Figure Skating and Harvard ... A Perfect Pair

Many Crimson Skaters Have Made Their Way to the Olympic Podium

by John Powers '70

From the beginning, it was a matter of geography and demography and meteorology. Ponds in Boston and Cambridge froze in winter, figure skating was an upper-class sport and a number of its enthusiasts happened to attend Harvard and Radcliffe.

“Skating was Boston thing and a Harvard thing,” says Ben Wright ’44, a global Hall of Fame member and the International Skating Union’s longtime historian.

Though the college is best known for football and hockey, squash and crew, Harvard’s figure skating pedigree is strictly gold-standard. Three Olympic victors— Dick Button ‘52, Tenley Albright ‘55 and Hayes Alan Jenkins Law ‘59. Fourteen U.S. champions. Five members of the World Hall of Fame and 14 members of the U.S. version, most recently Hugh Graham ‘55. And seven presidents of U.S. Figure Skating, including the original (A. Winsor Weld ‘30) and the incumbent (Chuck Foster ‘57). In fact, there might not have been competitive figure skating in America had it not been for George Browne GSA ‘42, founder of Browne & Nichols School and holder of a Harvard master’s, who introduced the ‘international style’ in 1908.

“He went to St. Moritz and stayed there for the winter, took it all in and brought it back,’’ says Wright. “He’s the godfather of the whole thing.’’

Rosy-cheeked Brahmins already had been doing figure 8s for years on outdoor ice at the Cambridge Skating Club on Mount Auburn Street and The Country Club in Brookline. In a day when Harvard and Boston society were conjoined, it was inevitable that figure skating would wear a crimson muffler.

When the sport was held at the 1920 Summer (yes, summer) Olympics in Antwerp, the star U.S. skater was Nathaniel Niles ‘08, who competed in both singles and pairs, with Theresa Weld. The 1928 team included not only Niles but also former crew coxswain Sherwin Badger ‘23 (who won the national pairs title while he was association president) and Maribel Vinson, who went on to win a record nine U.S. women’s titles and become an extraordinary coach.

Boston was the center of the American skating world, which then was limited to the Northeast, with hothouses in Minnesota and Colorado. If you were a Harvard student, you could take in a morning lecture at Sanders Theater, grab lunch at your House and work on your axel during the afternoon across the river at the Skating Club of Boston. That was what lured Button to Cambridge in 1948, after a certain New Haven finishing school told him that he couldn’t enroll there and still continue skating competitively.

“Well, that made all the difference in the world to me,” said Button, who’d just won the Olympic gold medal as a high-school senior and had another, plus four more world titles, still ahead of him. “I was flying, and I wasn’t about to give that up.’’

So Button went up to Cambridge, where dean Bob Watson (later Harvard’s Athletic Director) assured him that as long as his grades and conduct were up to the mark, he still could take his skates to Europe every winter. In fact, the athletic department ultimately awarded Button a major H, the first non-varsity winter athlete so honored.

“If I’d told him no, Polly would have killed me,” mused Watson, whose wife— the former Polly Blodgett — had been a two-time U.S. women’s medalist. Murder would have been excessive, Mrs. Watson says now, “but I certainly would have been angry.’’

When Button arrived that September, he found to his astonishment and dismay that he was already something of a campus celebrity. “The thing that most embarrassed me was the opening welcome to the freshman class in Memorial Hall,’’ recalled Button, who was lauded by the dean. “I thought Harvard was on a pedestal, above everything, and here I was being singled out. I just wanted to be one of the guys.’’

His roommates, Button soon discovered, considered him to be quite mortal. After he returned to Cambridge from winning his second Olympic crown in 1952, Button found they’d stripped his room of its furniture.
Once Button was at Harvard, other scholar-skaters soon followed. Foster, who went on to win a national pairs medal with Maribel Owen, came from North Dakota. “Part of it was Dick Button being there, which impressed my parents,’’ he says.

Hugh Graham, who won U.S. medals in both singles and pairs and later became association president, transferred from the University of Tulsa, urged by fellow Oklahoman Franklin Nelson ‘55.
“My first day there, I went into the Coop and the first person I ran into was Chuck,’’ Graham recalls. “I didn’t know he was going to Harvard and he didn’t know I was going. And then Dick Button walked in. He was at the Law School then.’’

Dudley Richards ‘54, who competed in pairs at the 1960 Olympics, was an undergraduate. Jenkins, the 1956 Olympic champion, was a Harvard law student. And Albright, who won Olympic silver in 1952 and gold in 1956, was at Radcliffe.

“That was the golden age of skating in America,” says Wright, “and it’s never been the same since.”
The 1961 plane crash in Belgium that killed the American team wiped out a generation of coaches and skaters, including Vinson, her daughters Laurence Owen (then U.S. champion and Radcliffe-bound) and Maribel and her partner Richards.

But when the renaissance came, Harvard students were in the vanguard. Lorraine Hanlon ‘67 claimed the U.S. women’s crown two years later and Scott Allen ‘71 won two men’s titles and a 1964 Olympic bronze. John Misha Petkevich ‘71, the 1971 U.S. champion, made two Olympic teams and Suna Murray ‘77 joined him in 1972. More recently, Paul Wylie ‘90 won the men’s silver medal at the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, the first Harvardian to make the podium in 28 years.

Generations of undergraduates have found that world-class skating doesn’t have to end once they step into the Yard, and university officials have been understanding about their comings-and-goings.
“They were so kind to us there, it was just amazing,’’ says Graham. “They helped accommodate us in so many ways.’’

Wylie, who competed in two Olympics, used to joke about being on the ‘seven-year plan’. But he received his degree and went on to graduate from the Business School.

While the Olympic skating team no longer is dominated by John Harvard’s spinning progeny, the skating tradition by the Charles remains strong. “An Evening With Champions”, the Jimmy Fund benefit co-founded by Petkevich during his Eliot House days, still brings top international performers to Bright Center each autumn. And the admissions office still warms to applicants who can land a triple-triple combination.
Sarah Hughes received her Harvard acceptance even before she won her miracle gold medal at Salt Lake City two winters ago. Then, unlike Button, she opted for Yale, where she promptly hung up her skates. Something about New Haven seems to dull the blades.