Wendy Griner: Canada’s Leading Lady of the Early 1960s

The daughter of George and Marjorie (Little) Griner, Wendy Elizabeth Griner was born April 16, 1944, in Hamilton, Ontario. She moved to Toronto as a young girl and started skating at the age of eight. In a 1963 interview, she explained, "I decided to do a little skating for the exercise, just to say I'm in a sport and chiefly with a view to meeting some new people. I was a complete stranger in Toronto. It sort of grew on me. I really liked it and won some club titles. Then I started winning some Sectionals, and someone mentioned that I might be able to go a long way in this field."

Wendy Griner and Donald Jackson practicing for a dance test

In no time, Wendy was taking lessons from famed Canadian coaches Marg and Bruce Hyland and Sheldon Galbraith. Every morning, she skated from 6:30 until 8:30 AM, went to school at Branksome Hall until eleven, then was back on the ice from 11:30 AM to 4 PM, followed by dinner, housework and bed. Her life as a youngster revolved entirely around the sport. In what precious little spare time she had, she enjoyed water skiing, modern jazz dance and tennis.

Wendy Griner (left) at age thirteen with Jean McKechnie at the Toronto Skating Club

By the age of fourteen in 1959, Wendy was the Canadian junior champion. The next year, she moved up to the senior ranks and won her first of three consecutive national titles, in Regina, Saskatchewan. In those days, fall international competitions simply didn't exist and after winning her first Canadian senior title, she had to face the terrifying prospect of making her international debut at, of all places, the Winter Olympics. At the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, she placed twelfth. In 1962, she recalled, "The ten days previous to the start of the competition, I had been working very hard and I think that perhaps a combination of altitude and fatigue caused me to sleep right through my alarm. Needless to say, after running to the rink minus breakfast only to find that my name had already been called for warm-up left me in rather shaken condition." At the World Championships in Vancouver that followed, she moved up the ladder to seventh. It was clear the fifteen-year-old dynamo from Ontario was going places.

Photos courtesy Marie Petrie McGillvray (left) and "Skating" magazine (right)

After winning the silver medal at the 1961 North American Championships in Philadelphia, Wendy, her mother, and Galbraith booked tickets to the World Championships in Prague... on Sabena Flight 548. Galbraith's last-minute decision to exchange the tickets and take an earlier flight out of New York City spared their lives.

Because of the last minute flight switch, Wendy's name was initially reported in Canadian newspapers among those who had perished in the crash. Upon returning to North America, she skated in the Skating Club of Boston's "Ice Chips" show in memory of her late friend Laurence Owen and visited Laurence's grandmother at her home to express her condolences. The following year, she returned to Prague and won the silver medal at the World Championships behind Sjoukje Dijkstra. Her success was particularly historically significant in that she was the first Canadian woman since Barbara Ann Scott - also a Galbraith pupil - to medal at the Worlds.

Top: Nigel Stephens, George Sherwood, Petra Burka, Shirra Kenworthy, Wendy Griner and F. Ritter Shumway at the 1963 North American Championships. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine. Bottom: Wendy Griner and Bob Butterworth at a carnival at the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club.

In 1963, she won the gold medal at the North American Championships in Vancouver in what turned out to be the firstCanadian sweep of the podium in the women's event since 1941. That year at the World Championships in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, she narrowly missed out on a second medal to France's Nicole Hassler. Right behind her in fifth was her Canadian teammate, Petra Burka.

Wendy Griner and Donald McPherson returning from the 1963 World Championships. Photo courtesy Toronto Public Library, from Toronto Star Photographic Archive. Reproduced for educational purposes under license permission.

Wendy's final competitive season in 1964 was disappointing, to say the least. She was dethroned as Canadian Champion by Petra Burka in North Bay, and at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, she skated second to last in the free skate, long after winner Sjoukje Dijkstra. It was almost midnight, pitch black, freezing cold and the ice conditions were, by that time, quite poor. She ended up in tenth place. 

At the World Championships that followed in Dortmund, things didn't any fare better. Quoted in Patricia Shelley Bushman's wonderful book "Indelible Tracings", Wendy recalled, "[The judges] decided after the second figure that they were going to dump me... When I got to Europe, the first thing everyone said was: 'What's happened to you?' Of course I said, 'Nothing,' but I was finished."

Turning down an offer to tour with Holiday on Ice, Wendy attended the University of Toronto, married surgeon Dr. Donald Peter Ballantyne and worked as a lab technician. She had two sons and a daughter and spent her days living on farmland outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she raised chickens, grew vegetables and relished a quieter life away from the spotlight. She later went back to university and studied history.

Photos courtesy Yvonne Butorac

Looking back on her competitive days in an interview in the Summer/Fall 1979 edition of "Canadian Skater" magazine, Wendy said "I made a lot of friends, had a lot of fun. There's no doubt in my mind that all that travelling was a great educational experience. I was very lucky [but] I was quite content to change my life and get on with other things... explore other worlds." Although she never skated professionally, Wendy did keep one foot in the sport, covering the 1979 Canadian Championships in Thunder Bay for local television station CKPR/CHFD. She was inducted into Skate Canada's Hall of Fame in 2010.

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