Thin ice skaters

[Daygloboo]

I dont know if im right but the ice skaters look painfully thin to me. I remember them looking toned but a healthy weight years ago. John Curry was nicely toned. A lot of them now look far too thin.

I thought this was something about a social media challenge to skate on thin ice 🤣

I agree, Jayne Torvil looked almost chubby in some old clips but I think that's true of all athletes nowadays, tennis players e.g are all super slim and toned now. Look at Martina Navratilova when she started out compared to her later career.

😂no but i think the men were skating on thin ice coz they all fell over the other night

I’ve noticed this too. I think there’s a trend towards skinniness again, sadly. At one point they used to look well muscled and healthy.

I thought it was to do with the moves they have started doing

so like the quads it’s easier if you are very slim

To me it seemed like a lot of them in the men's competition looked painfully thin and stressed and emotional.

Well eating disorders are endemic in athletics so I always assume it’s that

Me too!

Yeah they all looked like that to me.

They may be thin but are much stronger and more athletic than they used to be. Triple axel used to be hard now skaters are talking about quintuples being possible.

It's easier to exercise if you're muscly but without excess weight. It's a fine line and often comes down on the side of lean.

I thought that too. There were some very thin arms and legs, including on the men.

For the jumps, and to some extent the spins, you need to be able to rotate very fast which is much easier for someone with a slimmer build. Skating also demands a lot of flexibility which is easier to achieve when slim. That doesn't apply so much to the ice dancers but obviously it's going to be easier to lift someone lighter.

There definitely is an issue with eating disorders in the sport but the pressure comes more from performance than appearance. I've known coaches tell their skaters they need to lose weight and even to give them strict rules about what they should and shouldn't eat. This is with young kids, nowhere near Olympic level.

No all the skinny skaters have eating disorders though, some of them are just naturally very slim and that has given them an advantage in the sport.

I noticed it too. Although the woman who won French gold had amazing arms.

Laurence Fournier Beaudry. I thought she looked really hot especially in that pink Gautier corset costume. She has a decent amount of muscle and I think it looks amazing.

Scoring in ice skating has changed significantly since the 80s/90s. The skaters then were not doing what the skaters today are. The athleticism required now isn’t in the same ballpark.

Leanness is an advantage in ice skating. It means being able to go faster and higher.

if its the woman I think you mean - Laurence who won in the ice dance pairs? - then in a documentary she was featured in on Netflix in the lead up to the games she made a specific point to talk about how she had struggled with eating disorders from the age of 15 where she felt her frame was not a slim enough to be successful in the sport. She said it's a journey but she has tried to reframe her attitude and she now sees strength in it. She said she liked the idea of proving that a pair with much more athletic frames could win at the Olympics. It shocked me a bit, as while her and her partner do look very fit and strong with clear muscle definition, it's hard to believe they are the 'big' ones.

It’s heartbreaking, I can’t watch anymore. Both my DDs are skaters and Dd1 was headed towards elite. She was hospitalised in the summer for an ED which I had been trying to get help for, for months and is only off sofa rest a couple of weeks ago. Dd2 is much younger but I’m watching her like a hawk, part of me would love her to get tired of skating and find another passion as I never want to see someone else get anywhere near what Dd1 went through/is going through/will always have to struggle with

Yeah she doesnt look anorexic to me but some of the men do

The Canadian female pairs skater - on TikTok she was showing a day at the Olympic camp and all she had all day of training was two boiled eggs.

We've only seen the men so far, I have missed a lot of it, my OH said 'are they anorexic, they're so skinny'

I thought their legs looked very muscular and their necks were wide so Im not sure they're skinny as such.

Well, they can't be too fat or they'd fall through the ice

Yes i am suspecting ice skating is becoming unhealthy...all the elite group of men fell over except one and there was lots of crying and anguished looks. Didnt look mentally stable to me. Not how i remember the men from years ago. Quadruples are all very well but niot if you are mentally unwell.

The speed skaters, on the other hand, are almost all thighs.

It seems like the strength:weight ratio is being looked at as the route to success, the focus being on minimising weight and ignoring that strength is the other half of that ratio.

It's where gymnastics was until changes in scoring system slowly but surely began allowing a greater varieties of body types (and ages) to find success - it's not 'fixed' yet and may never be perfect, but far better than 15-20 years ago.