It’s been well over a decade since Team USA had a figure skating lineup as strong as the one traveling to the Milano Cortina Olympics this winter. The group includes current world champions Ilia Malinin and Alysa Liu, and hopes are high that they’ll both return to the States with hardware in hand. In the process, hopefully they won’t get embroiled in an international scandal—though for champion figure skaters, that’s always a distinct possibility.
Figure skating has long been a controversy-prone sport. For one, it’s maddeningly subjective, with a scoring system that no one understands (judges included). It’s also got particularly lofty stakes: Skaters train their whole lives for a handful of minutes on the Olympic stage, their dreams riding on slivers of steel. Throw in a dash of geopolitics (on the ice, the Cold War never ended), and you’ve got all the ingredients for drama on an operatic scale. While no one can predict what will go down in Milano Cortina, read ahead to catch up on skating’s biggest scandals before the Games begin on February 6.
Sonja Henie’s Salute (1936)
Figure skating’s first star, Norwegian Sonja Henie, is credited with bringing skating to the masses—first through newsreels, then through Hollywood. Trained in ballet, she pushed the envelope by incorporating dance and choreography into her routines. She also introduced short skirts and white skates to the sport, making it glamorous. And as a 10-time world champion and three-time Olympic champion, Henie remains the most decorated women’s skater ever. Even today, she’s upheld as a master of shaping and promoting her own image. There’s just one slight issue: her coziness with Adolf Hitler.
Sonja Henie in the 1944 film It’s a Pleasure.Keystone/Getty Images
In Berlin, ahead of the 1936 Winter Olympics—her last—Henie skated up to the führer. As Swedish skater Vivi-Anne Hultén recalled in the 1990s, “She went and gave a Hitler salute during the Olympic Games and shook hands with Hitler, and everybody said she became his girlfriend.” The idea that Henie actually had a romantic relationship with Hitler is widely disputed; the ice princess and the dictator did, however, reportedly go to lunch after Hitler congratulated her rinkside on winning her third Olympic title. The Nazi leader also wrote a lengthy inscription on a signed photo for Henie, which her family displayed at their Oslo home. Though Germany occupied Norway during the war, the Henies’s house went untouched.
“I don’t think Sonja Henie was a political person in any way, shape, or form,” Olympic gold medalist Dick Button told Vanity Fair in 2014. “She was an opportunist…. I don’t think she could have cared less who Hitler was, except for whatever power he had and what it would do for her career.” Opportunism did seem to be Henie’s distinguishing trait. Years after saluting Hitler, she starred in a 1939 anti-Nazi film called Everything Happens at Night. Henie plays a young woman, caught in a love triangle, whose father has escaped from a concentration camp. The reviews weren’t great, but Henie was getting paid: she’d signed a $300,000 contract with 20th Century Fox. In all, she starred in 11 Hollywood movies, skating in several of them—and at the peak of her career, she was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood.
A Risqué Showgirl Costume (1988)
Besides Henie, Germany’s Katarina Witt is the only women’s skater to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals. Known for her glamour and beauty, Witt was figure skating’s 1980s sex symbol. As a 2019 academic paper titled “Katarina Witt and the Sexual Politics of Sport in the Cold War” puts it, Witt and her coach “consciously cultivated her fame by increasing the sexual tension of her performances.” Oh my! One purported way to increase “tension” is by wearing a “provocative” outfit—and that’s exactly what Witt was accused of doing when she descended on the Calgary Olympics to defend her title.
“We’re here to skate in a dress, not in a G-string,” said Canadian coach Peter Dunfield. He was referring derisively to the glitzy showgirl getup Witt wore for her short program, which was set to Broadway tunes from Hello, Dolly! and Jerry’s Girls. While it seems Dunfield didn’t have the best grasp on what constitutes a G-string (perhaps he’d never seen one?), Witt’s high-cut ensemble did display a fringe of feathers instead of a traditional skirt. In response to the negative remarks, she said, “Why shouldn’t we stress what is attractive?” But Dunfield would hear none of it. “The real provocative side is the back,” he grumbled to the press, before adding, “but in the front, you’ve even got cleavage.”
