Gretchen Merrill, the reigning U.S.
ladies figure skating champion, had just taken the ice to perform her number. Te crowd, mostly Skating Club of Boston members, gave her a warm ovation. It was 1943 — the middle of World War II — and the club’s Ice Chips show was a wel- come diversion. One 8-year-old girl who watched
Merrill skate that day was particularly im- pressed. “Gretchen was obviously happy and
she was flying across the ice,” Tenley Al- bright remembered. “I thought, ‘Oh, I want to try that.’” Like many other Boston-area kids, Al-
Tenley Albright looks back at her accomplishments, including historic
Olympic gold by LORI GROSSMAN
Tenley Albright performs her winning free skate at the 1956 Olympic Winter Games in Cor- tina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Albright gashed her leg two weeks earlier during practice, forcing her to wear a bandage throughout the Games.
bright had already started skating outdoors. She and her friends played on the ice, jumping over cracks. Tey were just having fun.
“I had no thoughts about training at
that time,” Albright said. “Tat was during World War II and we had gas rationing, so I could only skate once a week at most. But I loved the choreography and the music. I loved to jump high. Tat’s what motivated me.”
She would lean on that love of skating
when she contracted polio and had to spend months in the hospital. In the 1940s, no one knew what caused polio, how it spread, or how to treat it. Parents were advised to keep their children away from crowds. “I think I was almost 11 years old
then,” she said. “Te doctors didn’t know if I’d be paralyzed or not until my fever broke, which took a number of weeks. One Mon- day morning, they said to me, ‘On Friday, we’re going to ask you to take three steps.’ All that week, I was visualizing — we didn’t know what visualizing was then. I had been doing it on my own when I was skating.” Several months after she left the hospi-
Members of the 1956 U.S. Olympic figure skating team glide together in preparation for the Games. (l-r) David Jenkins, Mary Ann Dorsey (1956 World competitor), Catherine Macha- do, Albright and trainer Maribel Vinson
tal, doctors advised her parents to let their daughter do something she’d liked before contracting polio. So Albright returned to the rink, being careful to stay away from other children.
Albright, 20, of Newton Center, Massachusetts, and Hayes Alan Jenkins, 22, a prelaw student at Colorado College, celebrate Albright’s Olympic victory. Jenkins led the U.S. men to a sweep of the medals.
40 OCTOBER 2016
BETTMANN/CONTRIBUTOR PHOTOS
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