To gather inspiration for a blog on figure skating injuries, I attended a co-worker’s birthday party at a local ice-skating rink. Oh, the humanity, the small children, the Zamboni interludes. Swirling, swirling, but never flushing, like the toilets in the men’s bathroom. It was there I changed from my work clothes into makeshift skating attire. As I struggled into an ironically tacky sweater my tie slipped off the top of the stall door into a sludge composed of unspeakable elements on the floor. This was the real deal; a public rink where people dropped $10 a piece to entertain themselves for several hours on the ice before the local women’s hockey team reclaimed their territory in the evenings.

Looking fashionable with one less tie to my name, I made my way out onto the ice for the first time in over a decade. Fortunately the rink was overdue for a resurfacing and heavily rutted. The inertia of the human carousel propelled me through the grooves like a slot car on a terrifying Disneyland tour. Ninety percent of the traffic was amateur; the remaining ten were just talented enough to hurt themselves.

Thwack!

An attractive girl slid across my path in the dead cockroach position, slowing to a stop just outside the safety of my groove. How did her ass manage to make that sound? Should I stop to help her up? No. She was wearing tight spandex pants, probably figuring skating pants. She must have been attempting a maneuver of some sort and not quite pulled it off. It would only embarrass her to be assisted in such a humiliating state. Plus, I could barely stand up myself.

She passed into my peripheral vision and out of sight.

Several tiny girls dressed in pretty leotard outfits pirouetted majestically in the middle of the rink. Young couples clung to each other in awkward flirtations made endearing by their lack of balance. The only real threats were the adolescent boys. Cocky little things, they pumped madly with their spry young legs until they were going far too fast, at which point it was anyone’s guess when they would lose control and cut across four lanes of traffic like fleeced aberrations from an Old Navy catalog. An article from the St. Louis Dispatch entitled “Ice skating injuries: What to expect,” warns of such behavior:

“Skating rinks tend to be surrounded by barriers and walls. Slamming into them is problematic.” (1)

Thud!

One of the boys hit the wall back first, completely horizontal with his skates up off the ground as if he had been launched there from a slingshot. He slid back down to the ice cartoonishly slow, kicked his skates about in a futile attempt to roll over and then lay still.

“Probably just trying to catch his breath,” I thought to myself as the carrousel removed him from my concern. Maybe Alzheimer’s had its perks… There was no time to ponder this thought any further as my coworker, the nice Cambodian lady celebrating her twenty-fourth -birthday at the rink, grabbed on to my shoulders from behind. A startled glance backwards revealed that I was suddenly the engine in a conga train comprised of her and her three cousins. Later I would be told that I was not supposed to be the engine, but more of a solid object to keep the girls from falling over as they flailed about holding on to each other and anyone else within arm’s reach for support. It didn’t help then when I started pumping my legs like an adolescent boy and whipped them around the next turn.

Thud! Thud!.....Thud! …Oh good, she made it.

Another quote from the aforementioned article came to mind:

“Statistics show that (beginning) figure skaters actually end up with more speed- and fall-related injuries than beginning hockey players.” (1)

I believe it.

Sources: (1) http://www.active.com/page19602.aspx

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