The line of four skaters blasts around the corner of the rink. Abbie Turner breaks from the group, lifts her foot and is vaulted into the air in a backward flip, landing in a plank position seven feet above the ice.
With her hip bones cradled in the palms of a teammate, and her shin supported by a second skater, the 20-year-old arches her back and presses her torso upright. Meanwhile, two other groups are executing the same manoeuvre at the same time. When all three clear the opposite corner, the lifted skaters cartwheel out in tandem.
“Do it again,” said Victoria Smith, the head coach of Nexxice’s senior E12 team in Burlington, Ont.
Coach Smith doles out a series of rapid corrections: Two groups were too slow on the descent. One of the lifted skaters needed more arch in her back. That’s the thing with synchronized skating: The technique doesn’t just have to be perfect – and beautiful – everyone has to be identical.
E12 skaters Mertcan Pak (left) and Paige Westerman practice a routine.
Synchronized skating is a rapidly growing figure skating discipline with Olympic ambitions. It’s also a sport that Canada dominates at the senior competitive level. Montreal’s Les Suprêmes are the reigning, back-to-back world champions, while Nexxice holds the Canadian national title and two world championships of its own.
But the sport is not yet well known among the general public.
“The thing people will usually say is ‘it’s like synchronized swimming, but instead of in water, it’s on water,’” Ms. Smith said.
Really, it’s a melding of all the different skating disciplines performed in a group. Synchro has the spins and jumps of freeskate; the edges, the turns and drama of ice dance; and the lifts and death spirals of pairs skating – plus a few of its own elements, such as heart-stopping intersections and circle, line and wheel formations.
“The dance, the quality of the movements, the intricacies between partners. I’m able to tie those ideas together and then multiply it,” Ms. Smith said.
The number of synchronized skaters in Canada has spiked by 16 per cent – from 5,889 in 2019 to 6,845 in 2022 – even though two recent seasons were either cancelled or disrupted by the pandemic. And as of this year, Canada has expanded its competitive synchro repertoire, with two clubs – Nexxice and Black Gold in Calgary – putting forward entries in the new “Elite 12” or E12 category.
The discipline launched in 2021 as a pathway into the Olympic Winter Games. So far, synchronized skating has not been accepted, despite figure skating’s popularity. One apparent explanation has been concerns about the size of synchro teams — and associated costs with adding so many new athletes — which typically compete with 16 on the ice. E12 only uses a dozen skaters.
But Shelley Simonton, one of the founders and current director of Nexxice, said the goals of E12 have shifted. With another bid for Olympic inclusion on the horizon, synchro is still hoping for rosters of 16 competitors. (The next opportunity for new sport proposals will be for the 2030 Winter Games. A host city has not yet been chosen, so there is no timeline for submissions, but it will likely begin sometime in 2026.) For now, clubs are using E12 as a way to keep more elite skaters within their organizations and to provide athletes with senior-level, international competitive experience.
“Adding it was a natural step for us,” Ms. Simonton said. “It’s a way to expand the club and give more skaters an opportunity to be trained in the Nexxice style.”
Paige Westerman, 21, joined the E12 team this year, after training with Nexxice’s senior team last season.
“When this opportunity came up, I jumped at it,” she said. Ms. Westerman commutes to practice from Oshawa four days a week, sometimes for a 6:30 a.m. start. She coaches and goes to the gym the other three days. “I’m at a rink every single day, seven days a week. It’s a lot of time in the car, but it’s worth it.”
Ms. Westerman started skating at three years old and tried synchro for the first time at age 8. She was hooked.
Nexxice E12 practising their short program.
“It’s everything you love about figure skating, but in a team environment. It’s just such a sense of friendship and family … there’s a lot of trust. Say, in a death spiral, someone is holding you up. All you see is the person’s feet,” she said. “You trust them to make sure you won’t fall, that you don’t hit another person and that it’s being done correctly – because you have to do it a specific way for it to even count.”
Synchronized skating itself is a relatively new sport. The first world championship was held in 2000, although its origins go back to 1956.
As the story goes, Dr. Richard Porter, a professor at the University of Michigan, noticed a group of skaters putting together a step sequence at practice one day, and he – a skater himself – thought it would be interesting to choreograph a big group number. At the time, it was called “precision.” That team, the Hockettes, a club which continues today, performed during University of Michigan hockey games and at ice shows.
Today, synchro runs in countries around the world, from Finland to Australia to Japan to the United States.
Nexxice E12 will represent Canada at the French Cup in February.
Even though two recent seasons were either cancelled or disrupted by the pandemic, the number of synchronized skaters in Canada has spiked by 16 per cent.
Reporter’s note: Another wonderful thing about synchronized skating is that it offers figure skaters a path to continue with the sport for life. In fact, this 39-year-old journalist competes in the Adult 1 category with Toronto’s Trinity team. Our team is one of the three that Ms. Smith coaches.
Robyn Doolittle