Glice at the 60th Ordinary ISU Congress 2026 in Tenerife: Invited by the ISU to address world skating.

Transcript of the Glice address to the 60th Ordinary ISU Congress, Tenerife, delivered by Viktor Meier, Co-Founder and CEO of Glice AG. Lightly edited from the spoken delivery for readability, with automatic-caption errors corrected. The names of individual young skaters, and of one athlete who tested the surface, have been removed pending their consent.

00:25Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, members of the ISU and the ice skating community. I am really honoured to be here, and very thankful. This is an important milestone in realising my personal dream: to bring your beautiful sport of ice skating to more kids and more people around the world.

00:51We are here to talk about synthetic ice. Synthetic ice has been around for several decades already. Some of you have tried it, and maybe you rightly say: that does not glide, it makes my blades very dull. And you rightly say, that is not an option. Or is it?

01:23I am here because I was invited by the ISU, because something has changed. That something is what I am going to talk about in this presentation.

01:37Like the previous speaker, I am not a figure skater, but I was an athlete. I did karate, and I understand the discipline it takes to reach high performance. At heart I am an entrepreneur, and I am passionate about using every means at my disposal to realise the dream I just described, because my personal concern is that your beautiful sport is under a lot of pressure.

02:12We have a crisis in Hormuz creating insecurity around energy. We have rising energy prices driven by electrification and data centres. And it is no secret that there are ice rinks closing all over the world. The rink in Ayr in Scotland, where energy prices doubled and they simply could not afford it. The rink in Prescott in Canada, where the refrigeration system failed and they could not afford to build a new one. And the rinks that do exist are under all of these pressures.

03:05If you go further: a rink is made of water, and half of the population by 2030 will be living in a water-scarce environment. That is not only countries in the global south. It is also a large part of the United States, Canada, France, and even parts of Germany.

03:38And there is a quiet victim. The talents. The young skaters who cannot train as much as their talent deserves. It is not the lack of talent. It is the lack of available ice time. That is exactly where my personal passion comes from, to find a solution.

04:02As I said, synthetic ice has not really been an option for the development of professional athletes. When I started with Glice I liked the concept of synthetic ice, because of the saving of water and energy. But I also felt the quality was not where it needs to be, because real ice is really special. It is almost magical. What is special about it is that it has a very hard core, and it has a very flexible surface, and that is what makes you glide.

04:41To achieve that we put in a lot of research and development, a lot of prototyping. We used materials such as nanoparticles used in space technology, to reach these properties of real ice.

05:02There are three big challenges with synthetic ice. Number one is that all synthetic ice is far too soft. When you skate you sink in, similar to an icebreaker boat. You sink in, and you have to push and plough through the plastic, and that makes it very resistant. So we found a way to make the material much harder, so that you do not sink in.

05:31We commissioned the Fraunhofer Institute, Europe's largest research institute, to test all our prototypes and see where we were getting to. Here you see a test setup: a skate that goes back and forth on top of a piece of synthetic ice, to measure indentation and friction. We were able to lower the indentation, that is the blade penetration or sinking, compared with the next best synthetic ice competitor product, by 45%. That means you sink in half as much as on the next best synthetic ice product.

06:24The second part is friction. Ice, as you know, has a very low surface friction. How did we lower ours? I will take out a deck of cards, because that is the easiest way to explain it. Everyone knows cards. What we were able to achieve is called the shear effect in physics. There are layered molecules in our product, and when a skate comes and skates on it, each molecule, or each card, multiplies the glide effect of the next. That is how we were able to replicate this low friction.

07:04And most of all, we were very, very surprised when the lab results showed that we even achieved the same friction as refrigerated ice. This was a sensation, and so the Fraunhofer Institute published a press release, and it was in hundreds of media outlets, that we achieved the same friction.

07:32However, I must say a caveat. This was made under perfect laboratory conditions, and it was under low skating speed. So if you skate very fast, the friction is still higher than what we measured in the lab.

07:53So that you understand: when you skate, the effort you put into skating is a combination of friction plus blade sinking. That is the skating effort. By lowering the friction and the blade sinking, we were able to lower the skating effort. A lot of figure skaters are very concerned about their precious skates, about the blade, that they do not want to waste it. Here it is the same. Blade dulling is a result of friction and blade penetration, and by lowering both we were able to drastically lower blade dulling.

08:38Another concern, and that is the third one. If you have experience with synthetic ice, there are little shavings, and that creates a concern about microplastics. We really took that to heart. We engineered the material so it has much less abrasion. It actually has 6% lower abrasion than the next best product. That is already an achievement, but we want to go further.

09:10Also important: we developed a cleaning process which captures 99% of the particles. We made sure that the particles are a little bit bigger than a micrometre, which means that if they are inhaled they cannot connect with biological cells, and we made them not airborne. So the health concern is taken care of. And most important, the material is not toxic. You could eat our synthetic ice and you would be perfectly fine.

09:44Okay, enough theory. I guess you want to know how it looks in practice. An ice skating club in Switzerland heard about our breakthrough. They came testing, they liked it, and they have a regular ice rink, normally an 800 square metre ice rink. They installed Glice during the summer. So during the three or four months of summer, when normally they would be on a summer break, their students can practise on the ice, and they can come back from the summer season already more advanced, and enter the new season with new skills.

10:39The feedback was very good. In just a few weeks they made improvements. They could do all the figures they want to do. And the younger coaches also appreciate the environmental aspect of it. So that is Switzerland. How does it look in other countries?

11:02In Mexico City there was a famous rink called San Jerónimo, and it was unfortunately closed, and some of the figure skating coaches there were out of a job. The other real ice rink was too far away. If you have been to Mexico, you can see the distances are really large. So they set up an ice skating club on Glice. I must also say it is an older version, it is not the breakthrough product I just presented in the statistics. They started from scratch, and now, after two or three years, they already have 115 members. What is also a good thing is that the membership fees are much lower than normal, so the kids can afford it. We got very good feedback.

11:59And what is most amazing, to use a buzzword of today: the kids who trained there are Glice native. They started on Glice, they trained and practised and prepared for competition on Glice, and they went to a real ice competition, and they won medals. [Skater names removed.] One won a silver medal and one won a gold medal.

12:39Something which is surprising is that coaches love it even more than the skaters. Why? Because Glice is a little bit less forgiving. If you make an error, if you land not correctly, you cannot mask it with a sleek recovery. Or if you do not have the perfect edge, it shows errors. And errors can be corrected, and like that you advance much faster.

13:11Another phenomenon we have seen is that more and more skaters who experience the ice rink in these centres buy an ice rink to train at home. Maybe you have read the book by Malcolm Gladwell: you need 10,000 hours of any skill to master it. So this could be your apartment from next week on.

13:56We also have something for the speed skaters. A multiple gold medallist happened to live nearby where we set up an ice rink, and he came testing, and he liked it. So that is something we have to explore. Please, if you are passionate about building the next speed skating track, come to me. [Athlete name removed.]

14:30Okay, enough talk about technology. I think what is also important is the investment. How does the investment in a Glice rink compare with real ice? There are different ways to measure it. Is it the rink itself, is it the dehumidification system, and so on. Depending on how you look at it, it can be half to 10% of a real ice rink investment. So it is huge. You can build ten rinks instead of one.

14:56What is more mind-blowing, obviously, is the electricity bill, which goes almost to zero. And we talked about water scarcity. A regular ice rink needs between half a million and 1.5 million litres of water every year. Here we get to zero. We just need some water for daily cleaning.

15:27Something a lot of people do not think about: if you want to start a skating academy and you have a little space, a warehouse, and you put in a real ice rink, you need to think about all the space for the chillers, for the ice handling, for the Zamboni garage. With Glice, all this space, which can be up to 40% if it is a small rink, can be used for practice. So that is another advantage.

15:54And no more waiting for the Zamboni, the 20 minutes where you have to be off the rink. If you count it all together, in a rink which operates from 6am to 10pm, that could easily be 3 hours of additional training.

16:12And last but not least, after an hour or 90 minutes the ice gets slushy before the Zamboni comes, and you have to avoid some lumps. With Glice you always have the same consistency of the ice. So in summary, from an economic point of view, you save on cost, you save on time, and you save on space.

16:40And there are more advantages we can talk about personally later. But having said that, I am not here to tell you: hey, let us do the next Olympics on Glice. On the contrary. Even though I am the entrepreneur behind Glice, there is something magic about real ice. It is natural. I love it. So the goal is that Glice never replaces ice for the big competitions. We only see it as complementary.

17:14If you have an ice rink and you see you want to have more ice time, you want to have more students, whatever, you can have Glice. In the hockey scene we do that much more already. It is almost normal to plan a regular ice rink with a hockey training centre on Glice next door. Or, as we have just seen, instead of closing a rink, why not have it as a replacement, or somewhere where climatically or budget-wise it is not possible.

17:49And last but not least, although we had this huge success and breakthrough in technology, we are not here to claim that it is 100% identical to real ice. But to give you some context: lately a figure skater who skated on Glice told me, it is a bit like buying a new car. When you buy a new car, the gears and everything feel a bit different. And when you drive around, after 20 minutes, 30 minutes, it feels like you always drove that car. Here it is the same. You just need some adaptation and you get used to it.

18:36And most important, and that is my goal today: I think you learned a lot today, so you need to shake out your legs a bit. So please, I ask you to come downstairs. Right below this room we set up a Glice rink. If you have your own skates, bring them, otherwise we have rental skates. It is very important, as I said, to put them on and let them warm up a bit, so that they glide better after a few minutes when the blade is warm. And just get used to it, like my friend with the deck of cards example. Let us see. Judge it for yourself. Okay, thank you so much.