Some older observers may have raised their eyebrows last week over news reports proclaiming that the Canadian skater Eric Radford is the first openly gay winter Olympian to have a gold medal. What about John Curry?
Curry won a gold medal at Innsbruck in 1976 and won that year’s World and European figure-skating championships. He then went on to create professional gala shows that incorporated ballet into the competitive elements of the sport. Curry was, before his death in 1994, one of the first British public figures to reveal an Aids diagnosis.
The documentary by James Erskine suggests that at the peak of his fame, there was a strong whispering campaign about Curry being gay and authenticating it as an open secret. Later he refutes the claims made on his behalf that he had come out long before the 1976 Olympics. He didn’t do so, a German newspaper published a story that diffused the news for him. But the British media was still incredibly conservative about his sexuality and he seems to have tried to evade the issue entirely.
Some humour and light sensitivity is required about these matters and The Ice King does it rather well. The testimonies of the infamous documentary Man Alive made in 1967, which inspired Monty Python’s Mouse Problem sketch, demonstrate that at worst, the most that gay people could expect was pity. An RP voice states, ‘For many… this is disturbing – men dancing with men’ in a tone of disgust.
Curry has recollections from his younger days in which he was raised by a middle-class family in a dull area of Birmingham, where, even though he was not allowed to partake in ballet, his father did permit him to skate since that was considered as ‘sport’. It is worth noting that Curry us rather successful in elementary skating, and now he is quite literally considered the best in the world.
A more or less uncomplicated routine is followed in Ice King. Larry Patterson, through a brief but articulated voice over, reintroduces us to the life of Curry. Thankfully, we do not have to suffer through modern day interviews since we were delighted with beautiful clips of the aforementioned skater in his glory days.
There is incredible information regarding the corruption whereby Soviet-bloc judges voted solely for their own contestants. Something like this undoubtedly occurred among their western opponents. Those subsequent parts are undoubtedly poignant.
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