From left, Karen Courtland Kelly, Rosemary Gole and Ollie Miller are the co-winners of the Suzanne Sheppard Clark Trophy in recognition of their many contributions in support of World Figure and Fancy Skating. They are posing here Friday, Aug. 25 at the Olympic Center’s Roamers Cafe in Lake Placid. (Provided photo — Naj Wikoff)

From Oct. 4 to 8, the World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships will return to Lake Placid, where they were founded nine years ago by Olympians Karen Courtland Kelly and Patrick Kelly. The 9th anniversary celebration of its founding was held in the Roamers Cafe at the Olympic Center on Friday evening, Aug. 25.

The first international skating competition in Vienna in 1882 featured just fancy skating. Around 1910, it was replaced by the international style that featured choreographed skating and compulsory figures or school figures, which became a required element of figure skating competitions.

Compulsory figures, far less elaborate than fancy elements, are circular patterns that skaters trace on the ice, demonstrating their skill in placing clean turns evenly on circles, a skill many believed critical for learning blade control. Initially, compulsory figures comprised 50% of a figure skater’s score, but through the pressure of athletes, coaches, and especially the media, which viewed it as boring, Compulsories and the number of elements required was reduced to the first 40%, then 30% and 20% of the score, and then eliminated in entirely in 1990.

At the same time, skating competitions increasingly favored athleticism with a growing emphasis on more and more complex and challenging jumps, resulting in younger athletes with a more narrow, loose-limbed body type taking over the sport. Another outcome has been increased bone stress injuries, shorter careers, and dropping audience numbers. To counter these challenges, ages for participating in world and Olympic competitions are being raised, and judges seem to be increasing the priority of the aesthetics of skating over athleticism.

In contrast to nearly all other sports, figure skating is an art form as the performances are choreographed to music. Think a mix of ballet and modern dance on ice. Part of the art form is the design of the skater’s costumes, as they need to support the choreography and music aesthetically. Missing for audiences, both back when compulsory figures were required and in today’s format, is seeing the patterns etched into the ice by the skaters, similar to a visual artist using a pencil or brush.

Figure skaters Matt Snyder and Megan Jermaine Stewart pose Friday, Aug. 25 at the Olympic Center’s Roamers Cafe in Lake Placid. (Provided photo — Naj Wikoff)

Karen, who competed for the U.S. in pairs figure skating during the 1994 Olympic Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway, and whose training included compulsory figures, believed that resurrecting fancy skating as a competitive sport on black ice mimicking the color of pond ice and other changes would foster greater appreciation and understanding of the art of skating and enhance foundational techniques. In addition, it would expand the array of skaters’ ages and body types that could participate and successfully compete. To that end, Karen and her husband Patrick founded the nonprofit World Figure Sport Society, which organizes the World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships and provides training, among other activities.

“The World Figure Sport Society combines skating, jewels, and art,” said Karen. “Our goal is to make sport more culturally relevant and, with the skating we do, combine fine art with paint, pencils, our blades, decorative arts, and the recording arts. We are more body-type inclusive for people of all ages and levels and host the world championships, world pro, and the world junior championships for skaters 21 and under. We also have inclusive skating for people living with any disability.”

Early in her career, Swiss Olympic silver medalist and skating coach Hans Gerschwiler taught Karen how to skate the Swiss S, a foundational fancy technique that strengthened her edge control, enabling her to compete nationally and professionally successfully. Now, as a coach, Karen shares the beauty, control, and satisfaction of creating fancy figures and their value in learning to free skate well. The World Figure Sport Society aims to reconnect and celebrate these two aspects of skating.

“One of the reasons Karen is such an advocate for fancy skating is that so many skaters are getting injured because they haven’t learned the proper edging they did when they had to do Compulsories,” said Jeanne Warner.

“Fancy skating saved my ability to skate,” said WFFSC Bronze medalist Matt Snyder. “I had torn my meniscus right when I started fancy skating, and it strengthened my knee enough to continue to skate. Everything good seems to surround World Figure Sport.”

Karen, along with six-time WFFSC champion Sheppard Clark, Olympian Debi Thomas and Cathy Oerter, chair of Art of the Olympians, also hope to establish a museum in Lake Placid that will celebrate the art of skating, art created by Olympians, jewelry, and the Roy Blakey collection of theatrical skating. In the interim, they organize pop-up displays, which will be a part of the World Figure and Fancy Skating Championships in October.

“You could say that figure and fancy skating is the most comprehensive and artistic activity on Earth,” said Clark. “We dance on a crystal. It combines the fine, performing, decorative and recording arts.”

An exciting element of competitive fancy skating is that it’s done on black ice, which enables the athletes and the public to see the results etched in the ice and precise patterns that the judges use when scoring. What the judges do not see, though the public can, is skaters creating their repetitive patterns; blind scoring levels the field for skaters with differing body types. Karen credits her husband, who competed for Canada in speedskating during the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics, with creating the unbiased sequestered scoring system now used in World Figure and Fancy Skating competitions.

One challenge is that the technique for creating many elaborate figures developed during the golden age of fancy skating has been lost; images of the patterns exist in old photos, such as one created by Russian Olympian Nikolai Panin a century ago, but not the technique. That loss has frustrated contemporary fancy skaters. Skating coach Mark Fenczak’s passion is figuring them out, as he recently did for Panin’s, an image that inspired him to take up fancy skating.

“It turned out it’s much simpler than it looks; I had been overthinking it for years,” said Fenczak. “One day, I managed to blow up the picture properly, and I thought, wait a minute, what if he is doing this and that over there? I tried it, and it worked. When it finally hit me, I was excited and instantly felt stupid. I was, ‘Oh, my God, it was so easy. Why didn’t I think of that?'”

(Naj Wikoff lives in Keene Valley. He has been covering events for the Lake Placid News for more than 15 years.)