This week, I wanted to take a little pause from our 'regularly scheduled programming' to talk about two different aspects of Skate Guard's online presence that you might not be super familiar with if you're following the blog on Facebook or Twitter or subscribing via e-mail or RSS - the Pinterest and YouTube pages. What make both of these unique is that they share materials you won't find anywhere on the blog.
Skate Guard's Pinterest page currently consists of no less than thirty nine different boards, which include photographs, artwork, articles and videos on a wide range of different skating history related topics. There are seasonal sections like 'Tis The Season For Skating and Spooky Skating, as well as whole boards dedicated to stars like Barbara Ann Scott, Toller Cranston and John Curry. You can step back in time to explore Victorian skating fashions and trade cards, learn more about the 1961 Sabena Crash and other skating tragedies and marvel at over fifty diagrams of the Special Figures that were in vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of my favourite boards to work on was/is Curiosities, an eclectic and head-scratching collection of truly unusual skating photographs and clippings.
There's also a Black Lives Matter board, along with one on LGBTQ+ Skating History. Both contain some fascinating clippings about skaters and events you might not be all that familiar with. If you're interested in checking out these goodies, you can subscribe at https://www.pinterest.ca/SkateGuard on your desktop or laptop or on your tablet or phone using the Pinterest app. A quick tip for navigating this page more easily: on the top you'll see 'created' and 'saved'. The 'saved' will give you a view sorted by board, whereas the 'created' is just a mishmash of all of the pins.
I'm also super excited to talk a little about Skate Guard's YouTube channel, which I've put a ton of time into over the last year, especially during the first wave of the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring. A small group of absolutely amazing people have been donating VHS tapes to the Collections, which I've been converting with Roxio on an old school VCR hooked up to my laptop, cutting on the Bandicut app and uploading to YouTube. For the sake of time and effort, I've tried for the most part to only upload things that aren't already readily available on YouTube. Like the Pinterest page, the YouTube channel is separated into sections - Sensational Seventies, Essential Eighties, Nostalgic Nineties, etc.
The latest batch of videos that have been put up over the last few of weeks includes videos from several of the Evening Of Champions shows at Harvard, as well as some 'new to you' videos from the 1988 Bursary Fund Gala show, exhibition performances from the 1984 Pro-Skate event and more. There are still dozens of videos I haven't clicked 'publish' on yet, because they will accompany specific blogs that will be coming out in 2021, but I really encourage you to take a deep dive into what's already up. There are some real treasures up there if you have the patience to use the 'search' function and dig! If you'd like to subscribe, the address for the YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKbnPsxrR-VTbe50rpj1kaw.
Skate Guard is a blog dedicated to preserving the rich, colourful and fascinating history of figure skating. Over ten years, the blog has featured over a thousand free articles covering all aspects of the sport's history, as well as four compelling in-depth features. To read the latest articles, follow the blog on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. If you enjoy Skate Guard, please show your support for this archive by ordering a copy of the figure skating reference books "The Almanac of Canadian Figure Skating", "Technical Merit: A History of Figure Skating Jumps" and "A Bibliography of Figure Skating": https://skateguard1.blogspot.com/p/buy-book.html.