What I love the most is getting on the ice and just popping in a fabulous CD and skating - all by myself, the rink completely empty, just me and the music.
I begged my mom to let me start skating.
I really like figure skating.
Skating is what got me into punk rock.
When you go out skating with your friends, you need one friend who knows how to take a good picture. Without the picture, there is no proof that you pulled the trick.
That's what amateur skating is about, technical expertise, and it should always stay that way.
The most important thing about skating is that it teaches you to do the things you should do before you do the things you want to do.
People don't understand sarcasm, like, they take everything too seriously. People need to lighten up and go ice skating.
The skating community is very fickle. And with me, they're especially fickle for whatever reason. Maybe I bring it on myself, but if you don't prove yourself and you don't skate consistently, then they can very easily write you off and bring somebody from behind you and put them in your place.
And the fact that I liked to show off and be the center of attention really lends itself to figure skating very well.
In ramp skating, theres this guy Alex Perelson whos really coming into his own and doing some amazing new stuff we havent seen before. Just different types of spin.
I am a skateboarder, and to stay fit for skating I have to stay away from a lot of things. I go to parties and that's fun for me, but between skating and lifting and everything, I know what I have to do the next day, so I'm very conscious about my schedule and keeping it.
I used to skate a lot when I was a kid. I loved it and was quite good. When I came back to London in around '85, I got really into skating again. But at the time, it had no influence from hip-hop. It was just thrash rock, hardcore rock, and skulls and all black - that kind of style. In Japan, the skaters were also strictly into rock culture, too, but I was coming from the hip-hop side, so for a while it was difficult to mix both interests.
And as you got older, the training became more developed and precise. We did plays, we had voice classes with great dialect coaches. But I was never into it on a school level; it was this kind of private little thing I did. At school I was a rugby guy. At school I was a rugby guy. I was causing trouble with my mates and skating and tagging buildings, and smoking bongs.
If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump quad, I don't know. Now it's not figure skating. Now it's dancing.
My mother introduced me to many different things, and figure skating was one of them. I just thought that it was magical having to glide across the ice.
Ice dance should not be seen as a rigid conformist form of figure skating. There is a great deal of freedom and originality to be had.
When I was skating you had to participate in every thing.
Classic music will always come across better on the ice because skating has such a rich history, rooted in tradition.
When the going got tough, I really had to draw on many of the same competitive instincts I did when I was skating. I really had to put my head down and stay positive. I had to fight.