No DanceSport at the 2020 Olympics :(

danceronice said:
Triple jumps. Triple spins are for babies. ;) (Even my thirty-seven-year-old, creaky-kneed self can rotate a spin three times.) There are enough adults who skate for USFS to offer a separate test track and some competitions, where the judging standards allow for decreased speed and power. But there's definitely always an aura of 'why are you here?' towards adult skaters. Even when you CAN perform to a reasonably high level, since you have absolutely no chance of even competing at a regional level on a standard track, coaches and clubs kind of think of you as a bit of an oddball at best.
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I was picturing a triple jump when I wrote that sentence. I forgot that figure skating ever used non jumping spins (proving the point further?)
 
danceronice said:
But there's definitely always an aura of 'why are you here?' towards adult skaters.
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I'm actually starting to notice that in the local ballroom scene... some of the people in the studios have no use for anyone who doesn't aspire to, or have a realistic shot at, high-level international competition. It's great when the adult competitors and social dancers support the studio by buying lots of private lessons, but that doesn't mean they are particularly welcome on Friday night, or in rounds.

To touch on some things Danceronice has said (DoI, please feel free to disagree), a big issue with the DoD system is that what it seems to reward is, can you do the pattern at all... whether or not you can do it well is beside the point. If you land that quad axel and windmill your arms coming out of it, but manage to not plant your behind on the ice, it scores far more than a perfectly-done triple. The Olympics seems to push all of the sports that aren't either stick-n-ball, or racing, in that direction. One of the first things that would happen in Olympic ballroom would be that there would be an enormous amount of pressure to legalize lifts in all dances. You can guess what happens next.
 
They keep tweaking CoP to TRY and allow for a completed element counting more even if it's a lower degree of difficulty than one done poorly (US women are never getting back on the podium unless they fix their underrotations--it doesn't count as a triple if you complete more than 1/4 of the blade turn on the ice.) But it's not the only problem-the object was to quantify, but you leave grade of execution (quality plus or minus) and can skew it, and then there's the PCS (Program Component Scores). These were meant to cover what the "Artistic" mark used to, but they're even harder to understand, and result in judges being able to sway results the same way they used the second mark. And of course, it's now anonymous, so there's no playing 'spot the French judge.'
 
I made it through about two minutes....it's like they're robotic...penguin...acrobats. God willing, that will never happen to ballroom.

In case anyone didn't catch from the video title, that's from a WDSF event.
 
ajiboyet said:
I went to the WDSF website and looked up the presidium's members and tried to Google some of them, but I haven't found anything to disprove that. Could you provide some links please?
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I don't need to Google them. Ken Richards is the USA Dance VP of Dancesport, and is on the Presidium. He and his wife are the directors of Blue Ballroom, in Delaware.
 
j_alexandra said:
Oh. my. But then, the ladies get to wear sneakers. It might be worth it. :p
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Or not -- I let the video run in a side window after posting, and the woman of the last couple injures her ankle on a bad landing for the first aerial flip (bad enough for her to call off the rest of the routine, but she was still walking, sort of).

And yes, the routines did all look very much alike when only half paying attention to them.... I think they all did four out of a set of six aerials.
 
Joe said:
I don't need to Google them. Ken Richards is the USA Dance VP of Dancesport, and is on the Presidium. He and his wife are the directors of Blue Ballroom, in Delaware.
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Ah, light. I don't live in the USA, so I'm sure you'll forgive me for not being familiar with him.
 
I guess if you're going to do that kind of stuff, you can't risk getting tangled up in a skirt.

And I agree that it gets monotonous pretty quickly -- there's almost nothing going on in between the acrobatics. Reminds me of some skating routines I've seen that consist mainly of jumps, and preparing for the next jump.
 
Oh for sure - a skirt would probably be dangerous. But even the way the leotard is cut can be done like what you see in gymnastics, or like what you see a Pittbull video.

But yeah, that's a bizarre genre. Of course the technical difficulty looks bananas as well as the strength and stamina, but it also doesn't look like dance anymore. IMO it looks like a hybrid between cheerleading and the original aerobics/fitness competition routines LOL

(sorry - back to topic.....)
 
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