Ice Skating

Norway’s Sonja Henie played a large role in popularizing figure skating during the 1920s and 1930s. On the strength of her athletic jumps, modern costumes, and inventive choreography she won gold medals at the Winter Olympic Games in 1928, 1932, and 1936. Henie later skated in ice shows and in motion pictures, inspiring many people to take up skating. American skater Dick Button, a five-time world champion (1948-1952) and two-time Olympic gold medalist (1948 and 1952), brought outstanding athleticism to skating. Along with inventing the flying camel sit spin, he was also the first skater to successfully complete a double axel and a triple jump in competition. Soviet skaters Oleg Protopopov and Liudmila Belousova transformed pairs skating in the 1960s with their elegant, balletlike movements. In the late 1960s American Peggy Fleming became the sport’s leading star, winning a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics and later being featured in a number of televised skating shows. Following Fleming in this role was Dorothy Hamill of the United States, a gold medalist at the 1976 Winter Olympics. Another Russian skater, Irina Rodnina, won three straight Olympic gold medals (1972, 1976, 1980) in the pairs event, with two different partners.

In the 1980s the sport was led by American Scott Hamilton, who won four consecutive world titles (1981-1984) and the 1984 Olympic gold medal, and East Germany’s Katarina Witt, who won gold at both the 1984 and 1988 Olympics. Brian Boitano of the United States won the 1988 Olympic men’s gold medal. British ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean dominated competition during the decade with innovative routines that broke away from ice dancing traditions, winning four world titles and an Olympic gold medal. In the late 1980s, Kurt Browning of Canada became the first skater to successfully land a quadruple jump in competition. In pairs skating, Ekaterina Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov won two Olympic gold medals in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In the 1990s women’s skating was led by Americans Kristi Yamaguchi, Michelle Kwan, and Tara Lipinski, along with Oksana Baiul of Ukraine, all of whom won world championships. Yamaguchi, Lipinski, and Baiul also won Olympic gold medals. Top men’s skaters included Browning, Canadian Elvis Stojko, American Todd Eldredge, and Russians Viktor Petrenko, Aleksi Urmanov, Ilia Kulik, and Alexei Yagudin.

Figure skating experienced an ugly scandal in 1994 when a top American skater, Tonya Harding, was implicated in a physical attack on a rival, American Nancy Kerrigan. Associates of Harding, including her ex-husband, were arrested for the attack, which prevented Kerrigan from competing at the U.S. Championships. Harding was never directly connected to the crime but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was banned from the sport for life. Kerrigan recovered and went on to win the silver medal at the 1994 Olympic Games.

A different kind of scandal erupted at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, one concerning the judging of the pairs event. After the judges gave the Russian team of Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze a narrow victory and the gold medal over Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, a huge outcry went up over perceived inaccuracies. Then, the judge from France said she had been pressured by her own federation to vote for the Russians, leading to suspicions of vote-swapping (the French would go on to win the gold medal in ice dancing). To stem the controversy, Olympic officials decided to award both the Russians and the Canadians gold medals. The incident damaged the image of the sport and prompted demands for reforms in the judging process. In the individual competitions at the 2002 Games, the gold medals were won by Yagudin and American Sarah Hughes. Yagudin also won the 2002 world championship, while fellow Russian Irina Slutskaya won her first women’s world title.

The development of modern speed skating is credited to Jaap Eden, a Dutch skater born in 1873. He set a world record in 1894, completing a 5,000-meter race in 8 minutes 37.6 seconds. Since then Eden’s record has been broken many times and today the best skaters complete the same distance in a little over 6 minutes, primarily as a result of more sophisticated training methods. Other successful speed skaters include Eric Heiden of the United States, a three-time world champion who won five gold medals during the 1980 Winter Olympics; Norway’s Johann Olav Koss, who set three new world records during the 1994 Winter Olympics; and Dan Jansen of the United States, who dominated speed skating for more than ten years from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, capping his success with a gold medal and a world record in the 1,000-meter long-track race at the 1994 Olympics. Successful female speed skaters include Germany’s Gunda Niemann, who won seven all-around world championship titles between 1991 and 1998; Bonnie Blair of the United States, who won a total of five Olympic gold medals in the 1988, 1992, and 1994 Olympics; and Claudia Pechstein of Germany, who like Blair won the gold medal in the same event during three straight Olympics (5,000 meters at the 1994, 1998, and 2002 Games).