About once a week these days, I am struck with an urge to root around YouTube for old skating videos. The quality of what I find is not always great—many times it's a low-resolution video from before the advent of HD, or it's a cam-rip of someone filming their television.
While not necessarily endorsed by the networks that broadcast them, many of the more famous performances are nonetheless available to watch on YouTube, and they are simply fantastic! Old videos from the '50s. New videos from this past year. You can find pretty much anything.
A few weeks back, I read that legendary coach Christa Fassi had been elected by the PSA to the Figure Skating Coaches Hall of Fame. Thinking about that this week, I was inspired to search for a video of one of her husband's (Carlo Fassi) most famous pupils—Dorothy Hamill—who just so happens to have been an SCNY member. I found several, including a good quality video of her historic 1976 Olympic long program. I've seen it probably a hundred times before (she was one of my idols!), but for me, it never gets old. It's such a solid performance.
That got me thinking about another Olympic gold medalist, also from SCNY: Carol Heiss-Jenkins. I'd grown up hearing about how wonderful she was, but I'd never seen her skate. Sure enough, not even two minutes later, I was watching her 1960 Olympic-winning freeskate. It was interesting to see how large a role footwork and edges played in her program. While jumps took center stage in the '70s, '80s and '90s, the return to an emphasis on edgework in the last decade makes this video even more valuable.
My afternoon of YouTubing wouldn't be complete without digging up a performance by SCNY's third Olympic champion, Sarah Hughes. Her 2002 Olympic long program is just as amazing now ten years later as it was when I watched it live!
There are hundreds of skating videos on YouTube and around the Web. Have you found any good ones lately? If so, let us know where to find them in the comments section below!
No comments:
Post a Comment