Before Torvill and Dean there was John Curry. In 1976, he won the European, World and Olympic gold medals as well as being voted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. In so doing, he transformed his sport by seeking to more deeply interpret the music used in his programmes and utilise balletic techniques in his performances, both of which were in contrast to the established methodology of clinical, technical precision. But even as he triumphed in Innsbruck at the Winter Olympics, Curry broke cover and in a newspaper interview, admitted to his homosexually. He next gave up being an amateur, going on the professional circuit, where he could collaborate with the best choreographers and employ the cream of the available skating talent to realise his dream of raising ice-skating to the level of ballet and yet achieve commercial success at the same time. It's probably fair to say that while he certainly achieved the former, as contemporary reviews make clear, the financial strain of maintaining a core group of skaters and musicians meant that his ambitious productions weren't profitable, despite sell-out shows at the New York Met and the Royal Albert Hall.
A picture is painted here of a lonely, restless man, unable it seems to find lasting love in any personal relationship. Drawn to New York it seems as much for its openly gay scene as well as being a cultural hub, it was his misfortune to contract AIDS as the epidemic took hold there and he returned to England to die in his mother's care, aged only 44, penniless and alone.
He was clearly a turbulent individual, obsessed with perfectionism in his chosen profession but incapable of committing and settling down with one partner in his personal life. There is a fair bit of pretentious twaddle spoken here about his lofty artistic aims and how he lived out his inner turmoil when performing on the ice. In interviews, he comes across as shy but brittle.
There's no question however that he took professional ice-skating to a different level and I would imagine that even as he drew towards his own end, as we see in the photographs of his emaciated state taken just before his too-early death, he hopefully took some kind of comfort from his achievements both as an amateur and professional skater.
It seems that Curry was too much of a non-conformist to adapt to his celebrity and become the money-spinning national treasures that his successors Robin Cousins and Torvill and Dean did. I guess it's often the way of trailblazers that they suffer the slings and arrows so that their followers can pass through in relative ease.
While I was surprised not to see contributions from Cousins, Torvill and Dean, even if only to acknowledge their own debt to Curry, this documentary brought to life an undeservedly forgotten figure who deserves this belated, sympathetic but honest recognition of not only the
achievements in his professional life but also the travails of his difficult personal life.
