By 1988, thirty-eight nations had joined the ISU. Over the next few years, the organization abandoned one of its long-held practices, eliminating the use of mandatory figures in the singles' figure skating competitions and reducing their use in ice dancing. During the 1970s and 1980s, several Asian countries joined the ISU, followed in the early 1990s by many new countries emerging from the breakup of the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. In 1994, synchronized skating was formally recognized as a separate discipline, and the first ISU World Championships were held in 2000 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.