Barbara Ann Scott, Canadian Figure Skater, Is Dead at 84 - The New York Times
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Barbara Ann Scott, who became a Canadian heroine at 19 when she won figure skating gold at the 1948 Winter Olympics, succeeding Norway’s Sonja Henie as the premier women’s skater in a sport Europeans had dominated for decades, died on Sunday at her home on Amelia Island, Fla. She was 84.
Her husband, Tom King, confirmed her death.
Growing up in Ottawa, Scott idolized Henie, the women’s singles champion at the last three Olympics before World War II. Emerging as a champion in her own right, Scott was hailed as Canada’s sweetheart when she put her country on the international sports map, prompting a toy company to create a Barbara Ann Scott doll. It became a cherished gift for a generation of Canadian girls.
Scott was the first North American to capture the world and European championships. She won both in 1947, and again the next year.
Her most spectacular triumph came at the 1948 St. Moritz Winter Games in Switzerland, where she became the first, and only, Canadian to win an Olympic championship in figure skating singles, triumphing on an outdoor rink rutted from hockey games. She was also a multiple North American and Canadian national champion.
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And she charmed with her youthful glamour. Life magazine, reporting on her 1947 world championship victory in Stockholm, called her “a shy, blue-eyed Canadian beauty” who was “undeniably lovely in face and form.”
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Barbara Ann Scott practicing in St. Moritz, Switzerland in 1948. Credit The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
When Scott returned to Ottawa, her hometown, after her world and European figure skating triumphs in 1947, tens of thousands greeted her, and the mayor presented her with a yellow convertible on behalf of the city, the license plate reading 47-U-1 (for “1947, You Won”).
Scott gave the car back when Avery Brundage, the head of the United States Olympic Committee, questioned whether her acceptance of it might jeopardize her amateur status and make her ineligible for Olympic competition. But the car was returned to her after she won Olympic gold in 1948 and decided to turn professional. It was repainted blue with the license plate updated to 48-U-1.
Scott usually dominated the compulsories, the tracing of figure-eight variations, which accounted for 60 percent of the scoring in her era, but she deftly executed spins and leaps as well. At 13, she became the first female skater to complete a double lutz in competition.
“She was delicate, precise, exact, meticulous — simply perfect,” said the American skater Dick Button, who won the men’s singles in St. Moritz, joining with Scott to herald the international emergence of North American skaters.
Button, who won again at the 1952 Winter Games but is known today more for his televised skating commentary, told Sports Illustrated in 1988 that in her St. Moritz gold medal performance, Scott “did everything right, and there was nobody to challenge her who was better in one particular area, either compulsory figure or free skating.”
In reflecting on the exactness of her compulsories, Scott said: “I like everything to be neat and tidy and symmetrical. I tried to get as near perfect a circle as possible.”
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Scott was named Canada’s athlete of the year for 1945 and again for 1947 and 1948. After her Olympic triumph, she embarked on a pro ice-show career, appearing at Christmastime in 1948 at the Roxy theater in Manhattan. She went on to tour with several companies.
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Barbara Ann Scott in 2006. Credit Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
With one, the Hollywood Ice Revue, she made her entrance at Madison Square Garden in 1955 in “ an evening wrap made of 546 white foxtails , 85 dyed gray and 375 blue,” Life magazine reported, lauding her fresh-faced teenage aura. The wrap rendered her “exhausted and nearly immobilized,” Life said, before she shed it to begin her routine.
She continued to perform until her marriage in 1955 to Mr. King, the press agent for the Hollywood Ice Revue, in which she succeeded Henie as the featured attraction. They settled in Chicago, where King’s business interests were based, but she was hardly forgotten in Canada.
“Even though I was a male skater, she was the one person I looked up to,” Donald Jackson of Canada, the 1962 men’s world figure skating champion and 1960 Olympic bronze medalist, told The Ottawa Citizen in 1999. “Barbara Ann Scott was the one big idol that we skaters knew, that everyone knew.”
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Barbara Ann Scott was born on May 9, 1928, in Ottawa, the daughter of Clyde Scott, an army colonel. She began skating at an Ottawa club when she was 6 and won the Canadian junior championship at 11. When she was 12, her father died, and friends and other Ottawa residents raised money to send her to competitions. She captured the first of her four Canadian national senior titles at 15.
After her pro career ended, Scott trained and rode show horses, owned a beauty salon and did charitable work. In their later years, she and Mr. King lived in Fernandina Beach on Amelia Island, in northeast Florida.
Scott carried the Olympic torch before the 1988 Calgary Games. She bore a torch again, this time into Canada’s House of Commons, preceding the 2010 Vancouver Games, where she was among the Canadian flag-bearers. She donated much of her memorabilia, including her Olympic gold medal, to the city of Ottawa in 2011.
On the 60th anniversary of her Olympic victory, she spoke of the moment she received that gold medal.
“It was a blinding snowstorm,” Steve Milton quoted her saying in “Figure Skating’s Greatest Stars” (2009). “I’ll never forget seeing the flag go up with the snow falling and hearing ‘O Canada’ so far away from home.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2012, on Page B17 of the New York edition with the headline: Barbara Ann Scott, 84, One-and-Only Skater. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe