axel

On January 7, 1882, at an international skating tournament in Vienna, a Norwegian speed skater named Axel Paulsen performed a jump no one had attempted in competition before. He took off from a forward outside edge, rotated one and a half times in the air, and landed on the back outside edge of the opposite foot. The crowd watched a new thing happen.

Paulsen was primarily a speed skater, not a figure skater, which made the jump more remarkable. He had trained for distance and time, not for aerial rotations or artistic presentation. The jump bore his first name almost immediately, though the formal term axel did not appear in skating manuals until the early twentieth century, after figure skating had separated from speed skating as a distinct discipline.

The 1908 London Olympics included figure skating, and the axel was already a recognized competitive element. By the 1920s, skating schools from Oslo to New York were teaching it as a foundational jump. The double axel followed in the 1940s, and Vern Taylor of Canada landed the first triple axel in competition in 1978. Ilia Malinin achieved the quadruple axel in 2022.

The word axel is unusual in sports nomenclature because it uses only the athlete's first name rather than a surname. The Salchow jump is named for Ulrich Salchow; the Lutz for Alois Lutz. Paulsen's given name stuck because the jump was so identified with him personally that even his contemporaries called it by it. A man's first name became the technical vocabulary of an Olympic discipline.