Trivia question on the radio this morning tells me that the International Skating Union recognizes 48 different types of figure eight! I have just spent the last hour looking and I can’t find a site which might tell me what those 48 are. Anybody help?
While I couldn’t find any pictures or descriptions, I did find some basic information form a few Yahoo searches.
Back in the day ice skaters had to learn “school figures” which were precise patterns they had to skate in. The variations come from skating on different parts of the blade or little flairs or turns through the figure (usually an eight). This was part of international competition up till 1991 when some organization, maybe the ISU, removed it as it made for bad TV (a guess).