After much agonizing I took the plunge and had my Gold Seal freestyle blades taken off my old skates and Skate Science Olympus synchro blades put on:
New Skate Science synchro blades
I love my Gold Seals so it was a hard decision. My whole life I’ve skated in freestyle blades with a similar profile: Coronation Ace, Gold Seal, and Reidell Eclipse. But I’m at the level where most ice dancers make the switch into dance blades, and the long tails on my Gold Seals were becoming a scary hazard. Ice dancing requires your feet to be very close together, “neat feet” as they call it. It’s easy to get your blades tangled together or step on the tail of a blade with the other blade. Those are nasty falls.
I’d asked both my dance coach and one of my local skate techs, who is an Olympian in ice dance, what to do considering that I wanted to skate both dance and freestyle. Both thought I should skate on only one type of blade, not switch back and forth between two pairs of skates with different styles of blades. Both suggested a synchro blade as a good compromise.
I have a massage therapist who is also a former ice dancer (don’t be jealous, now), and I’ve talked this problem over with her. I told her how I kept almost tangling my skates on the outside mohawk of the Fourteenstep, and she told me that she’d taken a bad fall getting her blades caught together on that very same step. That’s when she switched out of freestyle blades and into dance blades. Read the article →
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