Making Kim Yu Na High Tech: What’s Slick With Figure Skating Costumes
Posted by Jonathan in EQUIPMENT on 02-27-10 No Comments
Can we please stop dissing Olympic skater’s costumes?
I am not sure where this one got going; but right around week two of the five ring sports fest, our media elite loves to tear into what skaters wear as they skate. Sure, what Johnny Weir, Evan Lysecheck, and Rachael Flatt wore in their respective programs can be sort of goofy. But these athletes are not stupid. Costumes are a critical part of the skater’s trade. They must support programs, butts and fragile egos.
To pull all this off, it turns out skating costume are fairly complex, technologically sophisticated garments.
First of all, the prospective skate clothing designer has to engineer an outfit that stretches. That requires the use of a patterns that expand. Which is way far from easy. Just check out what Specialty Sportswear has in terms of patterns that give. And this is for a basic skating costume. Imagine how sophisticated the design needs to be for an Olympic level skater.
Next, these patterns have to be executed from of a blizzard of advanced synthetic fibers, beads and other techno chatchkas.. Here are metallic blended fabrics that give a halographic three dimensionality to skating clothes. And here is a custom bead and ink maker from Canada. This is pretty complex stuff.
And like any sports ecosystem, there are plenty of gadgets:
- Here is the IceLight boot warmer that fits over skate boots to keep feet warm.
- You can get protective pants from the Inside Edge.
- Skate boot tape to keep your skates looking slick from Sk8tape.
- Here is the Sport Mate skate sharpening tool, which looks pretty neat.
- Yet more protective pads from Skating Safe and Tommy Pad.
Let’s be honest here? Is any of this really that much dumber than a speed skating suit? Or what the bobsled teams wear? Or the half pipe boarders?
No, not really.
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