Evie: Honestly, I would like to see a Flight of the Valkyries but Flight of the Zambonis, just a bunch of them cresting over a hill - [cue the music]
Becs: That's the epic we need to produce!
Evie: Coming this summer “The Flight of the Zambonis.” [music swells] One Zamboni driver against the World!
Becs: Sounds about right.
Evie: Well, you're not that far off, honestly. You're a couple steps to the left of what was actually used. Henry Kirk tried to emulate the feeling of ice using a mixture of materials and included in this mixture were salt, copper, aluminium and... hog's lard. Literal hog's lard - the fat from a hog - to make it slippery enough to skate on!
Niamh: Who's sitting in their kitchen one night thinking, "Oh, I know what I'll do, I'll make some fake ice using hog's lard!"
Evie: Obviously Henry Kirk thought that. So here's your ingredients: "30-50 feral hogs --" (hosts laugh)
Tilda: It seems that was just the way he was because he also offered one of his past medals to Dick Button. [Karly: My dude!] in 1947, and Dick Button at that point came second but Salchow felt that he should have won and a lot of people agreed because people were super salty about judging here. [Salchow] was like, you should have won here -- have this medal!
Karly: Ulrich seems like a pretty respectful dude. You know, giving away his gold medal to who he thinks rightfully should have won. That takes some stripe of character.
Tilda: Right but it's also very savage if you're not competing.
Karly: That is also savage. He's like, I beat you but I'll give it to you.
Tilda: Yeah, at this competition with Dick Button, he wasn't even competing. It was like this other dude who won. Gerschwiler won and then Ulrich was like, no.
Karly: [laughs] “You did not win. Uh-uh, not on my watch.”
Tilda: It was like really savage.
Kite: So today is gonna be our second episode of Tales of the Blade, which is a new series where we're gonna dive into the history of figure skating. So the catch here is that one of the hosts is going to be teaching topic of the episode and the other host does not know anything about the topic that is about to be taught to them. So this week we are going to be talking about Elaine Zayak, who has the dubious honor of having one of the best known technical rules named after her. We do have to warn you before getting into this episode that there is going to be some mention of eating disorders, so if that is particularly upsetting to you then please refer to the time stamps for where to skip in the episode. So let's get right into it! Yogeeta can you tell me what the Zayak rule is?
Yogeeta: Oh god, I'm sure I could have told you this when it wasn’t relevant.
