When it comes to art, bits and pieces of it can be found wherever we look, even in the most unexpected areas — like in sports.

High-adrenaline action, masculinity and thrill are qualities often associated with sports like football and basketball. But what about figure skating and synchronized swimming? These bring to the table qualities most football players can't pride themselves on — art and finesse.

LSA sophomores Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who earned silver medals for ice dancing in the 2010 Winter Olympics, serve as examples of fame and respect achieved from a less-than-conventional athletic art.

Their preferred activity is a blend — physical enough to where the training is demanding and exhausting, but beautiful enough to inspire awe and admiration for visibly seamless movements.

LSA senior Jacki Fiscus, the University's figure skating club president, finds that ice skating requires elements of both athletics and artistry from its practitioners.

“We sweat, we’re doing physical activities and it’s really strenuous,” she said. “But at the same time, you couldn’t have it without art because then it wouldn’t be beautiful. Our point is to look beautiful, our point is to make our audience cry or laugh and understand the story we’re telling with our program instead of just making them happy because we won.”

LSA sophomore Jenna Kaufman-Ross, a synchronized skater and assistant secretary for the team, said unlike running, skating requires positioning precision far beyond the natural movement of the legs.

Additionally, “winning” in skating is a lot less objective than most other sports, since it is more than the hit, kick or shoot and score of traditional athletics.

“A level of subjectivity” is always present, Kaufman-Ross said. “It’s not who wins the race, it’s not who finished first — it’s performance-based, and that’s someone’s opinion when it comes down to it.”

Rackham student Sarah Williams, a coach and athlete for the University's synchronized swimming team, discussed her sport’s evolution from artistic endeavor to full-blown athletic activity while still maintaining its allure.

“It used to be more of an entertainment activity, and now it’s turning into a hardcore sport,” she said. “We put on sparkly suits, headpieces and lots of makeup, but the practices are very physically demanding. You don’t think about it as artistic when you practice. Only when you put on the outfit does it become an artistic thing.”

What figure skating and synchronized swimming share with other sports is the amount of the companionship and trust between teammates.

At the same time, there’s an exhibition aspect to these activities that doesn’t exist in more conventional sports. For instance, members of each sport are featured at performances decked out in dramatic makeup, slicked-back hair, fancy suits and sometimes headpieces.

For skaters, it takes three handfuls of gel to keep their hair in place since they can’t use bobby pins. Synchronized swimmers use boxes of Knox unflavored gelatin to harden their hair and nearly 50 bobby pins to keep in the headpieces.

Though two distinct athletic arts, ice skating and synchronized swimming share more than the water-based arena in which they take place, be it frozen or liquid. They straddle the line between art and sport.

Ice ice baby

Moments before any synchronized skating competition, the team members gather in a circle, lock hands and close their eyes as their program’s song plays. Hand in hand, each one of them imagines the ideal performance so the image is the last they have before lining up to enter the ice.

Kaufman-Ross said the team also exchanges anonymous notes filled with positive reinforcing thoughts for each skater to read before the competition.