ice skating

The act of moving around or dancing on ice, using skates.

Can be traced back to the late 1600s in London when people were first seen gliding across the frozen Thames River. It wouldn't become an official sport until the nineteenth century. Modern figure skating owes much of it's craft to Jackson Haines who infused it with an aesthetic quality largely based on ballet. Figure skating was debuted at the Olympic Games of 1908. Today, it is the most watched competition in the Winter Olympics.

In fact participants are really "water skating", in a sense. The extreme pressure exerted by the pointed tip of the skate blade creates heat which, in turn, melts the ice. It is this melting that creates a smooth, flowing motion or, at the very least, severe bruising.