About the guide
A field guide to figure skating, written for skaters, parents and anyone who has been handed a syllabus and told to go and learn a bracket.
Why it exists
Most of what a skater needs is either locked inside a coach's head or scattered across videos filmed at the far end of a rink. Neither is much use at seven in the morning when you are trying to remember which way the free hip is supposed to face. So this is the other thing: a page per element, the same three views every time, and a plain statement of which test it belongs to.
It covers 404 elements across 8 tests so far, and it will keep growing: edges and turns first, then spins, then dance and the competition-level material, kept on their own tabs so that a skater on their first test is not confronted with a triple.
How it is built
Almost nothing here is drawn or written one element at a time. Which way a lobe curves follows from three facts about the foot (which foot, which edge, forwards or backwards), so the guide records those three and derives the rest. The figures are geometry rendered from a body-frame rig, which is why the same move can be shown from above, from the side and from behind without anyone redrawing it, and why every element exists for both feet.
What it is not
It is not affiliated with British Ice Skating, with the ISU, or with any club or rink. Where it uses their names for things it does so because those are the names a British skater will be examined on. Every word and every figure here is written and drawn from scratch, from public sources, and the syllabus documents themselves are read locally and never redistributed. The one exception is the pattern dances' rink patterns. Where each step sits on the ice cannot be worked out from the steps, so those are redrawn from measurements of a governing body's diagram, and each one names the diagram it came from.
It is also not a substitute for a coach. Nobody has ever learned a rocker off a web page. What this can do is tell you what you are trying to do before you get on the ice, and give you something to look at afterwards.
Is it correct?
Not yet verified, and the guide says so on every page. The mechanics are derived from first principles and cross-checked against the published syllabuses, which catches a great deal and cannot catch everything. The plan is to have the descriptions checked by people who teach this for a living: a passage carries a tick once several of them have signed it off, and a single objection pulls that tick straight back down.
If you coach, judge or officiate, now or in the past, please get in touch. If you do not, and you have spotted something wrong, that is just as welcome: write to hello@figureskating.guide.
What it costs
Hosting is free: the site is static files on GitHub Pages. The only real bill is the domain, at £42.58 a year.
There will never be a subscription, an account wall or an advert, because the point is that a skater who cannot afford another lesson can still read it. If you can afford to, buying a coffee covers the domain and the evenings. If you cannot, read it anyway. That is what it is for.
What it counts
The guide counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, so I can see which pages are read and whether anyone finds it at all. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and does not follow you to other sites. What it records is the page, the site that sent you, your country, and your browser and device type, added up across everyone. No account, no advertising, and nothing that could identify you.
Who made it
One person, in Surrey, in the evenings, with a great deal of help from a skater who kept pointing out that the free foot was in the wrong place. Corrections, arguments and better wording all to hello@figureskating.guide.