A Magician From Milano: The Carlo Fassi Story

"The man operates at a level slightly below total hysteria." - unnamed reporter, "Skating" magazine, March 1968

"Skating is not all athletics. It is also an art. The choreography is much more important now than it ever was... I am lucky, I get along with kids. I get along with friendships and understanding; rapport is natural. I have order and discipline, and I get it by assuming that's the way it goes. Communicating is the key. With a top skater, you can't yell and scream; by that time, he can do it, or he can't, but don't waste practice... I try to be impartial with everyone. The pro must totally support the kids skating and the skaters must know that the pro is there." - Carlo Fassi, quoted in Howard Bass' book "Robin Cousins: Skating For Gold", 1980

Born on December 20, 1929 in Milano, Italy, Carlo Stefanoluigi Fassi was the son of Italian builder Riccardo Fassi. His grandfather ran the Palazzo del Ghiaccio, and family members of employees could skate for free. At the age of six, Carlo took to the ice, and by the age of twelve, he won the Italian junior men's title. He went on to utterly dominate in his home country, winning nine consecutive Italian senior men's titles and eight Italian senior pairs titles with his partner Grazia Barcellona. Carlo also won the coveted Cattaneo Cup at the Circolo Pattinatori Valentino Torino and was the first boy to win the trophy. His coach was a German named Harry Burghardt.

Poor training conditions in Milano following World War II led Carlo and Grazia to London, England, where they trained with Jacques Gerschwiler for the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Those Olympics hardly foretold the greatness to come; Carlo finished second to last in both the men's and pairs events.

Left: Grazia Barcellona and Carlo Fassi, Right: Carlo at the 1954 European Championships

Choosing to focus his attention primarily on singles skating, Carlo made a point of learning from the best. The November 29, 1951 issue of the Italian newspaper "La Stampa" noted, "[Fassi] was recently in Amorosa where he perfected in the free skating in the school of [Gustave] Lussi, the coach of world champion Dick Button. He then moved to England, where he was coached by [Arnold] Gerschwiler and [Piero] Talamona (the latter currently in Turin as a teacher). Under the guidance of expert instructors, Carlo Fassi has greatly refined his style and his performance." 

Hugh Graham, Carlo Fassi, Hellmut Seibt and Donald Jacoby. Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine.

From 1950 to 1954, Carlo won five medals at the European Championships (including the gold in 1953 and 1954) and the bronze medal at the 1953 World Championships in Davos behind Hayes Alan Jenkins and Jimmy Grogan. Turning down an offer to skate in the Ice Capades, he embarked on one of the most illustrious coaching careers of all time.

Carlo began his coaching career in Milano and then moved to Cortina d'Ampezzo, where he trained the Italian national team at the Stadio Olimpico Del Ghiaccio. It was at that rink in 1958 where he taught German skater Christa von Kuczkowski, who would in 1960 become his wife and the next year, Italian Champion. 

The 1961 Sabena Crash effectively ended Christa Fassi's competitive career but launched Carlo's coaching career to the next level. Patricia Shelley Bushman's book "Indelible Tracings" explained that after the tragedy that killed the entire U.S. team, Thayer Tutt of the Broadmoor World Arena "wasted no time in finding a successor for Edi Scholdan. Tutt had already planned to contact 1953 World bronze medallist Carlo Fassi because Edi had requested an assistant and had suggested him. Tutt headed to Italy to plead with Carlo to replace the legendary Scholdan." Carlo (then thirty-three) and Christa traveled to the United States by steamship, first settling in employees' housing at the Broadmoor before buying a house in Colorado Springs. While busy on the ice coaching, they raised two sons, Ricardo and Lorenzo and a daughter, Monika.

Among Carlo's first students in America were Monty Hoyt, the 1962 U.S. Men's Champion and Washington siblings Judianne and Jerry Fotheringill, the 1963 and 1964 U.S. Champions in pairs skating. In 1965, he started working with Peggy Fleming. His exceptional teaching of sound school figure technique allowed her to improve drastically, and his decision (criticized by some at the time) to send her to work with a choreographer paid off in dividends. 

Peggy Fleming and Carlo Fassi

As we all know, Peggy won the World titles from 1966 to 1968 and the gold in Grenoble at the 1968 Olympics. She was the first of an incredible four skaters Carlo would coach to Olympic gold. In an interview in the March 13, 1967 issue of "Sports Illustrated", he said of his first star pupil, "She has always been good, but we have to care tenderly for Peggy to keep her from getting tired. I think these other skaters sometimes practice too much, that is, practice all out. I don't think that Kansas boy [Jim] Ryun runs an all-out effort every day. You train too much, it gets you nothing but big legs." Peggy later said of her mentor, "I went to Carlo to perfect my school figures, but the lessons he taught me changed my life. He guided me through the maze of skating and the glare of an Olympic championship, and I will miss him with all my heart. I owe him so much. He was like your father, your mentor, your strength when you didn't feel you could do it. He always brought out the best in me, like no one else has ever done... He had a funny way of speaking English. He would chase me around the rink while I was doing figures and speak in this fractured English, and I would try to focus on what I was supposed to be doing, but I'd be laughing so hard, I couldn't breathe."

Carlo later 'set up shop' in Tulsa and Denver, where he built up the famous skating program at the Colorado Ice Arena. In the seventies, he incredibly coached both Dorothy Hamill and John Curry to Olympic gold at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. In Keith Money's 1978 book, John recalled his first meeting with Carlo thusly, "I walked into the rink at Denver one morning, very hot and very tired after a three-day drive that had seemed endless. It would be no more than the truth to say [that] at that time, I did not like Mr. Fassi and Mr. Fassi did not like me. We shook hands without either of us smiling. Mr. Fassi made basic pleasantries about my journey and then I departed to settle in. After a few days, I think Mr. Fassi realized that I was not the monster he thought I was, and I began to realize that he was not the monster that I had thought he was! We got along together; in fact we soon enjoyed each other's company. I can now say that, in my experience, Mr. Fassi is the best trainer in the world, not only because he knows the technique of skating inside out and backwards, but also because he knows how to prepare a person for a competition... Everyone thinks that the Italian background makes him temperamental. He is very bubbly and full of spirit, and yet he is the most consistent teacher one could find; his temperament is totally even. He does not have days when he arrives feeling bad, making everyone suffer for that; he does not have days when he is in such a good mood that one mistrusts him for that reason; one can totally rely on the evenness of his mood."

Olympic Silver Medallist and two-time World Champion Tim Wood recalled, "There were a couple of times where Ronnie [Baker] couldn't go to a competition, and Carlo Fassi was with me. I loved he and Christa very much. They were very fun. Carlo was so good because he knew how to get you away, to get your mind off it and have a little fun. He was really good at that... he understood that you just couldn't be all pressure, all the time."

Carlo and Christa Fassi

Carlo Fassi and Robin Cousins

In 1980, Carlo coached a fourth student to Olympic gold, none other than another British skating sensation, Robin Cousins, who later remembered his coach in saying, "A lot of people know how to cut diamonds, but very few know how to polish them. Carlo made you feel you were the best diamond you could be, whether you were a novice or Olympic Champion. He could make you feel the performance you were about to do with him was the best performance you could do in the world. He was an equal opportunity coach." At the time, there were rumours that Carlo used his wheeling and dealing skills to influence the judging of the men's and ladies events at the Lake Placid Games. When questioned by the press, his response was "I don't want to comment on anything so silly."

Having already coached four skaters to Olympic gold, Carlo embarked on perhaps the busiest decade of his coaching career - the eighties. He penned the instructional book "Figure Skating with Carlo Fassi", and he and Christa expanded their 'stable' of skaters to include champions from dozens of different countries. Two of their newest star students were, of course, Jill Trenary and Caryn Kadavy. 

Carlo Fassi and Jill Trenary

Many would think the highest point in his career was 1976, when he coached two skaters concurrently to Olympic gold, but in the February 10, 1988 issue of "The Pittsburgh Press", Carlo described what he considered to be one of his best moments as a coach: when he encouraged Kadavy to press on after a disastrous fall in the short program at the 1987 U.S. Championships in Tacoma, Washington: "At that moment, I think, everybody thought that Caryn Kadavy was out of the team. The team would have been Trenary, Thomas and Tiffany Chin. I remember at the barrier I talked with Caryn, I said, 'You are good, you can do it, c'mon, go in and do it. She understood,, and she did it. I think you really have to make the kids believe they can do it. I think that was probably the best coaching piece of my life." Do it she did. Caryn rallied with a brilliant free skate at that event, made it on the World team and upset the apple cart by winning the bronze medal at that year's World Championships in Cincinnati. Not to be outdone, Carlo coached Trenary to the gold medal at the 1990 World Championships in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

In 1990, Carlo returned to the Palazzo del Ghiaccio in Milano to be closer to his ailing mother and served as the head coach and manager of the rink where he first skated. In 1994, after spending three summers teaching at the Blue Jay Ice Castle in Lake Arrowhead, he joined the facility's permanent staff and returned to the U.S. to make his home in California. That same year, he was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame. 

Photo courtesy "Skating" magazine

In his later years, Carlo pushed not only for great skating but for great change in the sport. He served on the USFSA's Coaches and Skating Standards Committee and as chair of the ISU Coaching Commission and was a passionate advocate for the survival of school figures at the time the ISU was in the process of eliminating them from international competition. In her book "Cracked Ice", Sonia Bianchetti Garbato wrote, "I remember having long and tough discussions with Carlo Fassi on this matter... He became the leader of the movement defending the survival of figures. He claimed that figures were vital for the survival of the sport. He envisioned that without figures, all rinks would go bankrupt, the blade manufacturers would close, and in a couple of years, nobody would be able to execute a decent step sequence! Obviously, while fighting for the survival of figures, he was also fighting for his own livelihood. His extraordinary career in skating was surely due to his ability to teach the compulsory figures, rather than free skating. When the decision to drop figures was finally accepted, he confessed to me honestly that he was fully aware it was the correct thing to do. All of his fights, as well as those of other coaches, were only motivated by economic reasons."

Carlo also spoke out against the overemphasis of jumps in figure skating, the high rate of injuries as a result and the concentration of money at the top of the ladder that never seemed to trickle down. Quoted in the Ottawa Citizen, he said, "We have to choose soon which way we want our sport to go. Is it more jumps all the time? If the sport is going to more and more triples, in five years, the juniors will be better than the seniors.'' His words hearkened back to an earlier quote from the July 18, 1988 issue of "Sports Illustrated", when he (quite prophetically, looking at the state of skating today under the IJS system) said: "You watch. Our champions will start getting younger, so that they will soon be children, as in gymnastics. There will be fifteen other [Midori] Itos in the next Olympics. All they will be able to do is tricks.''

Carlo's larger-than-life personality made for some colourful stories. Lydia Paley Hume recalled one such story from the 1996 European Championships in Sofia in "American Skating World" magazine: "Coaches and officials flying in for the competition were greeted at the passport control by surly old bureaucrats demanding payment for Bulgarian visas. Poor Carlo Fassi... after refusing to pay what he thought was an exorbitant amount for an eight-day stay, he eventually negotiated the price of his visa down to about twenty dollars. His pleasure of winning this little war turned to obvious disgust when I told him that holders of U.S. passports were allowed free entry into Bulgaria for thirty days. 'Damn Communists,' he muttered."

Photos courtesy "Skating" magazine

This man who spoke five languages; this man with a passion for soccer, history, fine wine, politics and history; this man with such a driving passion to leave the sport better than he found it passed away on the afternoon of March 20, 1997 in the Canton Hospital University Vaud, after suffering a heart attack while in Lausanne, Switzerland as a coach at that year's World Championships. Carlo's death came only hours before one of his students, Romania's Cornel Gheorghe, was set to compete in the men's free skate. With heavy hearts, Gheorghe and Carlo's other student at that event, Nicole Bobek, courageously skated. 

At Carlo's memorial service in Lausanne, Dick Button read a letter penned to Carlo. He said, "Carlo, I was really taken aback by you. You had the quickest grin, the fastest edges, and knew more about people than anybody. You skated over the entire ice surface, the snow from your edges flew everywhere, and your arms and legs were like your conversation. They never stopped. Thank you, Carlo, for making us smile. For exposing us to new directions. For never losing that little boy charm. For being the skating world's best diplomat. And most of all, for enriching our lives."

Later that year, Carlo was inducted into the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame and remembered in an intimate star-studded skating tribute in front of seventeen hundred people at the Ice Castle in Blue Jay, California. Among those who took the ice were his three surviving Olympic Gold Medallist students (Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill and Robin Cousins), Caryn Kadavy, Nicole Bobek, Paul Wylie and Lisa-Marie Allen. 

With students from Italy, the United States, the UK, Romania, Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, Czecholovakia and everywhere in between, Carlo's influence touched all corners of the globe. His students all told the same stories: he loved his family, he believed in his skaters, and he knew the sport inside out. He remains, over two decades after his death, one of the most influential figures in figure skating history.

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