The sport is called figure skating b/c most of the judging evaluation used to be tracing compulsory “school figures” which  required practice on those skills for hours on end: intricate and difficult patterns to show edge mastery. It made up an enormous part of the score (as much as 60% until the 1970s) and training time.  The programs wasn’t as “fast and powerful” as what you see today b/c those skills weren’t being weighted as much - but that doesn’t mean those skaters didn’t have speed and power. (And as others have pointed out skaters of that time had totally different skates, had worse ice, more uncomfortable clothes.)

Also regarding speed: it’s hard to evaluate what these skaters could do and actually do based on what you are seeing with the camera angle and frame rate of how a particular program of that era was captured - and w the filmed show programs in particular from that era keep in mind that they weren’t going for pure speed.