Skate America is an international, senior-level figure skating competition held as part of the ISU Grand Prix of Figure Skating series. It is organized by the United States Figure Skating Association. The location changes yearly. Medals are awarded in four disciplines: men's singles, ladies singles, pair skating, and ice dancing.
The first Skate America (officially called Norton Skate) was held in 1979 in Lake Placid, New York, and was the test event for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. It was incorporated into the Grand Prix Series in 1995, the year of the series' inception.
On September 27, 2001, the Heinz Frozen Foods Company, an affiliate of the H. J. Heinz Company, agreed to become an official sponsor of the USFSA. This gave them the right to rename the competition to Smart Ones Skate America, using their brand name of frozen foods.
Famous quotes containing the words skate and/or america:
“To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, it ... will turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedom ... that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)