from being anywhere near a USFS event. That's my point from earlier, USFS needs to get over it and just let it go. It's obvious that Tonya was sufficiently punished financially by the ban.

If USFS publicly aplogized to Tonya (or at least lifted their ban which is basically symbolic at this point) it would be huge huge huge PR win for US skating IMO (though I can also see how they’d be concerned with distracting from the current skaters at nationals so I guess anything along these lines is a non-starter at this point).

As a relatively new (and kind of young, at 21) skating fan perhaps my entrance into the sport (and the barriers I've found to getting truly into it) could contribute a bit to the conversation.

I'll admit it, I got into figure skating because of Yuri!!! on Ice. However, I've been a watcher of sports anime for a long time and I've never before found myself hopping from anime to sport the way I have for FS. The reasoning for me was two-fold -- the anime really showed a very human side of sport with realistic characters, and the fact that the art of media was pretty reflective of the art of the sport itself. Imagine how floored I was when YOI had its finale at the GPF and I turned right to the real life GPF to see what all the hype was about -- only to see that real life skaters looked even cooler!! While yes, some of my fellow fans are a problem (I want to pull out my hair any time I see a comment about Yuuri on a Hanyu video), I know a number of people who follow FS now that didn't before the anime came out.

At least here in the States, I feel like we get very hyped about people and personalities, so going from a show about the personal side of skating fit well into my transition into this very individual sport. I think the USFS has been trying to do this -- promoting their "stars" and their stories, at least from what I've been reading here, but the fact is most people can see that it's fake advertising (especially in the current climate, young people really don't trust ads). That said, we do love our TV shows, so I think embracing any FS-related media would do well to bring new younger fans into the sport.

What's been the biggest difficulty for me for getting into FS is the cost. I live in NYS, but I couldn't go to Skate America because between the transport, hotels, AND tickets ($25 per session in crappy seats, or $125 for all sessions was the cheapest option) I just couldn't put forward the money. I know the sport needs revenue, but they are going to strangle themselves by charging this much money. Young people in general don't have that kind of cash, period. If they want to keep charging that much, at least American competitions need to be in more accessible cities. It was literally a hundred dollars cheaper for me to visit family in NYC than the potential ticket to go to Lake Placid. They would have a much easier time hyping up events that weren't in the middle of nowhere (and I say that as an upstater).

In short: more media in the form of stories and shows!! Less fake posing and advertising. Make events in easier places to get to. And offer more affordable ticket packages! I want to see FS live, but I just can't afford it.

Yep, events in the middle of nothing is one thing north america (USA and Canada) commonly do.

Mrs. P said:

I didn't say the attack, I said Tonya Harding.

I get she is seen as a disgrace to the sport, but I think at this point, it's been more than 20 years. I get others would highly disagree with me, but if Tonya Harding can provoke the imaginations of someone like Sufjan Stevens...I think there's some good of perhaps embracing her and her role in the sport.

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Didn´t she pay a very high price? In Germany, we don´t know much about her afterlife so to speak, I remember sawing a bio where she became a boxer and how she kind of, looked no longer like the person before. She seemed to be a broken person, do people in America really ignore that and want more punishment for this girl?

Has she been banned from FS? Couldn´t she become a coach or is this against the rules in American society?

Spirals for Miles said:

I think everything boils down to money, and more specifically, how it's allotted and how it's not.
There might be plenty of young talents with the drive and desire for the sport but if their parents can't afford it, that's it. There's nothing like the Russian sports schools that allow for most, if not all, talented children to learn a sport and be given the opportunity to succeed. And in today's system of financial inequality at a bigger level than ever before, this is going to be a problem as the 1% get richer and the rest of us get poorer, and less able to put our children into expensive sports.

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This is 100% true. I know of many families would would love to invest more time and energy into skating but don't feel they can because of their finances.
Personally, when I read here that serious skaters are looking at spending $100/day I did the math and I had a long conversation with my spouse about whether or not we wanted to invest half a million dollars in our son's sport. (He says yes but then he also says 'No more kids because we can't afford them' so... it's tough!)

tars said:

Establishing ministry of sport with federal funding, like in 99% of civilized countries.

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This would go a long way. Of course as Americans we would not call it a "ministry." We would call it a Department or something. Maybe we could get nutrition and fitness out from under the (conflict of interest) umbrella of the USDA and put it under the Dept of Health and Human Services.

Spirals for Miles said:

There's also the matter of how it's perceived.
For boys at least, they WILL get mocked at school for skating because in the US it's seen as a feminine sport.

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This is a big problem. In the US they are practically assumed to be gay. And YET it's still a huge risk to come out in this sport. There is rampant homophobia outside the sport AND within the sport.
Even here on these forums I read someone talk about how they thought Adam Rippon's costumes were too gay. C'mon! It's 2017

kiches said:

My first response is to make figure skating more accessible to viewers. Ice Network is a poor streaming option that doesn’t even offer HD quality. Normal non-cable broadcast is always tape delayed and shortened, and typically only focuses on US skaters. It’s shown midday on a Saturday for me on NBC and I’m never home then. They should focus on all top competitors and offer commentary that helps explain what people are seeing in terms of the program. Even making a live stream available for some senior events on YouTube for free can help foster casual interest, you can keep more major events behind a pay wall. The more visible you make the sport the easier it’ll be to get people to notice and take an interest (even if it’s not in the US skaters, but all skaters).

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Agree agree agree!

I am constantly frustrated with Ice Network. And I only watch the highlights after the events. I don't watch anything live. Their streaming is terrible!

It's also not particularly user-friendly. I am entirely cable-free and watch all my shows streaming, you know through Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or YouTube... We also have MLB accounts and sometimes sign up for streaming soccer too. As a family we are very pro-streaming. Anyway, we constantly struggle with Ice Network. If we struggle with it, I can't even imagine how much people who are more used to just regular cable TV might struggle with Ice Network. OK so... I have a family member who is a huge figure skating fan. Never skated a second of her life and is terribly nonathletic. But she adores figure skating an watches as much as she can. Yet, when I offered to give her the login to my IceNetwork account or buy her an account, she wasn't interested. Why? Too complicated.

Oh and all those other streaming services I use - including the sports ones - have mobile phones apps that WORK and stream the content to the phone too. Yet Ice Network's iphone app is just news and stuff.

Shandy said:

I know that quite a few people have been drawn into (or back into) FS thanks to the anime Yuri!!! on Ice. A lot of FS fans seem to dislike it because of comparisons drawn by anime fans between the characters and real-life skaters, but I think it's a valuable tool (kind of a "gateway drug") to get people interested in the sport. If friends or acquaintances enjoy YOI, you can hype FS to them as a way to connect the show to real life. If they're not interested in FS at all but like anime, why not try recommending YOI and starting from there?

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I watched all the episodes and loved it. And learned some things too. It made skating more accessible to me and helped explain things.

sheetz said:

The irony is that YOI is kind of the antithesis to everything USFS is trying to promote. While USFS wants to keep figure skating a sport for pretty princesses, YOI is all about gay men landing a bazillion quads.

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I think this pretty princess thing is dangerous. I think in order for the sport to move forward they have to drop the princess stuff. A coach recently told me, and I think she's right, that figure skating is losing a lot of girls to hockey. But hockey is not losing boys to figure skating. That needs to change. Both boys and girls who like ice skating should not feel like they have to conform to stiff gender roles to participate in ice sports.

Oh and I wanted to add that I think the new Cirque show, Crystal, might have some influence because it's really changing the concept of figure skating shows and opening up more opportunities for skaters to represent variety.
https://www.cirquedusoleil.com/crystal

It's a matter of consciousness and public perception. US figure skating as popular for decades, but it really faded in the run-up to the Vancouver Olympics. Maybe it's because winter sports have expanded to include extreme sports like ski-cross, freestyle, and others, there's less interest in a sport that is considered niche.

There's also less interest in young women and girls in becoming prime figure skaters, not when the sports above and others, like ice hockey for example, have become more popular. American female competitors may no longer want to become like Michelle Kwan, they may be more inclined to follow, say, Lindsay Vonn in skiing. The culture seems to have evolved from sports as an exercise in refinement into a need for speed and adrenaline. It seems figure skating just doesn't fit that niche. Notice how US women dominated the ladies discipline for most of the 20th century but once Michelle Kwan and Sasha Cohen retired, the stream of superstars came to an end. Ashley Wagner was unknown to the general public until the 2014 nationals controversy, and when she became a meme during the Sochi team event, but she's hardly a household name.

Remember how all those ice shows in the 80s and 90s were moneymakers? And how every network broadcast even exhibition-style "competitions" in the spring after worlds to capitalize? Ice shows nowadays don't sell out in the US the way they do in Japan or Russia. It's seen as a charming novelty.

Skating for whatever reason has fallen victim, in the US at least, to a decline in public interest in general.

Skaters now are doing their best to promote the sport. I share clips with friends and post to my social media. There's interest but it seems to be fleeting.

I must say though that part of the explosion in popularity in the 90s was the intense interest in Tonya Harding, which led to the 1994 games having record ratings. In that time Gordeeva and Grinkov became household names and people in the US still remember them fondly today. People still recall the 1988 games with Katarina Witt. It's the generation of those iconic names that really engaged the public, first through a bizarre event, and then into an actual love of the sport. Michelle Kwan was THE most famous female athlete - at one time arguably more famous than Michael Jordan - in the US for nearly a decade. What people need for the US to engage is to bring it back, not just with the fans, but with the USFSA doing more outreach.

My 0.02.

Alex D said:

Didn´t she pay a very high price? In Germany, we don´t know much about her afterlife so to speak, I remember sawing a bio where she became a boxer and how she kind of, looked no longer like the person before. She seemed to be a broken person, do people in America really ignore that and want more punishment for this girl?

Has she been banned from FS? Couldn´t she become a coach or is this against the rules in American society?

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Well, the film about her life is about to open in cinemas tomorrow and it's gotten excellent reviews. This may be the way to bring people back to the sport, in a roundabout way that first engages people with the "incident" (as she likes to call it), and then hopefully people will stick around to watch the sport for the 2018 games and re-invest in the sport. There's a whole generation of young athletes who weren't born yet at the time of the 1994 games, and maybe this new crop of potential skaters and fans could bring it back.

As for coaching: the USFSA banned her for LIFE. That includes performing, coaching, competing, the works ... !! No network will touch her as a commentator.

I wonder if putting competitions in major centers and promoting the heck out of tickets in urban areas would be an easy short-term way to re-engage people. Putting the competition in say Lake Placid makes something like SA cost prohibitive. But if they sold out the worlds in Boston in 2016, they can certainly put events in Madison Square Garden in New York, or in other major centres like Chicago, LA, Seattle, Dallas, SF etc. The USFSA could promote through packaged tickets that won't cost hundreds of dollars, but at a price where a large concentration of people could get to easily, and hopefully attract tourists too. I think worlds in LA in 2009 sold well too. Right now it has to reach a level where it's got major public attention ... but people have to NOT change the channel or think "I'm not watching figure skating!" when there are other sports viewing options.

Manitou said:

It will never change and it would be very naive wishful thinking to expect figure skating to be popular like basketball. Even tennis is mostly available on The Tennis Channel and requires purchasing a special package.
It would be so nice if the skaters were making millions, like in tennis...

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They used to in the US! Consider Michelle Kwan made millions even before she competed in Nagano for the first time. The other stars did well too, think of (and this goes back decades now) Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Nancy Kerrigan, Tara Lipinski, Kristi Yamaguchi. It also worked for expat skaters too, Katya Gordeeva was quite famous in the 90s and when she went on Oprah, it was one of the highest-rated shows on daytime television IIRC (Katya also sold out ice shows and had two best selling books in the US too). Oksana Baiul famously became a star in Lillehammer and was the classic rags-to-riches story who made most of her money in America after winning OGM 1994.

I didn't agree with you on other posts but I certainly agree with you on this, I WANT the skaters to do well, regardless of nation!

anyanka said:

I wonder if putting competitions in major centers and promoting the heck out of tickets in urban areas would be an easy short-term way to re-engage people. Putting the competition in say Lake Placid makes something like SA cost prohibitive. But if they sold out the worlds in Boston in 2016, they can certainly put events in Madison Square Garden in New York, or in other major centres like Chicago, LA, Seattle, Dallas, SF etc. The USFSA could promote through packaged tickets that won't cost hundreds of dollars, but at a price where a large concentration of people could get to easily, and hopefully attract tourists too. I think worlds in LA in 2009 sold well too. Right now it has to reach a level where it's got major public attention ... but people have to NOT change the channel or think "I'm not watching figure skating!" when there are other sports viewing options.

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Also, that counts for tourists.
For example, it is way more interesting, cheap and easy to travel to a FS competition that is located at a major touristic destination.
the access is easier, there are other things to do, better infrastructure and so on.