Olympian Answers Figure Skating Questions

I'm Max Naumov.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Figure Skating Support.

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All right, this question comes from @igksueellen.

How do figure skaters not get incredibly dizzy

and just kind of die?

That's funny.

So, honestly, we actually do get dizzy,

but not as much.

That's the thing.

We end up doing spins over and over and over again

just on one practice

and that happens throughout days and months and years.

So over time your body just gets used to that

and you have a much better ability

to get yourself un-dizzy really quick.

Your brain starts to realize kind of the RPMs

of what you're spinning at and it begins to adjust.

Now, granted, if you stay in the spin for a very long time,

longer than usual, you will still get dizzy.

This next question is from @dar_winning.

That's really good. I like that.

Hello, figure skaters!

Could someone explain the difference

between all the jumps in the sport?

Okay, so in our sport we have six different jumps.

Axel, salchow and toe loop jump.

Those all take off from the left foot.

Then you have your loop, flip and lutz jump.

Those are taking off on the right.

We also have three toe jumps and three edge jumps.

We have salchow, loop, then axel

and that is going to be your edge jumps.

Then you have your toe jumps, which is flip, a lutz and toe.

The edge jumps are done much differently than the toe jumps.

You have to use the momentum

and you have to kind of use your edge quality

to lift yourself up from the edge, from the rocker.

The toe jumps is where you use the toe pick

to launch yourself off the ice and we always,

no matter what jump it is,

we land on our right foot,

if you do rotate counterclockwise,

and the axel's the only jump that takes off forward,

that's actually one of my favorite jumps

and you count it in half rotations, right?

So waltz jump, that basic one, is half rotation,

then you have your one and a half,

which you single axel,

two and a half, double axel,

three and a half, triple axel.

Since you take off forward and you'll land backwards,

that's where the extra half revolution comes from.

Next question comes from u/HoneydewHalo25.

Does anyone have tips

to get over at the mental block of jumping?

The mental block is really just a lot of doubt,

just not quite being as confident

as you need to be going into jumps.

There's things that help out.

We have, we call it the fishing pole.

So you attach a harness

and the coach skates behind you and they lift you.

So that gives you a little bit

of a way to practice the jump without actually

going into it yourself.

And the other thing is just going back to

either singles or doubles,

really working on the basics and the singles

and the doubles until you feel really confident

to just slightly slightly add that extra bit of rotation.

You know, the fear and the doubt,

that's all part of the process of landing new elements.

One of the best things that has helped me

really is just taking it step by step,

from singles to doubles and then triples,

kind of try to think of it

like a double into rotation instead of thinking of it,

oh my gosh, I'm going for triple, right?

A Reddit user asks,

Do skaters know when they under rotate?

Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

I find that with jumps that have more rotation,

it's actually a little bit more difficult

to know when you under rotated,

just because you're rotating so quickly,

when you get to the ice,

it happens really fast when you land.

So even if it's a slight cheat,

your body doesn't even feel it, honestly.

When it comes to jumps that have less rotation,

you're in the air longer and you're rotating a bit slower.

So it's very clear when you do a cheated jump.

When you take off onto your jump,

you don't take off just straight like this.

You take off as you're rotating,

so whichever direction that your blade is taking off in,

you have to land backwards in that same direction.

So, for example, let's say you're taking off this way

and you land only a quarter turn

to backwards kind of relative to how you took off,

that's gonna be a quarter turn under rotated

or as we call it, Q.

Now when you have, you know, a more severe under rotation,

that's called a downgraded jump,

where you might take off forward,

you do your rotations in the air

and then you can land actually forward

and turn the rest of the time on the ice.

That's gonna be a severe under rotation,

called a downgrade.

Next question comes from u/Important_Target2141.

How to overcome embarrassment when falling?

I'm still working on it.

So embarrassment is part of the process as well,

especially when you're learning a new jump,

there's a process where you're falling

over and over and over again

and it can get really frustrating.

The other time when that happens

is when you already mastered an element

and then you come into the ice

one day you're feeling a little bit off

and you start falling on really easy stuff

and then you're kind of looking around like,

well, did anyone see that?

Or, you know, what's wrong with me today?

That's really embarrassing that I'm falling

on some really easy stuff.

The truth is everybody feels that way.

You have to acknowledge the fact that

you are going to feel those feelings,

but in reality it's all part of the process

and, guys, skaters that are Olympians,

they make mistakes all the time.

It's the skaters that do fall on easy stuff

that continue to get up and keep going and try it again.

Those are the skaters that are gonna be,

you know, successful in this sport.

This next question comes from u/LeoisLionlol.

What are some things you would want to see

in the perfect choreo sequence?

Back flip.

That has been the talk of the past few years.

If you hit that thing,

the crowd goes nuts and it is so much fun to do,

I'll tell ya that.

This question comes from u/RestaurantVast7942.

Do you think we will ever see a skater

attempt a quintuple jump?

100%.

When you look at Ilia Malinin

and the way that he's rotating,

I mean, he's doing a quad axel.

What a quad axel is is four and a half rotations on the ice,

you take off forward,

you rotate four and a half times

and land backwards on one foot.

It's insane.

The difference between that quad axel

and a quintuple jump is only a half of a rotation.

So, I mean, I'm not speaking for Ilia,

but I'm pretty sure that he's going to be doing it

and, man, I cannot wait to see that.

This next question comes from @Iwtpeace.

I have a bunch of couple figure skating videos

on my for you page right now

and I'm falling in love just watching them,

how do they not fall in love with each other?

Okay, actually a great question too.

It's almost like a theater, theatrical performance, right?

You go see a ballet,

the man and the woman really just doing their lifts

and they choreograph this beautiful step sequence

to a certain piece of music

that can be very romantic, right?

And, honestly, sometimes they

do end up falling for each other.

It happens a lot.

But, you know, it's part of the performance,

it's part of being a really good artistic skater

with high components,

is to have the audience in the crowd feel that way,

whether or not that actually is the case,

which I think is really cool.

This next question comes from u/ScaleGlittering6161.

It's been eight months, I can't do the backspin.

Any tips?

The is one of the first things that we learn

actually how to do in skating.

You enter on a forward inside edge,

you quickly turn and you have to do your back scratch spin

on a back outside edge.

You spin really quickly

and the idea is that you have to stay centered.

The more centered you can stay, the better.

My tip for that would be to find the bowl of the edge.

What ends up happening a lot of times

is people start to spin

and they start rocking from the heel to the toe

and that's where you're trying to find balance actually

and it could be really tricky.

When you find the bowl of the edge,

you'll find a certain stability in your spin.

Your bottom toe pick could be on the ground,

but right here is where you're gonna be spinning.

The rock that we're talking about,

if you can find your balance in this position,

that's gonna help stabilize your spin

and the faster you spin actually the easier it is.

This next question comes from u/typhoidsergei.

How does throwing gifts on the ice work?

So this is something that's really cool.

After the skaters finish with their performance,

the audience will throw, you know, stuffed animals, toys.

One time someone threw me a a chocolate bar on the ice,

so, you know, you never know what you can get,

but they throw gifts on the ice after you finish

and we have sweepers,

which are usually children that are part of the local club

and they collect all the gifts and they put 'em into bags

and later backstage we can go ahead

and grab them and take them home.

Certain skaters, the audience knows what they like,

like for example, Yuzuru Hanyu,

he had Winnie the Pooh

and after every competition he finished it would just rain,

rain Winnie the Poohs, which was unbelievable to see.

All right, this question is from u/c2cali.

Does Maxim Naumov collect anything on the ice?

Yes, I like polar bears a lot,

so I have a few of them actually at home.

It's really cool.

I actually try to grab as many as I can

when I go to the kiss and cry

and kind of just show them on the big screen.

The kiss and cry is the area

where the athlete and the coach will go to see their scores.

But a lot of sweet moments happen there.

You get to see the skater's personality a little bit

and, I mean, the idea is that you can cry

if it's not that good and you can, you know,

give kisses if it's good.

All right, this next question is from u/chronocosmos.

It's actually a cool name, chronocosmos.

How does a figure skater find out

they're going to the Olympics?

This is usually a phone call and they say,

Come meet us at a certain place.

And you don't know what you're meeting them for.

It's a really big surprise.

This next question comes from u/WheretheEoopy.

Would you rather have one gold medal

or five silver medals?

This is actually a really interesting question.

I would rather have five silver medals

and I'll tell you why.

When you look at one gold medal,

that is something that you did that one time and that's it.

When you look at five silver medals,

that's you showing consistency

back to back to back to back to back.

This sport is all about consistency.

You wanna show that your ability to do something

and to perform happens over and over and over again.

This question comes from u/werewolfscience.

What helped you the most while learning to rotate jumps?

What helped me the most was understanding

how and where to get your power from

and it's not just about power,

it's about speed, it's about timing,

and when you combine all of those three things together,

that is where you can be the most efficient.

Your body always finds

the most efficient way to do something.

Most of the time, technique wise,

it's not the best way to do it.

So you have to reprogram your body

to make certain technical moves

become subconscious movement.

The subconscious movement is way, way quicker

than conscious movement,

up to like 700 milliseconds before the movement even starts,

your brain already knows what to do.

Think of the term muscle memory,

that's essentially what that is.

It's your body knowing what to do

before you even start to do it.

This next question is from u/laysandchutney.

Why is quad loop so hard?

Loop is my least favorite jump,

I'm gonna say that right now,

and I'm not alone in this.

But the reason for that is because you are starting

on your back outside edge.

I have nothing to kind of generate

a bit more momentum and timing before the actual takeoff.

So you're starting on your back edge

and you have to generate as much torque and power

with your hips and shoulders as you possibly can

and you gotta launch yourself up,

it's another edge jump,

but the way that it's done is it's all on the right foot,

so you take off and you land also on the right foot.

So the hard part about that is just the amount of power

and angular momentum that you can generate,

you know, from, again, just one simple edge.

Next question comes from u/thatnurselifts.

What is your worst figure skating fall or goof-up story?

Man, there's so many.

My strap came undone at one competition.

It happened in the very beginning part of my program.

I didn't even notice it until maybe 15 to 20 seconds in.

When you have your competition pants on,

what ends up happening is that the pant

will cover the top of the boot

and it needs to stay down,

so it doesn't come up,

there's a strap that goes actually underneath the boot

and it straps and holds the pants tight this way.

That strap ended up coming undone

and it started dangling right here,

right by the blade.

You know, I was moving fast so it was just

waving in the wind and at any moment,

yeah, it could have been game over for me.

So I had to come up to the referee, stop the music

and I took an entire roll of duct tape actually,

right here, this one,

and I wrapped my entire pant to my boot

so that nothing would be dangling or falling

and I picked up where I left off

and we continued the program.

This question comes from u/sabo_emrld.

Advice on breaking in skates.

When you get into new boots,

the boot is very stiff and what you have to do

is actually a process called heat molding.

So you would heat up the boot to,

a pretty hot temperature actually,

and you would put your foot into the boot

and sometimes even tape it or wrap it around

for the boot to actually conform to your foot.

A Reddit user asks,

Why do all figure skaters only spin in the left direction?

The reason for that, I think,

is because if you rotate to the left,

you land on the right leg,

so usually that's people's dominant leg,

more stability, more strength,

so you'd want your landings to be on your dominant leg.

You know, there's a lot of skaters

that actually do spin the other way

and we do exercises and things like that all the time,

both directions.

It's really good for your coordination

and there's overall better skating quality.

And this next question comes from @TheChrisLambert.

How do they measure performance in figure skating?

The way that they measure performance in figure skating

is in two marks.

You have your technical,

which you get points for,

and then you have your components.

So technical is anywhere from your jumps

to your spins to your step sequences,

specific turns, things like that.

The component side is gonna be more your artistry.

That's gonna be your transitions, your interpretation,

doing things to the music, choreography, things like that.

Those two scores get combined together

at the end of your performance

and then you get your final score.

Some people get higher components, less technical,

higher technical, less component.

That's why skating is so beautiful, you need both.

This next question comes from u/constellationhopper.

Slang and words that figure skaters use?

We have abbreviations for certain jumps

like instead of salchow, you'll say, Oh, I'm doing a sal.

Or instead of toe loop, I'm doing a toe.

Right? Things like that.

Very easy.

When you do a program run with no elements,

that's called a skeleton.

When the Zamboni comes out

and it puts a layer of water over the ice

to make it clean again with no scratches and no marks,

we use slang and call it an ice make or an ice cut.

You can say a flood.

That's another thing that skaters say,

Oh, there's a flood going on right now.

We're gonna hop on the next session.

This next question comes from u/Cuiniel.

Do Olympic level skaters usually choreograph

their own expos?

Very rarely do athletes kind of do things on their own.

We actually have choreographers that we work with

to create an entire piece,

a short program and the free skate.

We work together.

It's kind of something that as you get older,

you can kind of put more input

and you know your body a little bit better,

you know what you're good at

and it's kind of a collaboration.

You're part of the music selection process,

part of the choreography process,

and you do have input on where you wanna do your jumps

and what jumps are you doing,

you have to create a program around all the technical.

The next question comes from u/International-Joke49.

What are some of the most difficult programs

that have been performed?

One way to look at it

is what is the most difficult program

from a component standpoint

and what is the most difficult program

from a technical standpoint?

From a technical standpoint,

I can tell you that in my field, in the men's division,

Ilia Malinin has done the most difficult program by far.

He's the only skater that's doing a quad axel right now

and is free with all of those different quads

that he's doing.

From a technical standpoint,

there is no one that's reaching him at all.

From a choreography and component side,

that's more up to, you know,

the audience and the judge's interpretation

and that's scored out of 10.

So it's very rare that skaters,

even of the highest quality,

will get those tens in the components.

You look at skaters like Jason Brown,

you got skaters like Patrick Chan,

like Yuzuru, like Javier Fernandez,

all those guys,

they perform not only just a program,

but it's a a piece of art

and also I have the utmost respect for the pairs

'cause they also have to jump,

they also have to spin,

they do everything that we do,

but they have throws,

they have lifts,

they have twist,

and those pairs girls, man,

I don't know how their knees and ankles are holding up,

honestly.

I got so much respect for them.

They get launched.

I'm talking about launched.

So I have the utmost respect.

I think in my opinion, the most difficult is that pairs.

I mean, doing that last lift at the end of the program,

I know how hard it's at the end of the program,

that four minute mark and you have to do a lift.

Are you kidding me?

This next question is from u/FireFlamesFrost.

How did you pick your blades?

I actually have the John Wilson Revs right here.

We call these the Revolutions.

These are my blades that I've been rocking

for multiple, multiple years already.

So the figure skating blade is actually interesting.

You would think that it's actually completely flat.

However, that's not the case.

What ends up happening is the blade is flatter

towards the heel

and then it comes up like this towards the toe pick.

We call this area right here,

the bowl of the edge or the rocker.

So this is actually where you do all of your turns.

So when you place the blade down here,

you'll see that it rocks back and forth

without it going to the toe pick.

This is something that allows us to do our turns,

it allows us to control our inside and our outside edges

and, of course, when we're spinning,

we're actually spinning on that part right here

where the heel is coming up

and that bottom toe pick right here

is on the ice and you hear that sound like shh, like that.

So Gold Seal Revolution.

These are the blades that I switched to

actually when I was fairly young.

The way that I describe it is like you're driving

a Honda Civic, you pop these on, you're in a Ferrari.

When you start to upgrade your blades,

you start to notice,

man, that spin was a lot easier than before actually.

A Reddit user asks,

Can someone explain how skaters choose their music?

What we do as a team is we sit down,

we kind of think about the music

that each person brings to the table.

Someone might have heard it from a movie

or a show or just, you know, other research,

you might hear it in the store.

You never know.

If I skate to something emotional,

it's usually something that I'm genuinely going through

at that point in time.

There's not a question of man,

I have to pretend to be X or Y or Z.

You are that and you get to share that.

Almost like actors, same way.

This question comes from u/cat_poo-poos.

Love that.

Why do ice/roller skaters skate backwards?

In order to create a transition

or a setup for a jump or a landing or a spin,

we have to be able to rotate forward and backward

and do a lot of elements both ways.

Setups for jumps, setups for spin, certain turns,

those all have to be done from a backwards entry

or when you land something, you're also going backwards.

So another area where you have to be able to do both.

It is easier to skate forwards at first,

but we very, very quickly teach skaters

to turn around and get comfortable going backwards.

It's a massive and integral part of skating.

This next question is from u/jaemjenism.

What is one skate that you always come back to?

So there's actually two in my mind,

2002, Salt Lake City,

Evgeni Plushenko, free program

and Alexei Yagudin, free program.

It is such a epic moment in figure skating.

Those two were duking it out

and I go back to that 'cause early 2000s figure skating,

massive popularity.

We have Scott Hamilton commentating,

big shout out to Scott Hamilton.

I literally know word for word what he's gonna say.

That's how many times I re-watched this program.

That entire event was so inspirational to me as an athlete

and I wanted to be just like those guys.

Another program that comes to mind is Javier Fernandez,

2016 Worlds.

I was there.

It was so loud with the crowd roaring

10 seconds before he even finished skating.

Became the world champion. Just unreal.

Next question is from u/ExaminationFancy.

How do you know when it's time to sharpen your blades?

The skating blade is really interesting

because it actually has, again,

a little bit of a concave and that's called your hollow

and the hollow is actually what creates that sharpness.

There's different types of sizes.

There's seven sixteens,

there's half all different types of things

that are personal to the skater,

how they like it, either really sharp,

it could be like a knife sometimes,

or it could be very light sharpening,

so you don't really notice it that much.

But, yeah, the blade is actually, you can touch it,

you can even bring your hands alongside this way.

It's not gonna cut you.

So, yeah, a lot of times when we sharpen

or when we check things,

you can even do this thing here

where you check it with your nail, how sharp it is,

and you can see a nail shaving is coming off

and you're like, okay, that side is sharp.

Then you check this side as well.

You say, okay, everything is sharp

and you check it at every part of the blade

all the way up to the rocker,

which is actually the most important,

it's still fine, the sharpest part.

Everybody is different too.

Some people like to sharpen their skates very often.

Some people don't sharpen 'em for two months even.

A lot of times actually what ends up happening

is some skaters will go into a jump

that has a tight edge and slip off the edge.

We do not want that to happen

to know it's time to sharpen your blades.

These were some really good questions.

If we get some more knowledge in skating,

it could be even more popular.

I wanna grow this sport as much as possible,

so shout out to you guys.

This was so much fun.

Thanks for watching.

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