Legendary Ottawa figure skater Barbara Ann Scott, forever known as “Canada’s Sweetheart” for her gold medal victory at the 1948 Olympics, died Sunday evening at her home in San Fernandina, Fla. She was 84.
In the year she won Olympic gold, Scott also won the national, North American, European and world figure skating championships — an unprecedented feat that secured her a place in history alongside the country’s greatest sporting heroes, said longtime friend Pat MacAdam, who learned of her death at about 10 p.m. It remains the only gold ever won by a singles female from Canada.
Scott died just weeks after she made her final visit to Ottawa to open a gallery at city hall to showcase artifacts from her storied career.
“It’s Ottawa that made it all possible,” she told the Citizen in August. “I’m thrilled to have a home for my memorabilia in Ottawa.”0
Mayor Jim Watson and countless others expressed their sadness on Twitter after hearing the news Sunday night.
“She was a wonderful person who will be missed,” Watson wrote. “She was the epitome of class and grace. Ms. Scott generously donated all of her medals and awards to the city that she loved and that loved her.”
MacAdam and his wife, Janet, have been friends of Scott’s for many years, often picking up the diminutive former skater and her husband, Tom King, from the airport whenever they came to Ottawa.
“She was a quiet, unassuming philanthropist,” MacAdam said, noting that one of the first things Scott did after her success was create a foundation so she could support other skaters. She also coached and judged the sport for years following her retirement in 1955, inspiring generations of skaters.
“Even though I was a male skater,” Donald Jackson, the 1962 world figure-skating champion and 1960 Olympic bronze medallist, once told the Citizen, “she was the one person I looked up to. I wanted to do what she did. Barbara Ann Scott was the one big idol that we skaters knew, that everyone knew.”
Scott was born in May 1928. Her first pair of ice-skates appeared under the Christmas tree, a present from her parents, at an age when most kids would find even boots daunting. By age six, she was enrolled in Ottawa’s Minto Skating Club and was taking her first lessons in basic school figures, the largely unimaginative and jump-free skating patterns that then made up most of a competitive program of that era.
By the time she turned nine, photographs of little Barbara Ann looked more like another youthful star of the day — child actress Shirley Temple, born a year before Scott — than they did of Scott herself.
A 1939 Minto Follies program contains hints of the course Scott was on. The sixth number of that year’s show was Magic Garden, in which dozens and dozens of young skaters appeared as various soldiers, dolls, butterflies, poppies, tulips and fairies. It was the kind of performance that many nine-year-old skaters would be in.
Scott’s name, however, was not among the nearly 200 listed for that number. Instead, her name appears alone, in bold, for the evening’s eighth act, the Powder Puff Ballet, in which Scott skated to Johann Strauss’s Tales From Vienna Woods.
At age nine Scott won the Canadian silver medal for school figures and gave up regular schooling for a daily routine of seven-hours training on ice, and 2 1/2 hours of academic tutoring. By the time she was 10, Scott had already won a Canadian gold medal for school figures and, in her first try, won the Canadian junior championship.
While Scott’s strength was the mind-numbing and repetitive figures, she was an extremely powerful athlete and excelled at jumps, all the while making it look effortless.
At 16, The New York Herald Tribune wrote of her North American championship performance at Madison Square Garden: “It was the spectacular display of youthful skating exuberance by Miss Scott which carried her to victory ... (She) performed three graceful loop jumps in swift succession and went into the air freely in Salchow and Lutz leaps, varying her display with dizzy spins, all skated with a fast, perfectly balanced pace ... and graceful repose.”
In fact, Scott was something of a pioneer at women’s jumps. In 1942, she became the first female to perform a double Lutz.
She turned professional in 1948 after winning the Olympic gold and defending her world title. At that point, she also reclaimed a convertible Buick roadster originally been presented to her by Ottawa mayor J.E. Stanley Lewis in 1947.
Scott had been forced to return the car to protect her amateur status. The vehicle sat in an Ottawa showroom, then was repainted from its original cream colour to a pale blue and given a new licence plate before it was given to her again.
She skated in the Barbara Ann Scott Show, the Ice Capades and various other ice shows, but soon realized that the professional touring life was not for her.
“As a professional,” she wrote at the time, “I must lead a gypsy life, roaming America and Canada.”
When Scott made her final visit to the city in August to open the City Hall gallery, she made the trip from Florida in considerable pain. She had surgery for pancreatic and abdominal problems in March and she was never quite the same after, said MacAdam.
“It took everything out of her, but she was determined to come.”
Details about funeral arrangements were not available Sunday night.
Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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