John Curry returned to Denver buzzing with more than Werner Erhard’s soothing truisms. For months he’d been fretting about his extended musical programme for the three defining tournaments that lay ahead. Suddenly, in an extraordinary way, the conundrum was solved. Somewhere mid-flight between Manhattan and Colorado – according to the myth he subsequently peddled – Curry experienced a revelation.
During a 20-minute burst of creative electricity, he mentally plotted every second of a five-minute routine that would shortly be watched by tens of millions. The music was by Ludwig Minkus – from the ballet Don Quixote – and without even stepping on to any ice, he could feel every movement deep in his bones. ‘From that moment, I could always do it; it was very strange – as if someone had waved a magic wand over me.’
Sadly, the truth was rather less exotic. In Spain the previous summer, Alison Smith had watched Curry doodling with the same Don Quixote music every day. (‘He was mad with me,’ she laughs, ‘because he wanted it for the Olympics and I told him he should stick with the stuff he was doing.’) Curry, as always, would not be told. Between Spain and the Sky Rink, he had continued to experiment. Familiar moves from earlier routines were re-sequenced into a new pattern. Edits were inserted into the Minkus music at key points. Point-scoring jumps were carefully accommodated around the rise and fall of the score.
When it all finally came together – no matter how he mythologised it publicly – the outcome was more of a climax to a life-long process than a convenient single revelation. Wherever it had come from, it was brilliant. And even Carlo Fassi – still smarting over Curry’s absenteeism – couldn’t hide a smile. Not only was the programme incandescent, it was also cunningly competitive, cut precisely to the Italian’s pragmatic design. ‘Very basic, but effective,’ Curry wrote later.
I set the programme so that no one could miss the difficulty of what I was doing. In fact it was more simple than what I’d been doing in the previous three or four years, but it was easier for the judges to see … I don’t think it was a sell-out to my artistic beliefs because it was a musical and nicely crafted piece of skating.
From its first balletic skips to its final kneeling pose – left hand on hip, right hand pointing to the sky – Curry had fashioned a work of such gliding energy that the Fassis were unable to find fault with it. ‘Normally these things take months,’ explains Christa. ‘This appeared to have been born on an aeroplane back from New York to Denver. Everything was there in his head. He’d even designed his outfit.’ The fact that their skater also radiated nerveless positivity merely added to their joy.
For the next few weeks, every evening at six o’clock, Curry ran through the routine inside the Colorado Ice Arena (or the CIA, as Fassi called it). More than 20 consecutive performances later, he still hadn’t fallen. Every rehearsal appeared flawless. Every movement seemed destined. Curry’s quest for flow had been rendered with such perfection that, for once, the required elements – the toe loops, the spins and the salchows – looked at ease amidst the surging force of his movement.
I was always ‘on’. Never missing a jump, or two-footing, or missing a beat. The whole thing became something of a lark … Suddenly I appeared as a very consistent person who could churn out a programme mechanically and the sight began to undermine the confidence of the other competitors.
‘It was scary,’ recalls Christa. ‘Twenty-three perfect programmes. It seemed impossible that he could keep it up and yet then he did another one. It was incredible he didn’t run out of steam. But then he’d done this EST course and had come back changed. Completely changed. All of a sudden he had no problems with mental garbage. Before it was always, “I can’t do it” or “I’m not good enough”. Doubt.’
As the European Championships approached, Curry practised furiously. ‘I had decided by then that I was not going to stop any more. I was not going to be tired any more. I was tired, but I did not stop. And it worked; everything worked.’ Even his closest friend couldn’t penetrate this wall of concentration. For the first time since 1968 his letters to Heinz Wirz had ceased and Curry’s coterie of influential Manhattan intimates – many of them introduced to him by Nancy Streeter – had been quietly expanding.
The skater with no home, and a passport full of ink, had attained new levels of rootlessness. For almost two years he’d been living in and out of Denver. When asked, he gave East 72nd Street, New York, as his home address. The boy from the West Midlands had become an English skater living in New York – underwritten by an American millionaire whose family made bank vaults. Apart from Alison Smith, his various coaches had been born in Switzerland, Germany, Canada or Italy. Before him, relatively few British athletes had crossed the Atlantic to better their chances. Within a decade, the route map laid down by John Curry would be familiar.
Back in London, Britain’s skating establishment twisted uneasily in its seat. Just so long as he won – and didn’t wave his arms too much – everything would be all right. Hopefully no one would notice that the man under the Union Jack didn’t even have a permanent address in his own country.
In the second week of 1976, Curry concluded his final session in Denver and flew to Geneva with the Fassis. Whatever happened now, their work there was done. A few days later, Nancy Streeter arrived in Switzerland to support him. It was the third trip she’d made to watch her young friend compete in the European Championships. This time, she was carrying his New York-made costumes. ‘I always feel a responsibility not to intrude on you at a competition either personally or officially,’ she told him. ‘You make it all very easy for me.’
As it did with John, skating ran deep in Nancy’s veins. For the previous two years she’d been president of the exclusive Skating Club of New York. While her husband Frank juggled the Whitney fortune, she – with John’s active help – had raised funds for the American Winter Olympics team. Although she had come to regard John with the possessive tenderness of an adoptive mother, Nancy Streeter brought expertise with her warmth.
In Switzerland she could be both a companion and an adviser. She could organise his laundry, accompany him on icy lakeside walks or review his performances. And, if so required, she would be John’s shoulder to cry on. At the Patinoire des Vernets ice arena, however – home to Geneva’s ice hockey team – Carlo Fassi had no intention of losing.
After his school figures, Curry was lying in second place. Never before had he carved his shapes with such nerveless accuracy; and yet never before had his way been blocked by such a formidably determined Eastern European contingent. After two years out with injuries, the former World Champion Jan Hoffman was back in contention from East Germany. Alongside him were the two Russians, Sergei Volkov and Vladimir Kovalev – World and European champions – together with a watchful posse of Soviet advisers and spin doctors.
Amidst rumours of dirty tricks, Carlo Fassi urged Curry to stay calm and concentrate on his skating: ‘Never fear the Soviets when you have the CIA behind you.’ By the following morning – after John Curry’s public practice session for his compulsory short programme – Fassi had unpicked a ‘plot’. Embedded within Curry’s two-minute routine the Russians had detected a so-called illegal move and approached each of the judges – ‘with the obvious exception of the British judge’ – insisting that the Briton should be downmarked when he performed that evening.
It was a depressing development. All Fassi’s skater had done was insert an elegant backward leaning spread-eagle ahead of a stipulated double axel jump, one of the six so-called prescribed elements. Nothing had been missed out. Curry had merely been striving to bring beauty to the prosaic.
Our informant was in fact a Russian teacher who felt that the whole campaign was so unfair that he was determined to try and prevent it. Carlo Fassi’s plan was very simple. ‘Keep practising the programme exactly as you have been doing it. Change nothing. But in the competition itself, don’t do it; don’t do the spread-eagle. Just skate backwards and go straight into the double axel’.
That night, skating to Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Curry followed Carlo Fassi’s orders to the letter. No rules were infringed. The offending move had vanished from the programme. ‘Panic registered on numerous judges’ faces,’ recalled Curry. ‘Where was the illegal element? … I had skated quite well, the judges were flummoxed and there was general uproar. The Russian contingent was plainly amazed and mystified. Then the marks came up and a great wall of average marks left me in second position.’
It was just like he’d always said. Skating was rigged. The judges were only there to put their own skaters first. Even if he skated like a ‘moron’ he’d never win. For the next 24 hours, Curry braced himself for more disappointment. Guided by Carlo Fassi he’d chosen not to protest. ‘You can’t win that way,’ Fassi had told him. ‘You will have to skate twice as well in the long programme. You can do it.’
It was time to unveil the Don Quixote. Watched by more than 7,000 people, Curry slid out under the blanket lights of the auditorium. Wearing black boots and a tailored sleeveless black-green one-piece, he stood perfectly defined against the ice. The front of his outfit was cut low. Narrow straps rose over his shoulders, framing a silk coffee-coloured shirt tied loosely at the neck. The outfit had been made and designed by the New York illustrator Joe Eula, but the inspiration was all John Curry’s.
Five minutes later – for the twenty-fourth time – Curry had completed his programme without error. ‘Very determined, very tight, no mistakes’ was his verdict. As 14,000 feet stamped their approval, the judges went into a huddle. ‘They were having some kind of frantic discussion and finally my marks came up. They were still average and I was suddenly weary of the whole thing.’
For the next half-hour, Curry sat disconsolately backstage while the remaining skaters completed their programmes. Failure here would be ruinous. As the last music ended, and muffled applause dwindled to silence, Curry prepared to leave. Suddenly ‘Carlo came bounding around shouting: “Ya got it. Ya got it”.’ Almost 20 years after persuading his father to let him skate, the Englishman was European Champion. Kovalev, Hoffman, Volkov and the rest had been humbled. Finally the aesthete and the athlete in John Curry had found perfect expression. He had arrived. And he had arrived – in part – courtesy of a judge from Czechoslovakia.
For the first time ever, according to Curry, an Eastern bloc adjudicator had defied the party line and marked decisively in favour of the Englishman. It was, as John noted, a ‘very dramatic turning point’, but then Curry’s portrayal of the East-West schism had always been born of bitterness, and was thus hopelessly simplistic. By degrees, rapprochement had been coming for years. Like everyone else, the Russians could recognise genius, too. And they had always loved a dancer.
During the early 1970s, he’d enjoyed summer weeks skating exhibitions for appreciative crowds in East Germany. The fleet-footed Oleg Protopopov and Lyudmila Belousova – the pioneering 1960s Russian pairs skaters – were high on his list of heroes. In 1975 in Copenhagen, while travelling to an event by public bus, Nancy Streeter had been daringly entreated by a female Russian judge. ‘Give John my best and wish him well for tonight.’ Long before that, at an event in Calgary, Curry had ripped off his skates in a temper and torn the tongue from a boot. It had been a Russian – Vladimir Kovalev – who then ripped the tongue from his own boot and handed it across in silent homage.
By 1976, almost everyone acknowledged that Curry was single-handedly redefining his sport. It was not until Geneva, however – through small acts of courage – that the results reflected what he had already done. Although he’d probably have won anyway, the story of the dissenting Czech judge, Josef Lojkovic, added intrigue to romance, more so because he too had apparently vanished swiftly into the night.
It was only later during an exhibition tour when we were in Brno, that a man came up to me in the street and said, with the aid of an interpreter: ‘I am the judge from Czechoslovakia who put you first’. To which I replied rather lamely: ‘Well thank you’. For less than a minute the strangers exchanged awkward pleasantries. ‘I got into trouble but what I did was right,’ the Czech insisted before he, too, shuffled into the darkness. I never saw him again but he it was who made the vital difference to everything that followed.
In Britain, John Curry was still an unknown. Since the mid-1960s, football’s popularity had been on a rising curve, and television time for figure skating was sparse. By mid-January 1976, however, all that was about to change. No country fixates more on its unexpected glories than Britain. And watching events unfold from her home in London, John’s friend Penny Malec had been witness to a sudden national awakening.
‘I was practically hysterical,’ she wrote to John:
After the compulsories all the papers and Alan Weeks on the wireless were saying that the marks were unfair again, so I sat down last night [before Curry’s Don Quixote free programme) just gibbering with nerves … you were so wonderful that I calmed down – especially when the artistic marks came up with that lovely band of 5.9s across the screen. When the final results came up we just screamed and danced around the room (doggo barking with joy).
The domestic press had woken up to a story. Twelve humiliating years had elapsed since the British sniffed success in a winter pastime. Home-grown historians might brag about the Briton who’d invented slalom skiing, but we still weren’t terribly good on anything slippy. Back in 1964, Robin Dixon and Tony Nash had unexpectedly won Olympic gold in the two-man bobsleigh. Before that, in the 1920s, the British men had won a gold medal at curling, but by the time it was formally recognised in 2006 the team were long dead. The only skating medal had been Jeanette Altweg in 1952. Since then, nothing.
For lots of reasons – and not all of them about skating – John Curry seemed interesting. Not only was he a rare British champion, but, for a sportsman, he seemed cut from peculiar cloth. With the Innsbruck Winter Olympics just four weeks away, Fleet Street prepared to satisfy the swell of public curiosity. The age of the paparazzi had yet to dawn, but John Curry’s life in the shadows had but days left on the clock. Sensing what was to come – and to seal off their skater from the outside world – the Fassis moved their camp east into Germany.
Under the gaze of the Zugspitze mountain, the Bavarian resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen would enable Curry to decompress without distractions. For one week, lodging at the Hotel Zugspitzen, he had the ice to himself. Nancy Streeter was already back in New York, glowing with the memory of her time with John:
Everything seemed to come together – the costume, the beauty of the long program, the audience’s response, the press … and most of all you, with your confidence and lack of nervousness and the beauty and strength of your skating … I’ll never forget the excitement of learning you had won, seeing you on the podium as the British flag went up; the flowers – all the rest of it. As well, I just loved being there, being part of the ‘scene’ and being with you and doing all the little things – tea, TV, talks, Geneva walks – even laundry duty.
Few people knew Curry’s frailties better than Nancy. Since victory in Switzerland, his mood had slumped. Being told how marvellous he was would help until the adrenalin returned. Being told that American television was also waking up to his talent would help even more. It wasn’t a cure, but Nancy’s letters, always fizzing with can-do energy and mumsy advice, seemed to calm him: ‘Just don’t let people get at you there even if it means Mr Fassi or your team leader have to be brutal to your public and press. I can see you smile and say “Easier said than done, Nance”, but this really is important.’
Instinctively, she had seen the storm coming. In North America, the big television networks were clearing their schedules for the Olympic figure skating. The immense battle for the men’s gold – with Cranston, Curry and Kovalev in contention – would lie at the heart of their coverage. So, too, would the fortunes of 19-year-old Dorothy Hamill, already a national treasure and the runaway favourite to win the ladies’ event. Even allowing for time differences, John Curry’s skating would shortly be seen by tens of millions. ‘This won’t be easy and the pressure will be very great but I know you can handle that and that you can do it.’ Again and again, Nancy accentuated the positive.
Curry’s slump had been mercifully brief. By late January, Hamill had joined him, Carlo and Christa at the Hotel Zugspitzen. During the day, if it got too cold, Fassi sent Curry from the ice. In the evenings, there were raucous meals at the town’s restaurants. ‘There is nothing wrong with me,’ he reassured Nancy by letter. ‘I’m just tired. I think I’ll take a sauna this afternoon. Since our arrival I have eaten so much cake, potatoes, soup, bread, meat, cream and ice cream.’
Fassi’s military-style planning and discipline suited him. Weakness of any kind did not. His EST training had also reasserted itself and he was sleeping ten hours a night. ‘We were like a small family group,’ remembers Dorothy. ‘We were Carlo’s kids.’ Seven years before, Curry had wrestled with Arnold Gerschwiler in the blizzards of Davos. Now he was enjoying ‘the happiest winter of my life’. ‘It was fun even though we worked very hard [and] the organisation never flagged.’
By early February it was time to forsake the log fires of a Bavarian pension for the utilitarian bedrooms of the Olympic Village. Two hours across the border, the representatives of 37 nations were gathering amidst high security in Innsbruck. By the time Curry arrived, the British team were already settled in, but ‘there was no demur’. No other individual carried such realistic hopes. It didn’t matter that he kept his distance. ‘Even in a room with a hundred people he’d still be on his own,’ explains Robin Cousins, Curry’s junior partner in the 1976 figure skating ‘team’.
Personal space would be key. Nothing could be allowed to break into it. Every day at 7 a.m. Cousins pulled on his winter woollens and braved sub-zero temperatures on the outdoor training rink. If Curry was already there, the two men spoke little. ‘There was an acknowledgement, but that was all,’ remembers Cousins. ‘We had nothing to talk about. Nothing in common. I only ever saw him at the rink. Never at the village.’ Small talk had never suited Curry. In Innsbruck, few people were allowed near. Not even his mother.
At this point, no one would have begrudged Rita a little jealousy. Ambition – and American sponsorship – had drawn her son into the embrace of a surrogate family. And although it helped that Nancy Streeter telephoned regularly, Rita had spent years being kept away from events at which Nancy was now a regular spectator. Apart from one early trip to France, she had never seen John compete at the highest level. It was an indignity unworthy of the crucial early role she had played and John’s motives for keeping his mother at a distance seemed woolly at best.
My mother’s always talked about coming to an international competition in Europe – Europeans or Worlds – and I always used to say ‘Wait till next year when I’ll be doing a bit better’ because I would have hated her to come and see me come in seventh or fifth or whatever. That would have been miserable. So as far as I was concerned, she was always waiting till next year. But this year she was very strong and said, ‘I’m going to come to the Olympics’. And I said, ‘Fine. That’s great. It’ll be lovely to see you there’. But we made an agreement not to see each other before the competition simply because I’m not used to having her around before competitions.
Ever diplomatic and respectful, Nancy had stayed away. In her place she air-mailed scented freesias pressed flat by her favourite dance books ‘topped by Nijinksy for extra good luck’. No one ever questioned John on Rita’s absences or why, unlike the effervescent Nancy, she would not be privy to the ‘tea, TV and talks’. Having waited so long, Rita was happy enough to be included at all. Along with Andrew, and a handful of Solihull friends (the ‘Birmingham XI’) she’d saved up £400 for a two-week ‘package tour’, and set up camp in nearby Seefeld. Every now and then she spoke to John on the telephone, but there would be no direct contact until it was all over.
As Rita settled in, curiosity about her son was growing fast. Under pressure from the British (and foreign) press, who knew virtually nothing about him, he’d given an impromptu virtuoso press conference. Some of the questions had been about ice skating. Many, however, had not. Looking on, the British Olympic team officials had shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Why did your father object so strongly to ballet?’ he was asked. ‘Oh,’ said John. ‘For the perfectly obvious reasons.’ The inference, although heavily disguised, was abundantly clear. Insidiously, the pressure was building.
The following day, newspapers worldwide began to carry articles sketching out his journey from Acocks Green to Innsbruck. The Guardian announced his plan to form a ‘theatre on ice’ once the Games were over. In the Observer, the athlete-turned-writer Christopher Brasher declared that ‘John Curry will break through a barrier of British inhibition – the belief that ballet dancing is not manly.’ In the Daily Mail, the brilliant sports journalist Ian Wooldridge was more artful in his selection of words. The only one missing was ‘homosexual’.
Despite his soft curly hair, chiselled lips, gentle voice and the graceful arcs he describes with his hands when he talks about skating being removed from the rough world of sport and elevated to the realms of the performing arts, he has thick armour plating just below the surface and a capacity for swift waspish repartee … It is no secret either that his Soviet rivals, intending to rattle him, mock his gentle mannerisms. Curry not so much shrugs it off as makes it perfectly clear that their very existence on earth is to him a matter of supreme unimportance.
Since very few newspapers penetrated the Olympic Village, Curry’s preparations proceeded in ignorance of this ballooning hype. It was a news vacuum that would have damaging consequences. Although Curry was no fool, his guard was underdeveloped. He was also honest to the point of recklessness and, away from the formal structure of a press conference, other journalists were seeking his ear.
If someone asked him a question, he would answer it truthfully. If that someone happened to be an agency journalist from the Associated Press, Curry would answer that, too. Penny Malec called it ‘moral consistency’. The concept of ‘off the record’ was not one he fully understood. In five days’ time, that would be a misunderstanding he had cause to regret bitterly.
In the final frenzy before the opening ceremony, whatever Curry might – or might not – have been saying was forgotten. As Britain’s one serious medal hope, he’d been chosen to carry the Union Jack into the main Olympic arena. Four years before, in Sapporo, he’d savaged the ‘snobs’ around him for whom ‘the Olympics meant nothing more than the price of a bobsleigh holiday’. In Austria it – or he – clearly hadn’t got any better.
‘I heard the same crass remarks and the same brand of cynicism that had scarred the Ceremony before. Nothing seemed to have altered.’ Instructed to walk four metres ahead of the British team, Curry happily maintained ‘a twelve-foot cushion between [his] idealism and the ribaldry behind [him]’ … ‘I was suddenly out of earshot, and I no longer cared about the belittling; for better or worse I was in a nationalistic vacuum of my own devising.’
Ahead of him in the snake of marching flags, John could see the red maple leaf of Canada. Somewhere behind it there would be Toller Cranston. On his day, despite the muscularity of the Eastern bloc skaters, Cranston was surely still the man to beat. What John Curry couldn’t possibly have known, however, is that Toller Cranston was probably already beaten.
In Canada, only the day before travelling to Austria, Cranston had run through his long Olympic programme for one last time. Everything about it was perfect; too perfect. Euphoria and horror had surged through every movement. ‘I was skating the performance of my life. I could do no wrong. In an era when three triples were quite a lot, I think I did seven.’ In the parlance of modern sport, Cranston had peaked too soon.
A few days later he gloomily collected his Olympic accreditation in Innsbruck wearing a ‘floor-length sheared muskrat coat’, and headed for the windblown practice rink. It was no more to his liking than Curry’s. Needing badly to emote publicly, he struggled with even the basics. ‘I did not make the impression that I wanted to make. I was more concerned with attempting to jump downwind. I couldn’t weave my mystical star magic because there were too many distractions.’
Jumps he’d mastered years before stayed trapped in his legs. It was ‘like writing with one of my feet,’ he wrote some years later. ‘When I dove into a snow-drift during the first practise I understood that the skating world was too ridiculous and absurd and I completely lost interest in it.’ If it was true – and Cranston’s words were written some years later – one of Curry’s fiercest rivals was already losing the mind games. But since the two no longer spoke, no advantage accrued to the Englishman. ‘What is, is and what ain’t, ain’t.’ Had Cranston known about Curry’s EST-induced sanguinity, it would only have made matters worse.
Four days after the opening ceremony, combat was joined. On Sunday 8 February – on a subsidiary rink still surrounded by Christmas trees – the leading skaters ran through their byzantine school figures. On either side of them, motionless judges wrapped in knee-length furs and thick coats looked on. The only sound was the steady hiss of steel on ice. Wearing fitted black trousers, gloves and a short, red and white Norwegian-style sweater, Curry appeared calm and concentrated.
With his eyes on the ice, and his arms raised slightly from the waist, Curry traced each circular pattern of his three mandatory figures in unbroken flowing movements. Behind his blade – and the glossy polish of his black boots – only the narrowest trace of crystal shavings broke the surface. A penitential stillness hung over the proceedings. No one seemed to be breathing. Only the judges’ eyes were moving in silent scrutiny. Thirty per cent of Curry’s score would come from their microscopic examination of his technique. By the end of the morning, he was feeling satisfied.
Toller Cranston, on the other hand, was feeling miserable. Despite his earlier encounter with a snow bank, he, too, had started the figures feeling confident. For years, the tracings had been his downfall. Arriving at Innsbruck he felt certain he had mastered them. As with his practice jumps, however, that hard-won proficiency had suddenly disappeared. ‘I pushed off and then I don’t know what happened … nerves or something else … but my eyes filled with tears and I became blind.’
Cranston’s first figure was diabolical. The next two were ‘a smidge’ better. Once the scores were tallied he’d finished the day in seventh place. Without the generosity of the Canadian judge, it might have been worse. ‘The Olympic gold medal had just evaporated,’ he said. Not so for John Curry who was lying second, sandwiched between the two Russians, Sergei Volkov and Vladimir Kovalev. All in all, a good day’s work.
That night, Curry and the Fassis analysed their prospects. A glow of quiet confidence seemed in order. Volkov’s lead was an illusion. The young Russian – who Curry referred to as ‘the boy’ – was a technician not an artist. School figures were his strength, not free skating, and his challenge would fade. Kovalev remained a big threat, and Cranston’s theatricality might yet revive his fading hopes. ‘Keep quiet, eat properly, and try not to think about the other competitors,’ Carlo Fassi advised him. It wouldn’t be difficult. ‘He never spoke to any other competitors,’ remembers Cranston. ‘Nothing. It was very effective. We all felt like dirt.’
The following evening hostilities resumed on the granite-like ice of the Olympic hockey stadium. After the scholarly weavings of the figures, the skaters performed two-minute musical programmes packed with seven specified jumps and spins. Of necessity, the musical pace was frantic, with restricted opportunities for Curry’s familiar embroidery. ‘Rather uninspiring’ was his own verdict. Inside the vast ice arena, the public had reached a different conclusion.
Wearing his trademark one-piece suit and beige shirt – and skating to Rachmaninov – Curry had wrapped the required elements inside a package of such panache that flowers had showered down from an ecstatic full house. ‘The most elegant skater I have ever seen,’ the American ex-champion Dick Button told the watching millions. ‘Until this year he’s never been able to pull it all together between the ears … but he’s taken on a course in learning to discipline his emotions … and all of a sudden for the very first time he’s been able to compete under pressure.’ Even the media had now heard about his Erhard Seminar Training.
As Curry stepped off the ice, frowning darkly, Carlo Fassi gripped him in a playful bear hug. There was still no smile. Seconds later, Curry’s marks flickered across the electronic scoreboard. Despite a handful of near-invisible technical flaws, almost every judge had carded him 5.9 for artistry. Clapping his hands, he bowed his head for a kiss from Christa. With both Volkov and Kovalev underperforming, only Cranston stood between Curry and victory in the short programme. Overnight, however, the Canadian extrovert’s skating had been thrillingly recalibrated.
I wore black, the colour I always wore for the short program. I skated with such veracity (or ferocity, or velocity) that I destroyed everyone, and I won with a 6.0 from almost every judge. I then pulled from seventh to fourth which put me in medal range – although I still felt like a failure.
Wearing a one-piece black suit, with sparkling shoulders, and a plunging neckline, Cranston had dazzled to the music of Johann Strauss. Although his highest score was a 5.9 – not six as he claimed – there had been no trace of negativity in his performance. On American television, commentators drooled over its ‘bizarre and exotic’ flair. ‘He’s an artist on and off the ice,’ viewers were told. Only the East German and Czech judges had failed to see it that way. If he was going down, he was doing so with style.
But it had not been enough and he knew it. Although he’d vanquished Curry on this second day, it had been only by a whisker. The Englishman had still shone, and the fading challenge of the two East Europeans had seen him move above Sergei Volkov on the leader board. With just one component left – albeit one worth half of the total mark – Curry was in pole position for Olympic gold. Short of a fall in his Don Quixote routine, it seemed that no one could stop him.
The following day – a Tuesday – the competition took a rest. Despite virulent flu that was decimating the village, Curry joined the crowds of Americans watching Dorothy Hamill score a perfect six in her own short programme. Like him, she’d finished her second day in the lead. Wherever you looked, it seemed Carlo Fassi’s stardust was proving irresistible. And wherever Curry walked there was a reporter hanging on his tail.
In the press tent yards of patriotic copy were already winging their way back to Britain’s newspaper. A country conditioned to defeat was being whipped into a frenzy. Over breakfast the next morning, readers would be informed that ‘a nation watches in hope’ and that ‘into the Olympia Eisstadion tonight, quite alone’ (according to the Daily Express) ‘will come a man facing the great moment of his life. John Anthony Curry.’
Every single paper crowded its pages with similar words. Leader columns dripped with good luck exhortations. Cartoonists were pressed into action. Phrases like triple salchow and double axel were being helpfully deciphered in curtain-raising background articles. Television and radio broadcasts assessed his chances. Images of John Curry – sporting his distinctive perm – were everywhere. Even Curry himself, with 24 hours still to go, was struggling to block out the frenzy.
From all over the world the telegrams had started to arrive. ‘It suddenly hit me that day what was happening. There were so many people in England hoping that I would win and the weight of that arrived on Tuesday.’ After congratulating Hamill, Curry’s clock started to slow. ‘Everything seemed to take an eternity. There seemed no way to fill in the time … It was like I had a sack of coal on my back.’
Up in his room he read Bleak House, stewed in a hot bath and sat in statuesque concentration behind darkened curtains. Hour by hour, Tuesday tick-tocked into Wednesday. Inside his head, to help pass the time, he ran an imaginary loop of what was to come. He called it visualisation:
I went into my ‘space’; I shut my eyes and took a ‘step’ outside my body and examined it in very close detail, and found that it was in very good working order. Mentally, I ‘played’ a film of myself doing my programme (without any mistakes in it) and after that I simply opened my eyes.
On the final morning, Curry headed for one last practice session. Dorothy Hamill was there to watch. Like her English friend, the teenager had an entire nation bearing down on her. ‘I was sad because I was not going to be able to watch his final free-skate that evening. There was no TV in our little village bunks and it was going to be on quite late at night. I remember telling him how great his programmes were and how I wished I could do that but I doubt I could express then how amazing I thought he was.’ Over a private coffee they wished each other luck. Soon both would be very public property.
By the early evening, the Olympic stadium was starting to buzz. Cocooned in a sheepskin coat, Rita had arrived several hours early to take her place high in the public gallery. Over the previous few days, John had rung her three times. Although they hadn’t met, he’d arranged special rink-side spots for both Andrew and his mother, which the pair had declined. ‘We came as a team,’ she said. ‘I preferred to stay as a member of our Birmingham XI.’ In front of their £6 seats they hung a huge Union Jack. Down by the barrier, Rita had left a bouquet of white carnations to be thrown on to the ice if things went well.
Under a sky full of stars, Curry was making his way to the arena on the British team bus. Alongside him was Robin Cousins (who would finish tenth) and the team leader, Eileen Anderson, ‘the grande dame of skating’ as Haig Oundjian called her. ‘She was very fond of John and she loved telling this story,’ says Oundjian. ‘Around 9 p.m. she looked out of the window and said, “John look, it’s a full moon”. John goes “Oh my God stop the bus”. The driver stops the bus. John says to Eileen, “You must go out, turn three times and bark at the moon.” So this woman in her sixties, set upon by John, goes outside. “Woof woof woof.” Comes back on, and John says, “Thank God” and falls back in his seat.’
Backstage at the arena, Carlo Fassi was conducting a more grounded master class. At the draw for the evening’s skating order there’d been a setback. Following one skater’s withdrawal, Curry’s name had emerged first. Historically, the opening free skater was always marked low. With competitors still to come, judges liked to hold on to their big scores. Curry’s lead suddenly looked as vulnerable as his nerves. Carlo Fassi saw it differently.
[He] said in a rather loud voice, ‘That is wonderful! He gives so much pressure to the others’. And with that we left. We did not even bother to see where the others were skating. ‘Hexcellent. Great. They will be so nervous after you skate,’ continued Mr Fassi in earshot.
It was nothing they hadn’t planned for. Secretly in Garmisch, Fassi had meticulously groomed Curry for every possible place in the starting order. No crevice was left into which Curry’s anxieties could creep. Every minute of his build-up had been allocated, from the times of the Olympic buses to the moment he put his skates on. ‘I was not nervous in the slightest degree,’ said Curry. ‘It was extraordinary.’
Skating first had never troubled him anyway. In the past, it had minimised stage fright. Here, he might even have won before the others started. In the final few minutes, as 10,000 people craned forward in their seats, Curry composed himself alone. Once again, he was wearing the dark green jumpsuit and the wide-collared shirt – along with the tiny black belt that (in Toller Cranston’s bitter description) encircled a waist so slender it ‘piqued his inordinate vanity’.
At a nod from ‘Mr Fassi’ he made his way to the ice and circled uneasily. When his name was announced – ‘John Curry of Great Britain’ – a huge roar ripped from one side of the stadium to the other. Battered by noise, under the bludgeoning glare of the floodlights, Curry skated smartly to the end of the rink furthest from the judges and pulled up by a plastic glass wall measled with the bruises left by ice hockey pucks. Extending both arms, and looking skywards, he held his pose and waited. And then it began.
As the music starts, Curry declares his intent. A skip, a sideways step, a delicate semaphore of arms, and he is gliding towards his first triple spin. No effort is visible in what he does. His back is redwood straight. His fingers curl and fold like petals. By the time he touches down his right foot he has rotated his forward moving body three times in little more than a second. Only when he pauses to take in the first gale of applause does it become apparent that something subtle has shifted in the dynamic of the evening. That man down there on the ice – under the scrutiny of 20 million British television viewers – is winning before it has begun. If there is a competition here, then this spectacular young stranger is already above and beyond it.
As he sets off again, skipping to the flow of the Minkus score, Curry’s furious confidence is proving infectious. The audience can enjoy it now. It seems impossible that he will ever falter or fall. It doesn’t matter that skating’s mystifying glossary is beyond most of them. Pioneering art often transcends understanding. Tonight it is the spirit alone which moves inside people. From a wally double flip, Curry melts into a triple jump, landing with such deft precision it’s as if the ice has dissolved.
Barely a minute has passed. The rout continues. Curry’s unbroken thread of willowy movement now softens. Behind the applause for his jump, the music has slowed. In the place of bombast comes romance and elegant yearning. Curry swoops and spread-eagles, raising first one arm and then the other, before an elegant clockwise spin leads him off across the rink in immense soaring strides. After his third triple jump, there’s a surprise. Even the television commentators notice it. John Curry is smiling. From now on it is easy.
Second by second, he is working his way through the Don Quixote. Twenty-four flawless performances but none of them quite like this one. After a cross foot spin in which his rotating feet never leave their spot, the music changes again. Waltz music. A charge of gleeful energy pulses through Curry’s routine. He skips and shuffles. He clasps his hands behind his back and rocks mischievously from side to side as the audience turn his smile into a joyous community clap-along. ‘Look at that. Extraordinary,’ says the American commentator. ‘He never succumbs to pure theatrics.’
Everyone is with him. Whoops and ecstatic yells puncture the constant clapping. Untold pairs of eyes are following him round and round. ‘I love having people watch me. I love an audience. I skate to them not to myself,’ he says. No skater has ever had an audience like this. With less than two minutes remaining, a harp arpeggio cues a camel spin. Curry’s hands slide to his waist as he rotates ten times on his anchored left foot. For the first time the music pauses – a bar of orchestral silence before the rustic pizzicato that propels him in thrilling, skipping steps the full length of the ice. His arms rise and fall precisely to the beat. A wave of exuberant delight bursts across the arena.
Momentarily, everyone has forgotten just how difficult skating is. No one is adding up the lonely hours that became weeks, or the solitary months that became years. No one is seeing the seven-year-old child at the Birmingham Ice Rink. No one wants it to stop, but it must. With the music winding up, he vanishes into the blur of an anti-clockwise sitting spin, somehow switching feet after five rotations. Within seconds he has stretched out of it and dropped to his haunches once more for a sit spin in the opposite direction. As he switches feet, the toe of Curry’s blade catches the ice. It’s his first mistake, but no one has noticed. On American television, the commentators are awe-struck. ‘We’ve never seen skaters that can do this kind of thing. What an artist. He is on. He is so on.’
Only seconds remain. The music swells to its fiery crescendo. Curry orbits the rink tossing in double spins and split jumps, before his final soaring spread-eagle. As the cymbals crash he crosses his arms across his chest before opening them up like a crucifix. His legs are parted wide; the blades are pointing in opposite directions; and the line between them is ruler-straight. Leaning back into gravity, he begins to carve a circle.
Music and motion now seem so gloriously synchronised it is pointless to resist. The ovation has already started before Curry exits the spread-eagle – with a theatrical flourish of his arms – and hurls himself into his final double jump. After a dainty hop into a kneeling position, it is over, four minutes and fifty-eight seconds after it started.
Curry kneels on his left foot. His right arm is folded high over his head. His left hand is on his waist. A spray of flowers slides past him on the ice and a boyish grin breaks out all over his face. For a moment he looks ten years younger than he is. Over his shoulder, Carlo Fassi, at rink-side, is hopping and clapping. More and more bouquets are piling up near Curry’s feet. No one seems to want to stop applauding. To make themselves heard, even the commentary teams have to shout. ‘One of the finest moments of skating I have ever seen and he knows it.’
He knows it too and he is happy; as happy as anyone has ever seen him. He waves. He bows. He smiles. But he leaves the bouquets. With his chest still visibly pounding, he stands up and skates towards the noise.
Before he stepped off the ice, Curry felt certain he had won. Nothing, not even the crackle of camera flashbulbs, had distracted him. As Carlo clutched a bunch of yellow orchids, Christa clamped John in a congratulatory embrace. With few exceptions – one of them being the Canadian – the Olympic judges had been seduced. Almost every score was a 5.9. Whatever ‘Cold War’ bias still lingered had been blown away and for the remaining competitors the game was up. For Toller Cranston, a bad Olympics had just got worse.
As he made his way into the arena, the backstage corridor was blocked by British team members shouting, ‘He’s won, he’s won.’ Through the PA, Cranston could hear the announcer telling him to take to the ice immediately. ‘I saw the absurdity, the surreal twist … I’m going to be disqualified because I can’t walk the last five feet to the ice … I think I even chuckled.’ Even before his troubled journey to the rink, however, Cranston had already made what he called a ‘fatal mistake’.
Much as Cranston had derided Curry’s outfit – ‘extremely conservative meat and potatoes’ – the Englishman’s contemporary cool had triumphed. Cranston, on the other hand, had opted for a peacock-blue one-piece, complete with embroidered leaves and beaded flowers. Once again, the neckline was low. It was a look Curry loathed. And it was a look that had had its day. ‘It was something I never did,’ said the Canadian. ‘Usually I wore black, the colour of omnipotence and total destruction.’ Cranston was also carrying too many pounds. ‘With all the free meals that one has at the Olympics, I was starting to gain weight, so it didn’t really fit me. I had to perform with my stomach sucked in.’
When he stumbled on his first triple toe loop jump, any lingering hope Cranston might have had died with it. No amount of soaring split jumps to a Prokofiev score could save him. When the scores were counted, he’d pulled himself up into the bronze medal position behind the Russian Vladimir Kovalev. ‘God knows I tried my best, but I was on the down and Curry was on the up.’ The Englishman had plundered his Olympic gold.
For Curry, there were tears but no champagne. ‘He wasn’t the sort to jump up and down,’ explains Christa. In his dressing room, he wept quietly as bedlam reigned outside. While reporters rapped on his door, he loosened his boots and prepared for the medal ceremony. In the auditorium, the lights were being dimmed and the red carpets rolled out. Under a volley of military trumpets, Curry tiptoed to the podium, grinning shyly. Traipsing behind him were Cranston and Kovalev.
‘Standing on that Innsbruck podium … John was but six inches higher than I, yet he was on Mount Everest and I was in the gutters of Calcutta,’ recalled Cranston. ‘He had won; I had lost. He had graduated; I had failed … I don’t believe that he congratulated either Vladimir or me.’
With the gold medal around his neck, Curry stood motionless during the British national anthem. It was to be his last moment of Olympic calm. In Britain, live or on news bulletins, his victory had been watched by almost half the nation. Photographers were banking up rink-side wanting his picture with Rita. Radio reporters with microphones were shouting for his attention. Every payphone in Innsbruck was occupied by a journalist ringing through his copy. Every telegraph wire into Switzerland was zinging with congratulatory telegrams. By the morning, they would be piled up around his bedroom door in boxes.
Telegrams from royalty and cabinet ministers; telegrams from publishers wanting his life story; telegrams from his past. Solihull School wished him ‘heartiest congratulations’. ‘All at Weetabix’ – for some reason – wanted him to know they were delighted. The pop singer Anita Harris and the Royal Ballet were ‘thrilled’. So was Denis Howell, the Minister for Sport. ‘Please phone,’ he urged. Elton John was stunned: ‘Would love you to be one of my guests at my concert.’ Werner Erhard of EST told him his win had created ‘space for people everywhere’ and from Eric Morley, at MECCA bingo, there was the offer of unspecified work. From two anonymous enthusiasts there was merely: ‘Congratulations Nureyev on ice’.
Among the cryptic, the weird and the anonymous – and the unsolicited felicitations from strangers – there were the ones that mattered. From New York: ‘Your performance golden terribly proud love nancy’. From Heinz Wirz, ‘Tonight you showed us all what art and beauty in skating can be stop I am so proud of you and proud to be a friend’. And from Penny Malec in London: ‘We are bursting with joy’.
Two days later the letters would start to arrive. Proposals of marriage. Expressions of love. Random photographs and curious drawings. An early Valentine from a nameless New York admirer. Letters from schools, letters from well-wishers, letters from people he knew well and from people he’d never met. Few would ever be answered. Most were not even opened. By the time the flood of correspondence struck the Olympic Village, Curry was already in mental flight; no longer just an Olympian, but that rarest of things in 1970s Britain – a publicly ‘outed’ homosexual sportsman.
There had been no post-ceremony party. For the first time since arriving in Switzerland 11 days before, Rita was able to wrap her son briefly in an overdue embrace. Like so many others in the village, she’d succumbed to laryngitis. Either that or she’d lost her voice shouting ‘We want six’ to the judges. ‘Finally, he’s got his style of skating over to the world,’ she told the Daily Mail, but the ‘words were less spoken than croaked’. Quietly, John slipped away to find a telephone. In New York, it was early evening and the Streeters were getting ready to dine. ‘Oh my God,’ he told Nancy, ‘I’m missing my favourite dinner.’
There would not be much time to celebrate. For several days, John had been meeting a journalist in the competitors’ café. ‘I had never seen anyone skate like that before,’ explains New York-born John Vinocur, now of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune. ‘I thought there might be a story.’ Vinocur’s brief was an enviable one. Providing he generated intelligent pieces of broad international appeal, his employers, the Associated Press (AP) agency, gave him free rein. Already this Olympics he’d filed copy on the mindset of downhill racers which, like everything he wrote, AP had syndicated to English-speaking news outlets around the world. Backing a hunch that John Curry could win gold, he’d asked the Englishman for an audience. The Englishman had said yes.
In an age before personal managers, no corporate eyebrows were raised. Curry was lonely and liked to talk about himself; an attention seeker who craved privacy. He was also alarmingly frank. Over several cups of coffee, their talk drifted naturally from skating to Curry’s sexual orientation. ‘I’ve got into various scenes,’ Curry told Vinocur. ‘I’m not a promiscuous person but I’ve got friends and I like to go out. I talk. I look. If I need to explode I can go on a three-day binge in Greenwich Village. I’ve had a lover and it was OK but now I have friends. It’s nice too.’ Curry was clearly not talking about women.
‘I found myself telling him things I had kept deliberately suppressed for years,’ Curry said later. ‘He asked me if I was happy and I said no, I didn’t think so. I lived in a homophobic world and I was a homosexual which made it very difficult.’ The American had his scoop. By accident or design Curry’s ‘secret’ was coming out. As soon as the Englishman’s gold medal was confirmed, Vinocur called up his news desk and told them to ‘move’ the story.
As the champion dozed, it sped around the world like a virus. By the following morning, it was starting to surface in news outlets from London to Los Angeles. By Friday, it was everywhere. ‘My fight to be different’ headlined the Daily Express with glee. ‘Britain’s gold medal star explains his very personal lifestyle’.
Much later Curry would insist that he’d been betrayed, and that his unguarded candour had never been intended for publication. ‘With the medal it seemed that I had acquired all the trappings that went with it; the chains as well as the ribbons. Well, so be it – but it is a foreign jungle to me,’ he’d said. It is much more likely, however, that Curry knew precisely what he was doing. ‘He was fed up with denying it,’ thinks Penny Malec. ‘He let it out deliberately.’ Unsurprisingly, John Vinocur agrees. Curry’s subsequent protestations, he insists, were a smokescreen.
‘These were not off-the-record conversations,’ he insists.
No way. The whole thing was absolutely standard journalism. There was no expectation of copy approval either. He knew I was a reporter; we met more than once and we had a cordial relationship in which I at no time felt like I was transgressing into areas which were uncomfortable for him. He seemed quite relieved if anything. I liked him. None of this was fraught. It was all the most natural thing. The quotes were scrupulously what he said.
When Curry rose on Thursday morning he had no hint of what lay ahead. The world’s newspapers would not reach Innsbruck for several hours, and most had gone to print long before Vinocur’s revelations rattled off the wire. The Daily Mirror praised ‘Golden Boy Curry’ who ‘makes all the rest look like men on stilts’. The Daily Mail raved about ‘the ice–cold golden boy’. The New York Times spoke of Curry’s ‘triumph against the old guard’.
Everywhere, the reportage had captured the previous night’s mood of emotional wonderment. Even the most hard-bitten reporters had been moved. Ian Wooldridge in the Daily Mail spoke for them all. ‘John Curry gave us precisely what he said he’d give us – an exhibition in skating as a new modern art. Amid the carnations and the gasping recognition of his commanding brilliance, he just looked up with a smile which said “I told you so”. Supercilious, I think, is the word for it. We forgive him that. We’ll forgive him damned nearly anything for the way he did it.’
Within hours of waking the next morning, however, the news agenda had shifted. This was no longer just a sports story. As Vinocur’s article bled out, national celebration – in some quarters – was mutating into something more prurient. Although the timing of the telephone call is unclear, Curry had been reached by a British tabloid newspaper offering a six-figure cash sum for his ‘unexpurgated’ story. ‘I felt sick to the pit of my stomach,’ he later told a friend. ‘I knew that I would never, ever, as long as I lived be able to trust anyone again.’
By mid-morning, having abruptly ended that telephone conversation, Curry was on his way to Seefeld for a pre-arranged lunch with Rita, Andrew and the party from Birmingham. Rarely had the Alps looked so magnificent. Every tree was sagging with snow. Enormous icicles ran down from the eaves of wooden chalets framed against a cloudless blue sky. Wrapped in a duffel coat, he entered his mother’s hotel looking ‘deathly pale’. ‘The lines [in his face] induced by remorseless training were almost vertical ravines, noted Wooldridge, who’d been invited along with a Daily Mail photographer to observe. ‘Uncharacteristically, for he is by nature a courteous person, he was nervy, snappy and abrupt. “DO come on”, he instructed his mother, “I’m EXTREMELY hungry”. It was 12.42 p.m.’
Over lunch, Curry’s mood brightened. For a couple of hours, the dog-tired ache where his adrenalin had been was forgotten. In the late afternoon light he walked quietly through a nearby forest with Rita and Andrew. He told her that there might be something unpleasant brewing in the papers. ‘But I don’t think he went into any more details,’ she says. If he’d intended to say more, Curry pulled back. Like everyone else – if she hadn’t worked it out already – his mother would find out the details through the papers.
By the time he got back to Innsbruck, matters had escalated. The AP article was now running on the front page of the London Evening Standard. Under a picture of Rita and John, millions of commuters were absorbing the headline: ‘Would some fool say, He skates like a gay? ’ ‘All along during my career,’ it quoted him as saying, ‘I’ve wanted very much to talk to people frankly about skating, about my view on things but I’ve lived fearing these idiots.’
Curry’s opportunity to ‘talk frankly’ was nearer than he thought. Trying to face down the onslaught of media interest was proving impossible and a press conference had been hastily arranged for eight o’clock that evening in Innsbruck. As a growing army of reporters took their seats, Curry telephoned Carlo Fassi for advice. ‘Just be honest – tell them something but not too much and then they will go away.’ Next – perhaps inevitably – he called Nancy Streeter in New York.
‘He was so disappointed and anguished that this was all people were interested in,’ remembers Nancy’s daughter Meg. ‘I believe she said: Do what you think is right and if you think you are ready to handle it, then be true to yourself. If this is what you are, then bring it forward.’
Flanked by Olympic officials, Curry entered the press room and took his place behind a forest of microphones. Slowly, his interrogators danced around their subject. Not one of them seemed able to be direct. This was new for them too. Coming out was rare. Coming out in public was surely unique. There was no real precedent for what one writer praised as his ‘act of social courage’ and almost every question was phrased as a negative. With £10,000 of American money behind him, had he really been skating for Britain? ‘Of course,’ came the reply. ‘But I love America. I love the attitude that before you start all things are possible.’
‘Slowly the questioning got around to words like “virility” and “masculinity”,’ wrote Ian Wooldridge in the Daily Mail. ‘Curry heard them coming and smiled at the room’s discomfiture and said simply, “I don’t think I lack virility and what other people think of me doesn’t matter”.’ Warming to his subject, Curry admitted that he’d had affairs and gay lovers but ‘had nothing new to say about sex’. ‘Do you think that what I did yesterday was not athletic?’ he snapped at one reporter.
When the official conference was over he was put under private questioning. He crossed spread hands like a boxer and said ‘Finish’ … It was John Curry’s second stunning performance in 19 hours. He had taken on the world’s hard newsmen and beaten them at their own less artistic game.
Publicly, Curry declared that it had ‘passed off satisfactorily’. Privately he was shattered by it. According to one version of the day’s events he immediately returned to Seefeld and finally opened up to his mother over brandies from the mini-bar. Rita Curry, however, proffers no recollection of that meeting. ‘If he did, I think that’s something I’ve shut away,’ she says. At the time, in a magazine interview, she was more forthcoming. ‘He rang me up and said “I’m sorry Mum, but it’s not really the way it’s printed.” For me that was enough … what they said isn’t true anyway. But in any case, I can’t see that it matters.”
Rita knew but didn’t want to know. Her relationship with John wasn’t configured for detailed confidences. She could never be what Nancy could be. She couldn’t pretend to be comfortable with any of this. But neither would she make things difficult. Even when he was dying, Rita never questioned her son’s choices; never asked for details if none were supplied. There was no reproach, or criticism, in her silence. John had always been free to make his choices. Just as she could always choose what she believed.
In Innsbruck that was not proving easy. The morning after John’s press conference, a British journalist had telephoned her and read out the contents of John Vinocur’s agency report. Does your son have any girlfriends, she was asked? ‘I don’t know, he doesn’t tell me,’ she was quoted as replying. What do you think of the ‘gay’ tag that he has carried? ‘All this gay talk is pretty irrelevant, don’t you think?’ she countered. ‘I want John to be judged for what he does on his skates. His private life is his own business. He is strong-willed enough to make sure it does not affect his career.’
It was extraordinary. Less than 48 hours after Britain’s ‘golden boy’ had won his Olympic medal, Curry’s character was being filleted in full public view. Even if he had conspired with Vinocur to ‘out’ himself, he could not have expected this. His mother’s telephone ‘interview’ had made the Saturday papers under the headline ‘My beautiful son’s gay tag by Mrs Curry’. Elsewhere – as far away as Chicago – there were coded pieces on ‘the haunted hero’, ‘gay blades’ and the ‘man with pink skates’. Only Christopher Brasher, writing in the Observer, seemed capable of intelligent perspective.
When everybody had telephoned their story [after Curry’s press conference] and discussions broke out in many languages around the bar, opinion began to emerge that it was John who was normal and that it was we who were abnormal. By which we meant that he had spoken with the honesty of modern youth and was prepared to admit that what is known as his ‘lifestyle’ had brought him many problems. However much the law has changed, the minds of most of us are still full of taboos.
Only Rita really knew it, but courage was in John’s DNA. It had been there when her husband had escaped from a German stalag. It had been there when she had kept going alone. In Vinocur’s article, her son had spoken of a lifelong fight to be himself:
When I started to skate I had a coach who used to grab my arm and push it back to my side when I finished a movement with it in the air … When you’re seventeen, people have the idea that they construct you somehow. This man wanted me to skate in a certain way and when I didn’t he beat me. Literally beat me. And there were more humiliating things. He sent me to a doctor as if there were something to treat.
Curry had defied them all. Arnold Gerschwiler; gone. Armand Perren; gone. Peter Dunfield; gone. And now when Curry waved his arms, the sky rained flowers. He’d won the fight to construct himself, but at a cost, and by Sunday 15 February he wanted to be anywhere but Austria.
The 1976 Winter Olympics was closing. Dorothy Hamill had won her gold medal and Carlo Fassi’s twin triumph was complete. Only one duty remained: the exhibition performances by all the medal-winning competitors. Usually this was the formal requirement John resisted. In Innsbruck, however, he embraced it with cathartic relief. After the water torture of public scrutiny, it would get him back on the ice. Carlo and Christa Fassi had never seen him skate better.
Dancing to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Curry abandoned the wit of Don Quixote for a programme that shimmered with brooding intent. There were no skips or smiles. This was elemental and furious. Curry seethed with ‘everything that [he’d] heard and read about [himself] in those few mad days’. Forgoing his usual make-up – ‘someone will think its effeminate’ – he’d poured what remained of his energy into four searing minutes. ‘I suppose I was fighting a lot of things,’ he said. ‘After that, the flags came down and everybody packed up and went home.’
Only one man packed his bags faster than Curry. At the closing Olympic party, Toller Cranston had arrived wearing a gold lamé ski suit, a black velvet fedora and several black scarves. ‘I could have been Jesus Christ wandering in the desert. Never have I felt so alone, so much of a failure, so heavy of heart.’ In his own words, ‘that kind of failure … becomes more monumental as time goes on’. Within a month, he would get his chance for revenge, but the scars from Innsbruck were all too visible.
Today I would have to be dragged by the hair, heavily sedated and handcuffed to ever watch those Olympic tapes again … But think; Curry won fair and square and had a horrible life and died. I lost, and am still alive and continue to be creative.
So who won? Who lost?