The way a skater moves through the ice and the shapes they create are supposed to be beautiful. Every four years, skaters pour in a lifetime of effort - thousands of jumps and spins and falls hours and hours of flexibility exercises nagging injuries an inordinate amount of time spent in the cold - into less than 10 minutes of skating.Īnd while it requires superhuman strength and balance, the sport has traditionally had an artistic side, too. It’s a competition that comes down to microseconds, a half-degree of an angle, and decimal points. The cardinal rules remain “more rotations are better than fewer rotations” and “don’t fall.” Still, the way skating is scored can be hard to decipher.įigure skating is all about the minute details. The parameters of the sport are finite: Skaters are limited to about seven combined minutes of skating between the short and long programs and only six allowed jumps.

There are 15 sports and 109 events at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, but the crown jewel of these games is the beautiful, rigid, surprisingly complicated bloodsport known as figure skating.

The best free ice skating game