Here is a blast from the past for everyone, here (https://youtu.be/kOtgkZANmXQ) is a link to Kerr/Kerr’s wonderful Free Dance from the year they qualified for the Grand Prix Final 2009 and came 4th. This is them performing it at the British Championships as the GPF performance seems to be lost to the mists of time...
I’d forgotten how amazing and interesting their lifts were, I hope to see more teams inspired by them in the future.
Edit: Also another lovely one of Sinead and Stéphane Lambiel dancing! (https://youtu.be/jm7OwYweTQo)
I do wish we could find some solo and pairs skaters to up the ante a bit. I suspect that's a forlorn hope.
There are a fair amount of rinks if you live in the city. I think I could say confidently that every major city has an ice rink but there are a few black spots like any country has. Weirdly London is one of those black spots with only two rinks in Streatham and a half rink in Queensway for 8 million people. (Edit: I forgot about Alexandrer Palace, not a full size but close. So three rinks for 8 million. )
We don't have much in the south though. After our rink closed down, we have no rink not unless you drove to the next few town away.
I really hope they shake up standings a little bit at Worlds!
There are a fair amount of rinks if you live in the city. I think I could say confidently that every major city has an ice rink but there are a few black spots like any country has. Weirdly London is one of those black spots with only two rinks in Streatham and a half rink in Queensway for 8 million people. (Edit: I forgot about Alexandrer Palace, not a full size but close. So three rinks for 8 million. )
What are the UK's Olympic Committee goals in winter sports?
Watching Eurosport of German TV broadcasts with skiing and ice channel events, one notices the occasional Brit in ski events and more of them in luge, skeleton, bob and such. But no cross country or biathlon?
Obviously it all comes down to money being at the hub of the vicious circle mentioned in this thread.
At least it's not as bad as on this side of the Irish Sea. 2 rinks in Belfast, and none on the rest of the island. Admittedly, it looks like the rink in Dundalk could be re-opening soon, but that would still only be 3 rinks. All three of these rinks are located on the east coast, and on the top half of the island at that. What about the rest of the island? Nada!
That said, I have recently been doing research into places in the north of Scotland for a post I was writing for another thread (it turned out to be a wasted effort - the OP was going to Banff in Canada, not Banff in Scotland ), and I couldn't get over how many rinks there are there! Every settlement I looked up (except for Banff itself) had at least one rink. And Inverness had loads!
And it started me wondering - with this many rinks, why aren't we seeing skaters from the north of Scotland coming through? And there are only two reasons I could come up with (which both probably boil down to the same thing):
- Lack of coaches due to them not wanting to be that far north, away from the skating heartland (if there is such a thing!)
- Skaters not being able to commit to travelling serious distances to get to competitions
I found the discussion about rinks in London interesting. Although there are not many rinks in London nowadays, there obviously used to be a lot more. For the simple reason that when I was researching times that Worlds has been held in the UK for a previous post in this thread, I found that out of the 6 (or possibly 7) rinks that had hosted Worlds, four of them were in London. Three of them in Westminster alone. But, none of them still operate as ice rinks.