Your guide to the best figure skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics – through the eyes of a dancer

By Val Hooper, Associate Professor, and Head of the School of Marketing and International Business, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

For dancers and ex-dancers like myself, the figure skating at the Winter Olympics is a particularly irresistible drawcard: the speed of the skating, the height of the jumps, the delicacy of the movements, the speed of the twirls and the musicality and interpretation of the skaters.

However, there are aspects of figure skating which seem odd to a dancer. Many of the jumps require the skater to be skating backwards before they jump – one would expect them to be facing in the direction in which they are going.

And despite the skater being applauded for maintaining a “good…

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