Ice Skating

Ice skating is traveling on ice with skates, narrow (and sometimes parabolic) blade-like devices moulded into special boots (or, more primitively, without the boots, tied to regular footwear). People usually skate on frozen rivers and lakes and at skating rinks. more...

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It is mainly done for recreation and as a sport. Many musicals like Starlight Express have been performed on ice.

History

The exact time and process by which humans first learned to ice skate is not known, though archaeologists believe the activity was widespread. The convenience and efficiency of ice skating to cross large, icy areas is shown in archaeological evidence by the finding of primitive animal bone ice skates in places such as Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. The runners were made from bones of animals such as horse, cattle and reindeer. They were ground down until they formed a flat gliding surface, and thongs tied them to the feet. The skates were not used like contemporary skates. Instead they were used by straddling a pole which was used to push the user along. While only averaging 2.5 mph (4 kph) it used far less energy than trying to walk across frozen lakes. By comparison, modern skates use only about 25% of the energy of these primitive bone skates. Another study by Federico Formenti of the University of Oxford suggests that the earliest ice skating happened in Southern Finland about 4000 years ago.

Earliest historical documentation

The first concrete mention of ice skating is found in a biography of Thomas Becket written by his former clerk William Fitzstephen in about 1180. The book includes a description of London, with its popular sports.

When the great marsh that laps up against the northern walls of the city is frozen, large numbers of the younger crowd go there to play about on the ice... Others are more skilled at frolicking on the ice: they equip each of their feet with an animal's shin-bone, attaching it to the underside of their footwear; using hand-held poles reinforced with metal tips, which they periodically thrust against the ice, they propel themselves along as swiftly as a bird in flight or a bolt shot from a crossbow. But sometimes two, by accord, beginning far apart, charge each other from opposite directions and, raising their poles, strike each other with them. One or both are knocked down, not without injury, since after falling their impetus carries them off some distance and any part of their head that touches the ice is badly scratched and scraped. Often someone breaks a leg or an arm, if he falls onto .

The sticks that Fitzstephen refers to were used for movement, as the primitive bone-made ice skates did not have sharp gliding edges like modern ice skates.

Read more at Wikipedia.org