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The 1977 Skate Canada International Competition


History had just been made, when complete proceedings from the House of Commons were nationally televised for the very first time. Margaret Atwood released the critically acclaimed short story collection "Dancing Girls and Other Stories" featuring the brilliant piece "The War in the Bathroom". Women from Cranbrook to Cornerbrook copied Farrah Fawcett's feathered hairdo. Cool cats of all ages got down to K.C. and The Sunshine Band's "Keep It Comin' Love".


The year was 1977 and from October 27 to 29, fifty-four skaters from Austria, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Sweden, America, the Soviet Union, and Canada gathered at the Moncton Coliseum in New Brunswick for the first international figure skating competition ever held in the Maritimes.

Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine

The 1977 event was a breakout year for Skate Canada - but not really in a good way for the event's host country. In the competition's first four years, all but one of the eight singles titles had gone to Canadian skaters. With big names like Toller Cranston, Lynn Nightingale and Ron Shaver all turning professional, the general consensus prior to the event was that, for the first time, it was highly likely that all of the gold medals would go to foreign skaters. How did it all play out? Let's hop in the time machine and take a look back!

THE ICE DANCE COMPETITION

The dance event in Moncton was to have been a showdown between Janet Thompson and Warren Maxwell of Great Britain, the silver medallists at the 1977 World Championships, and Krisztina Regőczy and András Sallay, the silver medallists at the 1977 European Championships. The Hungarians withdrew their entry at the last minute, paving the way for a rather easy victory for England's top dance duo.

Janet Thompson and Warren Maxwell had trained at Queen's with Miss Gladys Hogg since 1971.
Janet was a cabinet maker's daughter who worked as a sales assistant at a department store; Warren was a bookmaker's assistant who was born in New Zealand. The couple dominated the event in Moncton from start to finish, unanimously winning the compulsories, OSP and free dance. Unanimously second were the Soviet couple ranked fifth in the World, Marina Zueva and Andrei Vitman. The bronze went to Toronto's Lorna Wighton and John Dowding, who had placed tenth at the 1977 Worlds. Nova Scotia's Marie McNeil and Rob McCall finished eighth; Ontario's Joanne French and John Thomas tenth; British Columbia's Debbie and Randy Burke thirteenth and last. Following the free dance, Warren Maxwell told reporters, "It was a new program and it was the first time we did it in public so it was an unknown quantity." Though 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery', more than one team in Moncton was criticized for copying the style of Irina Moiseeva and Andrei Minenkov to an obvious degree.

THE WOMEN'S COMPETITION

Robin Cousins

Northridge, California's Linda Fratianne made history in Moncton as the first reigning World Champion to ever compete at Skate Canada. It was her first competition since striking gold in Tokyo, she took a convincing lead in the school figures over Claudia Kristofics-Binder, Emi Watanabe, Lisa-Marie Allen and Heather Kemkaran.

Strong performances had Linda Fratianne, Heather Kemkaran and Lisa-Marie Allen in the top three spots in the short program but a couple of small but noticeable errors in the free skate dropped nineteen year old Kemkaran down to third overall behind the two Californians. Eighteen year-old Deborah-Lynn Paul of Edmonton dropped from seventh after figures and the short to eleventh overall. Canada's third entry, Susan MacDonald of Vancouver, had withdrawn due to injury at the eleventh hour and was not replaced by the CFSA.

Despite low marks from the Soviet judge and admitted nerves, Linda Fratianne's unanimous win was one of the most convincing in the event's history. That said, not everyone was impressed by the women's event in Moncton. Reviewing the event in "Skating" magazine, Frank Loeser complained, "The top three ladies all chose music from Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Scheherazade' for their long programs. One could evaluate the women in terms of technique quite easily, and, that is how the astute Linda Fratianne emerged as the champion. (Who can question that she is a jumping wonder?) But, in the area of 'artistic impression' there were no distinctions save perhaps for the near incidental allusion to exoticism by Fratianne's costume? That the ladies skated to the same piece of music was not objectionable - that they all displayed an equal lack of insight into this musical Arabian fantasy was. Any other sound in 4/4 or 3/4 time could have been spilling forth and it would have been as appropriate as 'Scheherazade'. I am not entirely sure how the artistic aspects of women's figure skating have reached the sorry state they are in. The emphasis on the triple jump and technical accomplishment is only part of the problem. Uninformed coaching and judging are additional significant factors. The current system selects the fabulous technicians and, for the sake of making objective decisions, the individual and the personality are sacrificed."

THE MEN'S COMPETITION

In a five-four split, Littleton, Colorado's Charlie Tickner narrowly defeated Great Britain's Robin Cousins in the men's school figures. Cousins credited his move to the U.S. to work with the Fassi's for his good showing in Moncton: "Back home I always had problems getting ice. I could usually only work on my figures for a couple hours at a time and I really had to push myself. Now that I train in Denver, I can have all the ice time I want and put in as much as five hours a day on my figures. This has helped me a tremendous amount."

Twenty year old Robin Cousins won the short over Charlie Tickner, Japan's Mitsuru Matsumura and seventeen year old Calgarian Brian Pockar. Neither Cousins or Tickner had their best skate in the long, but Cousins pulled off the win over Tickner in what was his fourth trip to the event. America's Scott Cramer, who had been third in figures, took the bronze. Brian Pockar finished fifth; Coquitlam, British Columbia's Jimmy Szabo sixth and Toronto's Vern Taylor eighth.


Perhaps most notable was a valiant triple Axel attempt in the long by Mitsuru Matsumura. The Japanese skater may have missed the jump, but he didn't miss the memo - he skated to "Scheherazade" too. Following his win, Cousins told British reporters, "I'm unhappy with the way I skated. For the first time I went into a final in first place - and it felt strange. I'm going to have to learn, if it happens again, to cope with it." As we all know, that's exactly what he managed to do on the way to winning the Olympic gold medal three years later.

Skate Guard is a blog dedicated to preserving the rich, colourful and fascinating history of figure skating. Over ten years, the blog has featured over a thousand free articles covering all aspects of the sport's history, as well as four compelling in-depth features. To read the latest articles, follow the blog on FacebookTwitterPinterest and YouTube. If you enjoy Skate Guard, please show your support for this archive by ordering a copy of the figure skating reference books "The Almanac of Canadian Figure Skating", "Technical Merit: A History of Figure Skating Jumps" and "A Bibliography of Figure Skating": https://skateguard1.blogspot.com/p/buy-book.html.