Weekend Crush: Kurt Browning

That Skate 2013 (c) Queen Yuna
CC Attribution 2.0 License

Kurt Browning has been one of my favorite figure skaters ever since I saw an early video of him skating along to Singing in the Rain (we'll check it out  in a bit). It's impossible to watch him at it and not be drawn right in and uplifted; he has such a sunny personality on the ice. Even with my limited figure skating knowledge the level of difficulty of his moves are apparent, and yet all he seems to care about is entertaining.

He's dressed up as everything from the classic, elegant Gene Kelly to a circus clown. No matter what the look you really can't miss his awesome footwork. One of his videos and I'm off on a hours-long jag of video searches touching on my favorite from Sasha Cohen and back again to my pole loves like Anastasia Skukhtorova. In one word: inspirational. I don't care if you love figure skating, dance, pole, ballet, or anything else athletic and expressive; you can find something to love about Kurt Browning.

Then there are his many competitive accolades including being the first man to land a quadruple jump in competition. What I personally love the most
is how seamlessly he puts all the technical elements together--you can see how fast his foot work is and how impressive his jumps are but what really stands out is the performance. This is something I wish we would see more in pole and figure skating with the push in both for trick-heavy shows. I am all for a standardized scoring system but there is a fine line between a qualitative based point system and a system that strangles creativity and expression.

Back to Kurt Browning's Singing in the Rain performance. This routine in itself looks so near to impossible--add to that the fact that he is skating in water! I have seen video of Gene Kelly dancing in roller skates and it makes me wish he would have tried figure skates, too. If he had, I bet it would look like this: