Can a long program go viral?
Gymnastics is made for viral moments. How can figure skating find some of their own?
In the weeks since the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, several members of the skating media and many fans have said that Jason Brown’s “The Impossible Dream” long program would have gone viral on social media if he had not fallen on the triple flip at the end of the program.
Would it have been a moment? Yes, one that I probably would rewatch anytime I needed a pick-me-up.1
But would it have gone viral? When you look at the properties of viral videos, it is unlikely that the entirety of a perfect Brown long program would go viral, which leads to the question: Can a long program, with lengths between four and four-and-a-half minutes, ever go viral?
First, let’s look at the numbers. Though there are social media strategists who claim that video length doesn’t matter, analytics show otherwise. The average length of a popular video on TikTok is 21-34 seconds. On Instagram, many strategists recommend sticking within 60 seconds, because that is the preview length of an Instagram video, thus what you see in a feed or in a preview shared to a reel. Facebook-wise, it’s interesting to see that in a 2020 study, only 46% of users said that they watched videos on the service – odds are, given how they have incentivized video posts over the last year, that has increased. There are several stats that claim that successful Facebook videos are two minutes or less, though those came out before 2022. When it comes to Twitter, the social media management service Hootsuite says 44 seconds is the best video length.
What is the most applicable viral video example to figure skating? The floor exercises in college gymnastics. They are the most viral videos of the artistic sports genre. Floor exercises are 90 seconds long, which might be slightly longer than the TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram recommendations, but that hasn’t harmed their popularity. From Lloimincia Hall in 2014 to Katelyn Ohashi in 2019 to Margzetta Frazier today, they just keep gaining traction and have made college gymnastics as popular as it has ever been.
What’s the most recent skating viral video? Many are videos of Ilia Malinin’s quadruple Axel from Skate America in October. I took one of them, and my video was just eight seconds long. Other more viral ones weren’t much longer than that.
So if skating is seeking a viral video moment, odds are that an entire long program, or even the latter half of one, is going to have a hard time breaking through past Olympic sport diehards. Social media analytics show that it is just too long. A single jump or a final step sequence or spin could do it, but the entirety of a long program? Probably not.
Should skating, and its marketers, media and federations, look instead to the short program for viral content? With a running time of two minutes, 40 seconds, it’s a more social media friendly length, though still not ideal. That is one issue that skating has that gymnastics doesn’t: everything gymnastics does is in a digestible length. Quick vaults, 90 seconds or less routines on most other apparatus.
It’s interesting to consider that skating isn’t tailored for today’s media consumption habits, because for decades, the sport tailored itself for television. From the 1960s - 1990s, skating made several changes influenced by the dawn of televised sports: eliminated figures and added a short program, among other smaller changes. It was so important for those in charge of the sport to appeal to and work well on television that they changed the rules of their sport to do so. But now, television isn’t the medium it once was, and it doesn’t work well on social media.
What’s a sport to do? Adapt again to the media of the day? You could eliminate two elements from the short program (I would eliminate the solo Axel jump and a spin) and get it down to two minutes. You could also change scoring so the short program score gets points added for the skater’s placement after the short program, therefore making it matter more in the final standings, thus encouraging skaters to value its composition more.
Or should those in skating lean into how to best feature their most spectacular feats on social media? (Instead of making inappropriate eating joke memes using photos of skaters, like the ISU did this past week.) Maybe all you can do to go viral is feature the last 30 seconds of a program that has a moving ending and a massive standing ovation? Better encouraging clean programs and the artistic composition of those programs would help create potential viral moments. You can’t continue to value jump attempts over clean landings if you wish to have a visually appealing sport, yet that’s what the ISU continues to do.
Whatever the answer is, skating’s leaders need to figure out how to best get the wonders of the sport in front of non-fans, and quickly.
(And while we are at it, I must mention that the video of Brown’s long program “expired” on the NBC Sports page on February 13th. I had to dig through the depths of YouTube to find a version to link to above, and who knows how long it will be allowed to stay up. Is it smart to take down a video of a performance so good that a large amount of people are questioning its ability to go viral?)
It would have been added to the playlist alongside Paul Wylie’s 1992 Olympic long program, Todd Eldredge’s 1998 Worlds long program, Naomi Nari Nam’s 1999 Nationals long program, and Brian Boitano’s 1988 Olympic long program. It’s a list I recommend watching whenever you have an awful day. What programs are on your pick-me-up list?