Figure Skating in 2014: Program components

Ten each: Ulrich Salchow (men, 1901-1911), Sonja Henie (women, 1927-1936), Irina Rodnina (pairs, 1969-1978) Figure skating is the only Olympic sport judged on both what the body can do and what it can say. A skater has between two minutes forty seconds and four minutes to launch multi-rotation jumps off a blade about four millimetres wide, spin fast enough to blur, and hold a musical argument together while doing it. The International Skating Union, founded at Scheveningen in 1892 and the oldest winter-sport federation in the world, governs four Olympic disciplines — men's and women's singles, pair skating and ice dance — plus a team event added at Sochi in 2014.

The sport's centre of gravity has moved repeatedly. Codified in Britain and reinvented in Vienna by the American Jackson Haines, it was dominated by Scandinavia and Austria before the Second World War, by the Soviet Union for four decades after it, and since the 2000s by Japan, the United States, South Korea, China and Russia. Figure skating was also the first winter sport contested at the Olympic Games, appearing at the 1908 Summer Games in London, sixteen years before the first Winter Olympics, and it remains the most-watched event of most Winter Games.

What makes it unusual among scored sports is that the scoring itself was rewritten in living memory. The 6.0 system collapsed after the 2002 Olympic pairs judging scandal and was replaced in 2004 by the ISU Judging System, which assigns every jump, spin and step sequence a published base value, adjusts it by a grade of execution from minus five to plus five, and adds a separate component score for composition, presentation and skating skills. The result is a sport in which a program is an arithmetic problem before it is a performance, and titles are routinely decided by fractions of a point.