Herma started skating at the age of two with her mother on the outdoor artificial ice rink of her uncle Eduard Engelmann along with her cousins Helene and Christine, and started pursuing figure skating seriously at the age of nine.
Showing athletic talent from a young age, Herma spent her winters training on the ice and summers wading around in a swimming pool and playing tennis and field hockey. In 1915, she placed third in a swimming competition in the town of Perchtoldsdorf. Throughout The Great War, she found success competing in the junior ranks in sporadic competitions against the best young skaters from Vienna and Berlin. A scrappy young thing, she was caught in the corner of the ice at the Wiener Eislaufverein in a full-on brawl with two boys.
Herma Szabo and Karl Kronfuss
Left: skating junior pairs with Karl Kronfuss. Right: competing at the 1918 Austrian Championships in Vienna.
When The Great War ended and international competitions in figure skating resumed, Herma rose to prominence as the 'it girl' of skating in Vienna. She was one of Pepi Weiß-Pfändler's prize pupils and as such, received a great deal of attention at the Wiener Eislaufverein. In the twenties, she won every Austrian Championships she entered in both singles and pairs skating. Her success didn't come without criticism. She faced judgment for wearing skirts cut above the knee and American skater Nathaniel Niles once claimed that "her form is possibly a little too masculine".
When Herma made her debut at the World Championships in Stockholm, Sweden in 1922, she was the unanimous choice of all five Scandinavian judges, beating skaters from Sweden and Norway on their own turf at an event that was part of the Nordic Games. She repeated as World Champion in 1923 in Vienna.
At the age of twenty-one at the 1924 Winter Olympic Games in Chamonix, Herma dominated both the school figures and free skating and defeated American Beatrix Loughran by over twenty points. The Official Report of The Games reported that her free skating performance "was clearly the best of the lot, featuring the spread eagle and spins standing and sitting... [Her] victory was fully deserved, because this skater showed her rivals indisputable superiority." Despite her impressive performance, she actually believed she had lost to Loughran and her father had to go retrieve her from her hotel when the Austrian anthem was being played. Herma's win in the women's event and her cousin Helene's win in pairs with Alfred Berger was the first and only time in Olympic history that members of the same family won gold medals in different figure skating disciplines at the same Olympic Games. Years later Herma recalled, "I always had a new dress for major competitions, and I wore a terra-cotta coloured wool that day. The music was provided by six musicians, five strings and a piano. It was broadcast over 10 electric megaphones around the grandstand. On the day of the ladies' free skating competition, however, there was a strong wind blowing the music away from the rink. We managed all right." She was fascinated by the North American and British skaters who competed. "They seemed so much prettier, and they skated so differently, so modern," she later reminisced.
After winning her third World title in Oslo in 1924, Herma followed in her mother's footsteps and competed in both women's singles and pairs skating concurrently. Incredibly, at the 1925 World Championships in Davos, she took the gold medal in both singles and pairs with partner Ludwig Wrede, defeating France's Andrée and Pierre Brunet by only half a point in the latter.
At the height of her success, Herma's attitude towards skating - and the fame that came with it - was extremely down-to-earth, humble and refreshing. In an interview with "Skating" magazine, "One must have a competitive nature to withstand all the difficulties of figure skating training, and in spite of everything to find joy in one's art. The finest moments of all the hard work are those when total strangers come up to me before a competition with their advice and help. It is equally moving when the dear little children bring me oranges for my journeys, so that I need a basket finally, to carry them all. A youthful mother assures me that her son is ruining himself for me. The son is eight years old and spends all his pocket money for sweets, which he presents to me with great embarrassment. When I feel how anxious my colleagues are to help and sympathize with me, how their thoughts follow me on my long journeys, and that they await results with such hectic interest, how the telephone rings by day and night to obtain results and bring me good wishes - then I would like to hug the whole world of sport and thank all these good people. For Bismark once said 'the audience makes success.'"
By the 1926 World Championships in Stockholm, the tides of Herma's seemingly unstoppable skating career were already beginning to turn. She and Ludwig dropped to third in the pairs event behind The Brunets and Lilly Scholz and Otto Kaiser and her win in the women's event was extremely narrow for a change... owing to the emergence of a young Norwegian upstart named Sonja Henie.
Quoted in the documentary "ISU: 100 Years Of Skating 1892-1992", Herma explained, "Sonja Henie made my life very difficult and her father even more. In Stockholm at the Worlds, we were invited to the Austrian Consulate in the evening and I left my skates in the lounge. The next day was the competition and on my first step onto the ice the sole with the skates came off my shoe. It had been cut off with a razor blade. That was not nice." The school figures were delayed until her boot could be repaired. Fritzi Burger claimed Herma told her that she had seen a member of the Norwegian skating entourage in the corridor when she returned to her hotel room the night before the event. Incredibly, Herma managed to win her fifth consecutive World title.
"No matter what I did, I could not win," claimed Herma. She was absolutely correct. Three of the judges had been Norwegian, one German and one Austrian and the competition had been judged blatantly down national lines. A similar situation, if not even more pronounced, occurred in the judging of the men's event that year. As a direct result of Herma and Briton Jack Page's losses and a subsequent media firestorm sparked by the late, great T.D. Richardson, the ISU later instituted a rule change allowing only one judge per country. In the midst of all of the drama, Herma returned to Vienna and won her second and final World title in pairs skating with Ludwig.
Just how bad was the controversy surrounding the women's event in Stockholm at the time? On February 23, 1927 - the day Herma and Ludwig won the pairs event in Vienna - the "Sporttagblatt" reported, "When the message arrived in Vienna that the invincible former woman world champion Herma Jaross-Szabo had been beaten and, as you heard, all three Norwegians who sat in the court of arbitration [voted for] their compatriot Sonja in the first place [we were] so outraged and indignant that [we can] speak bluntly of an organized fraud. It is not the first so-called scandal of this kind in skating, and it alas, will remain this way... The controversy over the rating is almost as old as the sport." Three days later, the "Illustriertes Sportblatt" even went so far as to insinuate that the Norwegian judges were motivated to vote for Sonja "both nationally and personally."
Herma ultimately retired from the sport just two weeks before the 1928 Winter Olympic Games in St. Moritz. She was as jaded as one might expect one to be after her Stockholm experience. She reportedly turned down several film offers, as well as a position as a fitness teacher in America.
Herma Szabo and Ludwig Wrede. Photos courtesy National Archives Of Poland (left) and Bildarchiv Austria (right).
By the 1926 World Championships in Stockholm, the tides of Herma's seemingly unstoppable skating career were already beginning to turn. She and Ludwig dropped to third in the pairs event behind The Brunets and Lilly Scholz and Otto Kaiser and her win in the women's event was extremely narrow for a change... owing to the emergence of a young Norwegian upstart named Sonja Henie.
Quoted in the documentary "ISU: 100 Years Of Skating 1892-1992", Herma explained, "Sonja Henie made my life very difficult and her father even more. In Stockholm at the Worlds, we were invited to the Austrian Consulate in the evening and I left my skates in the lounge. The next day was the competition and on my first step onto the ice the sole with the skates came off my shoe. It had been cut off with a razor blade. That was not nice." The school figures were delayed until her boot could be repaired. Fritzi Burger claimed Herma told her that she had seen a member of the Norwegian skating entourage in the corridor when she returned to her hotel room the night before the event. Incredibly, Herma managed to win her fifth consecutive World title.
The following year, the World Championships for women were held in the heart of Sonja Henie territory... Oslo, Norway. Although Herma had not once been defeated in the school figures at the World Championships before, she lost three judges to two to Henie at the Oslo Championships. The result remained exactly the same in the free skating and after reigning as World Champion for five successive years, Herma was ousted by Henie in what T.D. Richardson described as a "highly controversial" decision.
Top: Political cartoon from the "Sporttagblatt" mocking Sonja Henie and the judges at the 1927 World Championships. Bottom: Herma Szabo performing a spiral.
Just how bad was the controversy surrounding the women's event in Stockholm at the time? On February 23, 1927 - the day Herma and Ludwig won the pairs event in Vienna - the "Sporttagblatt" reported, "When the message arrived in Vienna that the invincible former woman world champion Herma Jaross-Szabo had been beaten and, as you heard, all three Norwegians who sat in the court of arbitration [voted for] their compatriot Sonja in the first place [we were] so outraged and indignant that [we can] speak bluntly of an organized fraud. It is not the first so-called scandal of this kind in skating, and it alas, will remain this way... The controversy over the rating is almost as old as the sport." Three days later, the "Illustriertes Sportblatt" even went so far as to insinuate that the Norwegian judges were motivated to vote for Sonja "both nationally and personally."
Herma ultimately retired from the sport just two weeks before the 1928 Winter Olympic Games in St. Moritz. She was as jaded as one might expect one to be after her Stockholm experience. She reportedly turned down several film offers, as well as a position as a fitness teacher in America.
Herma's medals and trophies
Now, here's what I love! When Herma retired, she set to work almost immediately doing everything she could to help other Austrian women beat Sonja Henie. In the wonderful 1998 documentary "Reflections On Ice: A Diary Of Ladies Figure Skating", Fritzi Burger-Russell recalled that "Herma came to my house in Vienna and brought me some tights and a skirt and said, 'Now try to beat her!'" She showed up at the Wiener Eislaufverein, schooled the girls in figure technique and helped Hedy Stenuf with her free skating. Despite her best efforts, nothing worked. Sonja just could not be beaten. When Maribel Vinson interviewed Sonja at the 1936 Winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, she asked her how she managed at her first Olympics. She replied, "I didn't have regular instruction until later but I had seen Mme Szabo-Plank the year before, and besides I always watched men skaters whenever I could and tried to imitate them. There didn't seem to be any reason why I couldn't do the things they did."
Pál Jaross. Photo courtesy Erdélyi Audiovizuális Archívum.
Herma also devoted much of her energy to a second sport: skiing. For several years, she represented the Ski Club Arlberg in downhill, slalom and competition races. Although she won a race on Schneeberg Mountain in 1932, for the most part, she never seemed to be able to manage to crack the top five in most races she entered. She sustained multiple injuries in January of 1937 in a serious skiing accident in Kitzbühel and was bedridden for some time.
The once 'it girl' of figure skating who had been married three times thusly ended her sporting career. She was very much interested in figure skating's development and relished in the success of Austrian figure skaters in the fifties. She certainly had an inside knowledge of the sport's development. One of her husbands, Hungarian Champion Pál Jaross, was a World Referee and Judge and ISU Official.
Herma was widowed in the late sixties. She spent her golden years living alone in a gabled mountain house in the quiet Upper Styrian market town of Admont, approximately one hundred miles southwest of Vienna. She had to use two canes to get around. When she was in her early eighties, she remarked, "All that remains of my youth is the discipline of a sportswoman. Every day, rain or shine, I force myself to walk 10 rounds in the garden."
Herma was inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall Of Fame in 1982. She passed away on May 7, 1986, at the age of eighty-four.
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