Art & Creativity Quote by Peggy Fleming

Fleming’s phrasing sounds almost casual, but it’s a blueprint for why figure skating reads as more than sport. “Then came the choreography” lands like a turning point: the moment the program stops being a sequence of jumps and becomes a story with pacing, breath, and consequence. She’s not romanticizing artistry for its own sake; she’s describing choreography as the mechanism that makes technical difficulty legible to an audience.

The key word is “impact.” Music and movement don’t merely decorate the skating, they frame it, telling viewers what to feel and when to feel it. In a judged sport where “clean” can look similar across athletes, that framing is power. It guides attention, sells risk as triumph instead of strain, and turns speed into urgency rather than chaos. Fleming’s “tends to really emphasize” is modest language for something skaters and coaches know is decisive: presentation isn’t a bonus, it’s persuasion.

The subtext is also about intention and authorship. “What you really want out of the program” suggests a program has an argument. Not “I want to land everything,” but “I want you to leave with this mood in your body.” Coming from Fleming - a skater whose era helped mainstream the idea of skating as performance - it reflects the post-1960s shift toward holistic programs: music, costume, and choreography as a single emotional contract. The athlete isn’t just executing; she’s directing your perception, engineering meaning out of blades on ice.