Terrific or Terrible Twizzles
By Natalie Cimpello
Pretend you landed all your lifts and had perfect footwork combinations at the 2018 Olympic
games. You’re approaching the twizzle but wobble when changing your arm and leg positions on your third rotation. Straight to the ice you fall on the twizzle, the hardest skill in ice dancing, or is that debatable. Some people do consider the twizzle as the hardest skill in ice dancing. However, others think that lifts or footwork is more challenging than the twizzle. In my belief, the twizzle is the most challenging skill in ice dancing.
To start off, twizzles make up an important part of an ice dancers technical score. A non-challenging skill would not be worth a lot of technical points in ice dancing. A Boston News interview states, “But if you ask the brother-and-sister ice dancing team Alex and Maia Shibutani, aka the ShibSibs, the toughest thing to pull of is a twizzle. “One of the most difficult tricks or elements—that’s the technical term—is twizzles,” says Alex Shibutani. Also according to Sports Yahoo, “When looking at twizzles, judges assess the difficulty of the position, the closeness of the partners to each other, and various other factors.” Judges look at a lot of things when accessing the score of the twizzle. It is also a very difficult skill to pull of as an ice dancer. Olympic information shows that if the twizzle is executed perfectly it can be the highest score element in ice dancers programs. From the information above you can see that the twizzle is a high scoring element in ice dancing.
In addition to the first reason, the twizzle consists of balancing on one leg in the center of your blade while changing arm and leg positions for three or more revolutions. Many people can’t even glide across the ice imagine having to do three revolutions of turning while changing arm and leg position every rotation. “This particular pattern, which calls for the skaters’ free legs to remain at the same distance and angle as their partners as they smoothly skate through a series of challenging twists and turns, is notoriously difficult and even the top teams have had trouble mastering it,” states the Denver Post. Robert Samuels from the Washington Post says, “ Among the required elements are sequences of fancy footwork, a lift lasting no more than seven seconds and the twizzle — fast, rotational spins that travel across the ic...
