I Survived: My First Week on the Olympus Synchro Blade

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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.

The Skate Science synchro blades are supposed to be geared 60-70% for freestyle and 30-40% for dance. They still have a decent toepick on them so you can jump, and they’re intermediate in length between freestyle and dance blades.

I picked up my skates with the new blades last Tuesday and took them for a spin. To make things that much crazier it was my first time on the ice in three weeks. Did I really have to show up at the ice rink with just the skates and no padding whatsoever? The first ten minutes were really bizarre. I skated like a cautious beginner.

I’ve skated on them for a few hours now. I am going to be able to skate on them, but they are a lot different: the height, the rocker, the toe pick, the whole feeling. I can already tell that ice dance will be easier. I can bring my feet together without hesitation. With the shorter blade, it would actually take effort to tangle your skates together.

I feel like I’m on top of the ice, whereas with the Gold Seals I felt much more in the ice. I’m not getting the same pressure and crunch and growl. I’ll have to ask my skate tech if he gave these blades a shallower grind or if that is just how they are. I seem to be getting a decent amount of speed and glide regardless, so maybe they are just quieter?

The toe picks are quite different. Gold Seals have a big drag (first) pick, while these have a smaller first pick and a medium sized second pick. It makes a difference for jumping. The Gold Seals used to really launch me with that big first pick. With these, there’s a little delay from what I’m used to in getting into the air. Nevertheless I do seem to be able to jump fine. The toepicks, or maybe the rocker, is changing my three turns, the timing seems off.

I’ve only tried to spin a couple of times. It’s different, for sure, between the different toe picks and the lack of the big spin rocker of the Gold Seals. And yet I can spin, it’s coming along and hardly worse than usual (I’m not  a great spinner).

I’ve already fallen hard off the shorter back end of the blades. No harm done, but I just ordered some new wrist guards.

That’s my preliminary report, I’ll let you know how I like them after a while. Once I figure that out I can finally order the new skates I was fitted for back in January.