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Figure skating is the third most popular spectator sport in the United States after football and baseball, yet as popular as it is, most of the fans who watch on TV don't know what the different jumps are. Television commentators do not take the opportunity to educate the audiences and so people who love the sport watch are ignorant of even the most basic terminology. They hear the words: loop, toeloop and half-loop; flip, Lutz and Salchow and the Axel; but those words have no meaning.
Figure skating jumps are not that difficult to understand. The key to learning the jumps is to learn the basic skating terminology that lies beneath. Each jump has three parts: a take off, a rotation and a landing. Additionally, the take off and landing have a specific foot and a specific edge. The rotation has a direction which affects which foot and which edge defines the jump.
Sound confusing? It really isn't.
Most skaters rotate counter-clockwise (CCW), so in general, their jumps all look alike. About ten percent of skaters rotate clockwise (CW), some notables are five time US Champion Todd Eldrege and popular professional Rudy Galindo. When a CCW skater takes off for a jump, he or she does so on the opposite foot from the CW skater. It is the same jump, just mirrored. For the sake of simplicity, let's use CCWs jumps.
Once you consider the rotational direction, it is the take off and the landing which defines the jump. As noted, each jump has an associated foot and edge with each take off or landing. The loop, toeloop and half-loop all take off from the same foot, the right. The flip, Lutz and Salchow all take off from the left foot. The Axel takes off from the left as well.
Each jump has an associated edge for the take off. An edge is just a fancy way of saying which side of the foot the skater is leaning on. An outside edge means the skater is leaning over the outside of the skate, away from the center of his or her body. An inside edge means the skater is leaning on the inside of the foot, towards the center line of his or her body. The loop, toeloop, half-loop, Lutz and Axel all take off on an outside edge. The flip and Salchow take off on an inside edge.
Once the skater gets into the air, he or she must rotate. All the common jumps except the Axel have an even number of rotations. A single jump has one rotation; a double, two; a triple, three; and a quad, four. The Axel is the exception. A single Axel has one-and-a-half rotations. A double Axel has two-and-a-half rotations; a triple, three-and-a-half and so on. The reason that the Axel has that extra half rotation is that it takes off from a forward direction of travel and lands with the skater's back to the direction of travel. All the other jumps take off backward and land backward.
Each jump finishes with the landing. All the jumps are landed on the right foot on an outside edge except for the half-loop, which is landed on the left foot on the inside edge. The half-loop is often seen only as a single for this reason.
Figure skating is not rocket science. You, too, can learn to identify all the jumps. It's as easy as one, two, three; take off, rotate, and land.
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