Skating with a Partner

This chapter discusses the development of pair skating. Skating with a partner of the opposite sex in which there is physical contact had its real beginning in England, bastion of combined skating. However, it was in the 1890s that hand-in-hand skating became fashionable and moved from the static confines of basic figures to continuous movement around a rink. The rigid English style still ruled supreme, but in that same decade the introduction of the first true skating waltz, which capitalized on speed and flow across the ice with partners in a true dance position, not just holding hands, dealt a death knell to hand-in-hand skating. The direction of couple skating changed rapidly and permanently when in 1895 the three-step waltz ushered in the era of ice dancing. As a competitive discipline at the international level ice dancing was many years in the future, but dances and steps from them provided from the beginning basic material employed in competitive programs for singles and pair skating.