Precision Skaters Make Impression Synchronized Competition May Open Door To Olympics

The United States Figure Skating Association will be taking lots of notes at this weekend’s Citizens Bank Snowflake International Synchronized Skating Competition.

The USFSA, which hosts this event every four years, will also be host to the first Synchronized World Championships next year - an event that will play a crucial role in synchronized skating’s bid to become an Olympic sport.

Gaining Olympic status is no easy task. Although some sports, such as snowboarding, have joined the Olympic ranks with relatively little difficulty, many others have been accepted only after decades of lobbying. One of synchronized skating’s counterparts, ice dancing, for example, waited nearly half a century to gain entry into the Winter Games.

While synchronized skating - also known as precision - still has a way to go, the sport has made great strides in a short amount of time.

The sport began in the 1950s, the brainchild of Richard Potter, a skater and professor at the University of Michigan. Potter was disturbed by the decline in teenage skaters and in an effort to get more of them involved, he formed a group called the Hockettes that performed between hockey games at the college.

Interest soon spread to Canada and the first precision-only competition was held in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1976.

The first national competition took place in 1983, and a little over a decade later precision became officially recognized as a discipline by the International Skating Union.

Synchronized skating has continued to establish its credibility through major international competitions, including this weekend’s event at the Civic Center.

The ISU has already sanctioned two World Challenge Cups, with another slated for this spring. The first World Championships will be held in April of 2000 in Minneapolis.

The 11-member ISU committee will analyze those World Championships and decide whether it will petition the International Olympic Committee to accept precision as an exhibition sport at the 2002 Olympics.

“We need to show that we can put on a World Championship and that it would be of the caliber that would be expected for an Olympic sport,” said Claire Ferguson, a past USFSA president and current member of the ISU board. “The World Championships will be analyzed and the final decision will rest with us to say that we’re going to move this forward.”

Lee Ann Miele, the USFSA’s chairperson for precision skating, says that 2002 is probably too soon to expect to gain Olympic status.

“That’s wishful thinking,” she said. The level of precision “is getting better and better and stronger every year. It’s really progressing beyond where we thought it would. It just has to be established and recognized internationally. We need more countries participating.”

Miele, a resident of Narragansett, R.I., points to many New England teams, including those from Rhode Island, at the forefront. The Warwick Figure Skaters Club is among the largest of the 375 synchronized teams registered with the USFSA.

“The U.S. is recognized quite highly in the sport internationally,” Miele said. “I would say we are one of the top four countries. And the Midwest is where (precision) really began, so for teams in the East to be right up there is fantastic.”