Word: ann
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Threes & Eights. When Barbara Ann skates, she seems to float on ice. She turns effortlessly and unexpectedly-only clever performers can manage that-and never has to push to get up momentum for an eight or a loop-change-loop. She always seems to be enjoying herself, and as a result people always enjoy watching her. She has equilibrium, charm and style. A U.S. skating judge, who likes to define the quality of a skater in one word ("push" is his word for Sonja), puzzled over Barbara Ann a while, then described her quality as "femininity...
...Barbara Ann takes a perfectionist's delight in tracing threes (bunnies' ears, she calls them) and double-three-change-double-threes on the ice. Even ice-when it's smooth-delights her. "I suppose most people think of ice as cold and artificial. But to me it's warm. It isn't artificial, really-it's alive...
...disguised the last part of the turn so expertly that the people never saw the difference. Sonja put on a tremendous show. While she performed, her businesslike father made sure everybody knew it by bustling about handing out autographed, postcard-size pictures of the champion. So far, Barbara Ann is a mile behind Sonja in showmanship...
Both Sonja and Barbara Ann subscribe to the theory that it is wiser to try a single jump and be sure of making it than to try a double jump and miss. As a result, their "free" programs-which are, in effect, ballet solos on ice-are less daring than some skaters'. But there the likeness ends. Barbara Ann usually manages to say the right thing (or at least the polite thing). When something irked Sonja, and many things did, she was more than apt to blurt: "It stinks...
Daddy's Girl. How do you become the best figure skater in the world? In Barbara Ann's case, a casualty on the battlefield of St. Julien in April 1915 (13 years before she was born) had something to do with it. Lieut. Clyde Scott of Canada's "Iron 2nd" Battalion had been hit by shrapnel and machine-gun fire in both hips, one knee and one eye, and left for dead. By sheerest luck, a German search party kicked at a pile of bodies, causing Lieut. Scott, who was on top, to turn .over and groan...