figure skating podcast interview
figure skating podcast interview
APRIL 2010
An interview with Bob Paul, 1960 Olympic Champion in Pairs with Barbara Wagner, Ice Capades star and top choreographer. 55 minutes, 29 seconds.
Thanks to Fiona Mcquarriefor transcribing these interview highlights
On his most embarrassing skating moment: [laughs] Skating in the last year of Ice Capades, I wore a toupee, even though I was only in my late 20s, and I saw this big dark spot in the middle of the ice and I thought it had fallen off. It hadn’t, but panic set in [laughs].
On starting in skating: In Toronto, and in Canada, most kids skate. I can remember being on double runners with my mother, and I must have been around three, skating outdoors. And then I was in hockey skates, and I went to a rink where my cousin was skating, and it was a skating club. And I really liked that because of the entertainment end of the skating, not the competitive end. We skated for fun and we did exhibitions. And that’s what got me into it. And then someone at that rink told my father that if I wanted to get serious I should go to the Toronto Skating Club, where Barbara Ann Scott’s coach, Sheldon Galbraith, had just been hired. And being a boy I was able to get in there fast. They took boys off the street [laughs].
On being able to jump everything up to a double axel in both directions: At first I jumped one way and spun the other. And when I got to Sheldon Galbraith, we studied the jumps and spins, and looked at which one appeared to be my natural direction. So I had to switch my jumps. It took me a year to switch the axel. But I maintained my ability to spin both ways, and I mostly spun in the opposite direction in the ice shows. I had to learn everything up to the double toe loop the other way because my partner, Barbara Wagner, jumped that way.
On starting in pairs skating in 1952: I continued in singles until 1956, but in pairs we were on the world team by 1954, so that progressed a little faster [laughs]. And we started out with six inches in height difference, and we ended up with a foot difference. I grew a little faster than she did [laughs]. I was told by a Russian that they started in pairs because of us, and they saw that example.
Pairs did not do, in that day, forward camel spins. It was a no-no for some reason. The Ludingtons brought the sit spin in, from roller skating. We saw them and then we added that next year. We added a lot of content from when we first won worlds to the Olympics, because we had to keep up with the ones that were pushing us.
On being the dominant pair in pairs skating: I asked Sheldon Galbraith about that recently, why was that?, and he said, because you were good [laughs]. We always had, all four years we won Worlds, somebody different second to us each year, which I guess means something. But we focused on adding difficulty to our own skating. We didn’t focus on, and I don’t think Sheldon allowed us to focus on, our competitors and who we had to skate against or anything like that.
Our best element was our unison. That was something that we had, and our stature together absolutely matched all the way through. I never even watched the other skaters, except at the [1960] Olympics. I watched one group, and I remember the German pair coming quite close because I had to step back because they hit the rails. But there were rules back then, like you couldn’t leave your arm locked in a lift — you had to get up and then release. So it was very difficult to do things like turning lifts, and we were determined to do everything within the rules. Because the Europeans really had a thing about watching the North Americans very closely, to find ways to not let us get through [laughs].
On winning the 1957 Canadian, North American, and world championships within 16 days: We were, I say, trained like machines. Sheldon would bring out the stopwatch, and we could go through that program without the music and end up within a half-second[...]
