Today we're happy to announce the launch of Skate Ukraine Academy – a platform for sharing knowledge and experience. For skaters and by skaters. We believe knowledge sharing is essential for Ukrainian figure skating to thrive. Success is a positive sum game – the more successful peers are, the higher chance for success for you. We're launching Skate Ukraine Academy to start building culture of trust and knowledge sharing among Ukrainian figure skating community members.

Today we're excited to announce a launch of Skate Ukraine – a new non-profit organization with an ambitious mission to fix the dire state of figure skating in Ukraine

In the previous article, "What's wrong with Ukrainian Figure Skating Federation?" we got to the bottom of the problem of sports organization systems and briefly mentioned the club system, popular in the developed countries. In this article, we'll take a deeper look into the club sports system, learn the major principles behind it, explore how it works (or how it doesn't) in other countries, and debunk some of the most popular myths about clubs in Ukraine .

UFSF governs figure skating in Ukraine and represents it in ISU. Its website boats about big achievements, Olympic champions, high moral standards, but if you look at statistics and listen to skaters, you'll be surprised how clear the degradation of figure skating under UFSF governance is. UFSF is often referred to as corrupt, rotten or outright "mafia". This article explores the topic and asks the core question – what's wrong with UFSF?

Sofiia Holichenko and Artem Darenskyi have formed a new skating partnership and will compete in pairs. They'll be coached by Liliya Batutina in Dnipro. They started skating in June, and three weeks into the partnership, are progressing at an impressive pace.

On March 20, 2020, Ukrainian figure skating community was deeply shocked and saddened to read the press release from the Ukrainian Figure Skating Federation (UFSF) on the ban and exclusion of Kateryna Dzytsiuk – Ivan Pavlov and their parents from its members. Furthermore, it was strongly recommended to ban them from access to any professional figure skating schools or ice rinks whatsoever. We explain how and why this is happened, and give you an update from skaters on their future plans.

Ukrainian figure skaters are scattered across the world, representing other countries and winning medals for other federations. Sport migration is a normal part of the modern globalized sports world unless the rate of talents fleeing the country is alarming. Is it? Till this day, this question was prohibitively hard to answer. There were no available statistics on how many Ukrainian figure skaters switched to other countries, when they switched or why. Today we're changing that.

In these tough days for the whole world and figure skating world in particular, when ice rinks are closed and athletes are stuck at homes in isolation, the Don't Rush Challenge gained popularity in social networks – a nice virtual way to support and connect with each other, and have fun together while waiting for the quarantine to finish. Ukrainian figure skaters have joined this challenge – you can watch the full video on our IGTV channel.