Dick Button
U.S. Figure Skating Icon Dead at 95
Published
Dick Button, America’s first Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, is dead, and the legend’s passing comes on what was already a dark day for the sport.
Button died Thursday in the Upstate New York town of North Salem … according to his children, who first confirmed his death in the Washington Post.
Perhaps no one in history’s had more of an impact on U.S. figure skating than DB, who first dominated as a competitor in the 1940s and 1950s … and then became a longtime broadcaster covering the sport around the world.
Dick almost literally put America on the figure skating map — at a time when European countries dominated — when he won his first of 5 consecutive world figure skating titles in 1948. That was also the year he won his first gold medal, at the age of 18. He remains the youngest man to ever achieve Olympic gold in figure skating.
He struck gold a second time, at the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, and did it with some serious flare — becoming the first person to land a triple jump, a triple loop to be exact, on his way to the medal stand.
After that Dick went pro … scoring a massive (for the time) $150,000 contract with the Ice Capades. Might not sound like much now, but it made him one of the world’s highest paid athletes — and then, in 1960, he started a legendary career in broadcasting.
He covered the Winter Olympics that year for CBS, before jumping to ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” … where he really became the voice of figure skating for generations of athletes and fans.
Dick was beloved for the fact he called it as he saw it, and had no issues calling a skater’s program ugly, or as he once labeled an Olympic performance, “slapped together.” His final stint covering the Olympics came in 2010 during the Vancouver games.
He still holds 2 U.S. men’s records — his 2 Olympic gold medals, and his 7 national championships.
In what feels like eerie timing, the undisputed icon of American skating died on the same day the sport mourned the deaths of the talented young skaters who were on American Airlines 5342, which crashed Wednesday night into the Potomac River after colliding with a military helicopter. Fourteen people in the figure skating world — skaters, coaches and parents — were onboard the flight which took off from Wichita, where this year’s U.S. Figure Skating Championship was held.
Button is survived by his 2 children. He was 95.
RIP