Ice Skating: British Skating Slowly Comes in From the Cold

As a brisk cha-cha tune echoed tinnily off the scuffed walls and peeling rafters of Streatham ice rink in south London early yesterday morning, Pippa Towler-Green and Phillip Poole swooped back and forth across the ice, practicing their lifts and spins. The contrast between their graceful precision and the run-down surroundings appeared to provide a perfect metaphor for the condition of British ice skating on the world stage.

Towler-Green, 21, and her 24-year-old partner leave on Saturday for the European figure skating championships in Lyon, where they will compete as the second string to the current British champions, the Edinburgh siblings Sinead and John Kerr. The absence through injury of Jenna McCorkell, Britain’s individual women’s champion, means that the two ice dance couples will form Britain’s only representatives in France next week.

Pippa’s mother, the former Diane Towler, stood at the edge of the ice yesterday offering technical advice to the couple. With her own skating partner, Bernard Ford, she won four consecutive world titles and four European championships in the 1960s. She and Ford were the forerunners of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who brought skating to a new level of popularity in the 1980s, reaching a climax with their Olympic triumph in Sarajevo. As T&D danced to Ravel’s Bolero, the nation held its breath.

Looking around Britain this winter, a visitor might mistake us for a nation born to skate. Around London the temporary open-air rinks at Somerset House, Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, Canary Wharf and the Natural History Museum, and a dozen other locations around the country, are thronged day and night with people of all ages and abilities. This Saturday the ITV network will devote 1½ hours of prime time to the first episode of Dancing on Ice, an eight-part series in which celebrities including Kelly Holmes, David Seaman, Bonnie Langford and Tamara Beckwith - billed as "the original It girl", which might perplex the surviving fans of Clara Bow - compete under the supervision of Torvill and Dean in a format borrowed from the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Since the days when the Nottingham couple were scoring perfect sixes, however, the story of British skating has been one of a painful struggle to arrest decline. Around three million people here skate regularly at one of the country’s 62 permanent rinks, but competitive figure skating, the sport of John Curry and Robin Cousins, lost its national lottery funding years ago. Only short-track speed skating has produced results good enough to qualify for continuing sponsorship from that source, and those with ambitions to follow in the blade-marks of Curry, Cousins and T&D face an uphill battle.

"We lost our way over a period of 20 years," Keith Horton, the general secretary of the National Ice Skating Association, told me. As a result Towler-Green and Poole work as skating teachers to subsidize their ambitions, fitting their paid employment around their practice sessions, which have to take place when the Streatham rink is not in use by the public. The national association, with around 3,500 members, pays for the couple’s flights to competitions. But they are confronting a long haul as they set out on the road to the Winter Olympics of 2010 and 2014, by which time they will have reached the prime years for figure skaters.

They owe their trip to Lyon to the Kerrs, whose eighth place at last year’s championships gave Britain an extra entry this time round. As runners-up to the Scottish brother and sister in the British championships, Towler-Green and Poole were awarded the chance to make their international debut. "It’s our first year and we want to place as high as possible," Towler-Green said, "but really we don’t know what to expect from ourselves or where we’re going to come. We’re just hoping to skate well and enjoy ourselves. It would be great to finish in the top 16, but we’re still young."

While she and her twin sister, Candice, practically grew up on the Streatham ice, her skating partner arrived by a different route. "When I was five," he remembered, "my parents took me to see the Torvill and Dean show at Wembley. That did it."

And yet, curiously, the T&D phenomenon did not spark a lasting upsurge in the number and the quality of British skaters. "It was noticeable for two or three years," Diane Towler said, "but then it started to drop off. Now the problem is that the sport doesn’t get enough publicity. And there aren’t enough rinks, which means that if you want to practice, you probably have to get up at five o’clock in the morning, which is something a teenager might not find attractive."

Her daughter remembers a time when the sport appeared much healthier. "There used to be thousands more couples when I was younger," she said. "It’s sad. We’ve still got a high standard of skating but there’s not as much TV coverage and there aren’t enough rinks. There are only two in London now. We’d really benefit from having an Olympic-sized arena down here."

The news is not all bad. The 75-year-old Streatham rink, four meters narrower that the Olympic standard, will be demolished in a couple of years’ time to make way for a supermarket, but a full-sized replacement will be built on a neighboring plot. The closure of the Altrincham rink a couple of years ago left the people of Manchester and district without anywhere to skate, but Planet Ice, the country’s biggest private rink operator, recently won planning permission to build a new one. Brighton, too, will have a new rink by the end of the decade.

At his office in Nottingham’s National Ice Centre, opened four years ago at a cost of £41m and paid for by the lottery and the local authority, the national association’s Horton expressed confidence in the sport’s gradual emergence from a period of self-inflicted gloom.

"Back in 2000, the governing body was insolvent," he said. "A lot of money had disappeared. All sports are expensive, but skating is particularly expensive, and it was being run by sports people who didn’t see the larger picture and didn’t run it as a business. There was no management structure at all. Since then we’ve got a new board, proper structures, and a four-year strategic plan. It’s meant that we’ve been able to create a development fund and put money into figure skating for the first time in ages."

Among the most urgent priorities was an improvement in the quality of tuition available to young skaters. "We’re no different from any of the other sports that have had to drag themselves into the 21st century," Horton said, "but we were one of the first to recognize that coaching standards needed to be raised. There was, shall we say, a little reticence to start with."

Now there are 450 Nisa-registered coaches, sorted into five levels, and skaters are able to move from one level to another as their performance improves. Starting in March, the coaches will be relicensed annually and ranked according on their performance. "That should give parents more confidence when they take their children to the rink," Horton said.

Just under half of those coaches have been trained in the new method of judging, imposed by the International Skating Union, which replaces a much criticized and often abused system with marks clearly based on the successful execution of specified skills.

"It’s made the marking clearer," Pippa Towler-Green said, "but you had a lot more variety in the programs before. All the lifts are ending up the same because they all have to reach a certain height."

But in a sport historically dominated, in Horton’s phrase, by judges and officials who are all volunteers, has it eliminated the sort of bias that saw Warsaw Pact countries, for instance, routinely favoring each other’s skaters?

"Some of it." Not all? "Well..."

On the glass doors at the Streatham rink, a poster advertises a special attraction. "Friday Night Disco Special," it says. "Free soft drink with every large fries!" Not exactly in line, perhaps, with the government’s thinking on young people’s health as the nation looks forward to an Olympic future. Britain’s ice dancers may be setting off in search of a brighter future, but their sport still has a long way to go.