Obituary for Richard “Dick” button: inventor of the double axel

It was days of grief for the American figure skating. On Wednesday, a scheduled aircraft collided with an army helicopter in Washington, nobody survived. Among the dead were young ice skaters who returned from a training camp with parents and supervisors. The Russian couple running world champions from 1994, Jewgenija Schischkowa and Wadim Naumow, who worked as a coach after their career in Boston, died in the disaster.

And before the week was over, the US ice skating association reported that Olympic champion Richard “Dick” had died “Dick” button at the age of 95 in his place of residence in North Salem/New York: the man who invented the double axel. And who explained this theater from Toeloop and Tüll for half a century, this sport, half athletics, half artistry, which he loved.

Dick button was not a romantic at the microphone. His gaze was sharp, the words sometimes as well. The demonstration of the US champion Christopher Bowman once decreased as “common, boring, slow, sleepy”. Another time when his co-commentator Peggy Fleming composed regretted the fall of an athlete, he replied laconically: “On the other hand, I regret everyone who has to look at it.” He did not want to hurt the figure skaters, he said the New York Times; He wanted them to take the criticism to heart. There was no question that he had expertise like no other.

At his first world championship button became “only” second – it remained his only defeat

Button, as a child, had started buying figure skills as a child, initially a chubby boy. The father, who, as a wholesaler, distributed typewriter, financed the lessons at the Gus Lissi ice skating school, a specialist with whom he worked until the end of the career. In 1946 he won the first of his seven US championship titles as a 16-year-old thanks to his enormous zeal for training. When he only finished second in the freestyle at his first world championship a year later at his first world championship, the great Swede Ulrich Salchow gave him the first trophy he had won Salchow in 1901. The only defeat of the entire career should remain for Dick Button.

In 1948 in St. Moritz he was chosen as the Olympic champion, this time he presented an excellent duty and in the freestyle a world first: the double axel, which, strictly speaking, even requires two and a half turns. Four years later, the next Olympic gown followed in Oslo, this time he easily jumped three double axes in succession and was the first runner to land a triple jump, the Rittberger, cleanly on one run. With his athletics, Dick Button has fundamentally changed figure skating. The descended scales, in English Flying Camel Spin, also goes back to the ice pilot with a law exam. In addition to sport, he had studied law in Harvard.

After the amateur career, he temporarily earned money as a profile runner at ice shows, after which he revolutionized in the USA after the Winter sports also the winter sports report. From 1960, from Squaw Valley’s black and white games, he explained the figure skating to the television audience, initially at CBS, later also among the broadcasters ABC and NBC. Until 2010 in Vancouver, then he resigned. It was the “enthusiastic feeling of freedom” that fascinated him on the figure skating: “The opportunity to move was like flying,” he said in one of his enthusiastic moments.