The Origin Of Ice Skates

Pristine when snow and ice covered the earth, humans living in northern Europe began to ponder how can quickly in the ice and snow, the first people to wood of the sledge as ice transport, wooden sledge is bad control, is not smooth, very easy to fall, so the Dutch will horse bone ground to a smooth bottom surface, and to drill a hole on the bone, The straps are wound around each other through the holes like shoelaces, using the straps to secure the horse bone to the foot. They all worked together, several of them standing on the bones held together by leather ropes, each with a long stick in his hand, and working together to slide the huge bone skates.

The most primitive ice-skating tool of human beings -- bone ice-skating knife, not only in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain and other countries in the early literature, there are records about tying animal bones on the feet to slide on the ice surface. This seemingly primitive bone skater was the prototype of the skater that athletes wear on their feet today, laying the foundation for the development of the skater.

Of course, ice sports are not the patent of western countries, but also one of the important contents of ancient Sports in China. Especially in the Qing Dynasty, ice sports became an important form of winter sports in north China. The Qing Dynasty called ice sport bingxi and regarded it as "national custom".

Later, with the development of science and skating, the material of skates changed from animal bone to stronger metal with less friction, and the difference became more and more obvious. In the mid-13th century, iron ice blades mounted on wooden boards appeared in Holland. After about three centuries of evolution, in 1572, the Scots invented the ice skates made entirely of iron, which not only gave a leap forward to the development of speed skating, but also laid the foundation for the formation of modern figure skating.

From the middle of the 19th century, figure skating entered a period of rapid development, Philadelphia Bushnell in 1850 produced the world's first pair of steel skates, which replaced the Scottish iron skates, greatly promoted the development of figure skating.

Nowadays, according to different events, there are three kinds of skates, namely: speed skating skates, figure skates and ice hockey skates. Speed skating skates can be divided into large track speed skating skates and short track speed skating skates, that is, we often say speed skating skates and short track skates.