They say it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice before you can master something. If that’s true, then Fred Martin has mastered skate sharpening many times over, and he has the Olympic pedigree to back it up.
A native of Detroit, Martin is a third-generation figure skater — his grandfather, who grew up skating on Michigan ponds, passed down his passion to Martin’s mother, who skated professionally at one time. Despite his early exposure to the sport, Martin didn’t start skating until his early 20s, when he returned from serving overseas in Vietnam. He quickly picked it up and began competing at Detroit Skating Club (the original location in Detroit), where he began skating with Laurie, the woman who is now his wife of 55 years.
After quitting his job at the Chrysler assembly plant in Hamtramck, Martin began teaching figure skating full-time at Ann Arbor Figure Skating Club. He quickly realized something that would change his life.
“I found out my skaters couldn’t skate because their skates were so badly sharpened,” Martin says. “So I started doing the skate sharpening. I’m sure as bad as I was when I started, it was better than what they were getting.”
Martin returned to Detroit Skating Club, now located in Bloomfield Hills, and set up shop as Fred’s Skate Sharpening, where he became the de facto sharpener for the national- and Olympic-caliber skaters at the club. He became accustomed to their individual preferences and would travel around the world to be with them for competitions.
The list of professional skaters Martin has worked with is too long to name, but the biggest moment of his career came at the Nagano Olympics in 1998, where he worked with U.S. Olympian Tara Lipinski. The 15-year-old phenom won the gold medal in women’s singles, becoming the youngest Olympic gold medalist in figure skating history. While Martin wasn’t up there on the podium, the hours he spent forging the perfect edges on her blades were.
Back home, Martin continued supporting his skaters around the country, even buying a single-engine Cherokee Six plane, which he used to travel to competitions in the Midwest. After almost 50 years of sharpening skates, Martin retired in 2018, selling the business to Richard Brown, the brother of one of Martin’s former figure skating students. Brown, who had no prior sharpening experience, completed a six-month apprenticeship under Martin before officially taking the reins.
While Brown hasn’t made an Olympic trek (yet), his sharpening skills have. He worked with Russian ice dancers Gleb Smolkin and Diana Davis, who trained in Novi while preparing for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Today, Brown continues to work out of a closet-sized workspace at Detroit Skating Club, honing the blades of Olympian hopefuls using the same techniques he learned from his mentor.
This story originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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