John, the youngest of three boys, was born to Rita and Joseph Curry in suburban Birmingham, England, on September 9, 1949. Early in his life he developed a passion for theater, encouraged by his father, a self-employed precision engineer, who often took him to see musical comedies. John constructed a model theater and played out stories in miniature, concocting the scenery, costumes, and lighting.

What John truly wanted to do, though, was dance, something that his father expressly prohibited. In time he transferred his passion to the ice, without ever leaving behind the balletic and dramatic underpinnings.

When John was seven years old and just beginning to take skating lessons with Ken Vickers, his mother nursed her husband and John's brother Andrew, both of whom suffered from tuberculosis, in a part of the gracious family home that was ruled off-limits to the two healthy brothers. At one point, John believed that Andrew had died, but that nobody had thought to tell him about it. Going to the skating rink became a welcome escape from this unnatural house divided, as well as an outlet for John's athleticism and his strong competitive spirit. When John was sixteen, his father died, leaving the family in fairly dire straits. For his part, John was left with emotional issues that remained unresolved to the end of his life. Not too long afterward, he set out on his own. He eventually found his way to the outskirts of London, where he worked in a small grocery store and then at the National Cash Register Company to pay for his living quarters and his lessons with the great Swiss master of school figures, Arnold Gerschwiler.

In 1970, John won the first of six British titles. He worked with a number of gifted coaches in England and America, before landing on the doorstep of Carlo and Christa Fassi in Denver, Colorado. Through the kindness of a sponsor, American businessman Ed Mosler, he was able to afford the intensive work at the Colorado Ice Arena that would make him Olympic champion in 1976. His Don Quixote long program in Innsbruck set the standard of pure artistry for years to come.

After he won the 1976 Worlds in Gothenburg, John set out to truly meld dance and skating through a variety of ground-breaking ventures, most notably his own repertory ensembles of highly trained skaters who applied the basics of the dance class to ice and worked with leading dance choreographers. One of John's great contributions was assembling talented people without thought to their amateur resumes. Well-known and "no-name" skaters alike profited from his work methods and pioneering approach. John's companies performed on Broadway, at the Metropolitan Opera House, and at the Royal Albert Hall. His best remembered solo tour de force remains Debussy's L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, inspired by the classic Nijinsky interpretation.

John's final career as a stage actor was cut tragically short by illness and ultimately by his death in 1994 from an AIDS-related heart attack.

John Curry was the most important historical skater whom I knew well. However, it is both difficult and unpleasant for me to write about him, because he was also the only skater I ever knew personally whom I ultimately disliked.

I first laid eyes on John at the I972 Olympic Games in Sapporo. He was the solitary skater at the practice session before mine. (He didn't like to practice with other people watching.) I noticed that his figure was lean and trim, in some ways more suitable to classical ballet than to figure skating. On this particular occasion, he wore a long woolen toque with a gigantic pompom on the end.

That hat struck me as a strange fashion statement. At the Olympics, people with influence always scrutinized the talent, especially the newest competitors. I was sure that the pompom toque would raise establishment eyebrows.

It seems ridiculous to add this tidbit as well, but I realized when John performed his long program that his hair was long enough to make a ponytail. In I972, that was not at all acceptable to skating judges. Perhaps John's obliviousness to establishment mores contributed to his greatness.

John's personal life had already achieved a certain maturity, although the facts were not common knowledge. Even as early as February I972, when he was just twenty-two years old, I knew him to live intimately with a much older man. That same-sex cohabitation, I thought, bordered on the scandalous. John's homosexuality and the details of his private life are not appropriate literary fodder, except to the extent that his forbidden lifestyle and sexual partners influenced his skating career and his interactions with members of the figure-skating world.

Neither John nor I did well at our first Olympics. I placed ninth, while he finished eleventh. Ondrej Nepela, Sergei Chetverukhin from the U.S.S.R., and Patrick Pera of France were the medalists that year. But at the Calgary Worlds following those Games, we both moved dramatically up the ladder. It was after Calgary that we both realized, consciously or unconsciously, that we were two hungry competitors, both chasing after the same medals.

My move up the ladder in Calgary was more dramatic than Johns. As the eleventh place finisher in school figures, I won the free-skating competition and catapulted into fifth position. Perhaps in the back of John's mind was the phrase "slow and steady wins the race." At the time I certainly was very much the hare, and John was much more the tortoise.

John and I were different yet the same. Certainly neither of us was the boy next door. Both of us were interested in the fine arts beyond the figure-skating world, and were convinced that skating was more an art than a sport. Both of us laughed at ourselves, yet we were both absolutely convinced about our destinies. Unfortunately, we wanted the same thing, and two people can never win the same Olympic gold medal. (At least, that was the rule until the pairs' event at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.) Nevertheless, we were genuinely friendly in those early days. We looked forward to seeing one another at the various international exhibitions and competitions.

John embraced classical dance as his number-one influence. All his movements seemed to have been transported from the dance floor to the ice. He was a refined skater with an elegance seldom seen in males, yet, on an emotional level, I found his performances as cold as an iceberg.

I was the antithesis of the classical skater. Unlike John, I was not trained in dance. What I offered, in direct contrast to John, was individuality and originality fueled by passion. During our heydays as amateurs, figure skating was in the throes of athletic and artistic change. John was the prime European exponent of that metamorphosis, and I believe that I was its prime exponent in North America.

Some eighteen months to two years before the I976 Olympics, I received a telephone call from Carlo Fassi, inviting me to train without cost. I would receive free lessons, ice time, and even my own car, if I left Toronto and my coach, Ellen Burka, to defect to Colorado. All of us with Olympic dreams were looking for the right vehicle to allow us to realize them, but as tempting as Carlo's offer was, my loyalty remained with Ellen, both as a friend and as a coach. I turned down Carlo's invitation. A month later, I heard that John Curry, my primary competitor, had gone to Denver to train under Carlo and his wife, Christa.

By the time the I975 Colorado Springs Worlds arrived, John had undergone a disposition makeover. He refused to speak to or acknowledge any of his competitors. Even "good morning" was no longer in his repertoire. As I look back, I realize that this tactic was highly effective and quite devastating to me on a psychological level. I had always thought that competitors were competitors on the ice, but friends could still be friends.

Elva Oglariby cited John's excuse in Black Ice: The Life and Death of John Curry:

Carlo had made me promise that I would avoid my fellows katers as much as possible so that I could concentrate fully on my own performance. This particularly bothered Toller, because we had become friends. I had been so impressed by his Pagliacci programme in Munich that I had started a correspondence with him, and he had been looking forward to spending time with me. But his flamboyant style and his avant-garde approach had the power to unnerve me - it's difficult to explain why, but for some reason it undermined my confidence and made me doubt my own direction. So I stayed in my own home and spoke to no one except the Fassis.

That situation continued through the Olympics in Innsbruck and beyond.

Because of John's ballet connections, he always wore refined costumes that were understated in an exotic way. For both the short and the long programs, his Olympic costume in Innsbruck was as plain as it could be. He wore a beige, wide-collared, blouse-like shirt under a simple black jumpsuit, with a tiny leather belt encircling his slender waist, a waist that piqued his inordinate vanity.

Like all competitors who are divinely ordained to win gold medals, John sensed that his moment had arrived, and he rode a tidal wave to glory. With his Don Quixote long program, he earned fifteen marks of 5.9. (I received five of them, compared to VIadimir Kovalev`s one 5.9 from the Soviet judge.)

Standing on that Innsbruck podium, a metal platform topped with strange, round acrylic tubs carpeted in turquoise, John was but six inches higher than I, yet he could have been at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. He had achieved, in the most heroic way, what I had failed to accomplish. I don't believe that he congratulated either VIadimir, the silver medalist, or me, in the bronze-medal position.

After his triumph in Innsbruck, John's character underwent a further metamorphosis. Of all the people described in this book, he had the deepest and most multifaceted character. He was the one person within the skating world who was entirely different from the millions of likeable and kind people who existed under the figure-skating umbrella. In his latter years, I don't believe that John enjoyed anyone's company His least favorite person was himself, and, during his bouts of self-loathing, he punished the members of his inner circle. He flew into rages and sank into depressions, jeopardizing his projects.

After the men's Olympic event concluded, John confided some of his inner torment, in particular the loneliness of his secret homosexual existence, to a young British journalist whom he took for a kindred spirit. The morning after their quiet chat over a bottle of wine in the hotel bar, a newspaper headline screamed what John had worked so hard to hide. He was devastated.

With John's telephone ringing off the hook with calls from other news outlets, Carlo Fassi called a half-hour press conference, so that John could explain the situation in a controlled and dignified manner and perhaps douse some of the raging fires. It was only after the press conference that John was finally able to sit down with his mother to tell her what he had most feared revealing to his own family.

Shock waves coursed through the figure-skating world. For various reasons, Carlo did not want his student to compete at the forthcoming Worlds in Gothenburg, and John reluctantly agreed. Back at home in England, though, he had time for reflection and realized that some unfinished business remained on his agenda. He telephoned Carlo at the pre-Worlds training site and announced that he would arrive the next day Carlo was horrified, and not without reason. During the weeks off the ice, John had lost his training edge. In Gothenburg, journalists dogged his footsteps and even planted bugs at the practice-rink barrier where John and Carlo worked.

All things considered, I should have won that competition. Going in, I enjoyed a number of advantages over John. In a nutshell, however, once more I did not win, Again John did. Winner and loser, that event marked the end of our amateur careers.

John and I both went on, during the next year, to assemble groups of skaters and create our own shows. For John, it was The Theatre of Skating and then several other ventures. For me, it was Toller Cranston's The ice Show. After the eventual premature demise of my show (more about that later), with my personal and professional life lying in tattered ribbons around my feet, I decided that my only remaining option was to perform with Holiday on Ice in Europe. Its casts included the dregs of show business, right down to trained bears and skating chimpanzees. Readers of my book Zero Tollerance will recall just how strained was my relationship with the monkeys.

One day, while traveling in a frigid train from Dortmund, Germany, to Cologne with Holiday on Ice - how clearly I remember this - I happened to read in Time magazine about John's opening at the Metropolitan Opera House. I experienced a flashback to my lonely moment on the Olympic podium in Innsbruck. Years later, John and I were still a million miles apart: geographically, artistically, and financially.

Usually, when competitive skaters have shared common experiences like the Olympic Games or Worlds, there is a common bond that takes hold after the event, once everyone has turned professional. The past is forgotten. That was not at all true of my evolving (or devolving) relationship with John Curry I'm convinced that the more often we ended up on the same bill, the more he came to dislike me and the more I reciprocated with indifference.

The silly thing is that, no matter what image I aspired to project international skating star, multifaceted artist, brainy intellectual, or clotheshorse - John always made me feel inferior. Our few verbal exchanges over the years bordered on icy politeness, and no matter what John said to me, I found his words both painful and intimidating.

John had the remarkable ability to make any skater, world-class or otherwise, feel that John Curry alone possessed the secret to skating. He was somehow able to persuade other skaters that his simplest basic edge was superior to and infinitely more valuable than their triple Axels.

In I980, John was asked to perform an exhibition at the Olympic Games in Lake Placid. I'm not certain where I was at the time, but I remember watching the event on television. It rather shocked me, because John's skating routine, "After All," contained neither a jump nor a spin. Renowned dance choreographer Twyla Tharp had choreographed the number, which was rather long. At the time, I dismissed the performance as an artistic sham.

Many years later I happened to see that program again on videotape. My jaw dropped. Only then did I realize what a splendidly unique and original skater John was. It had taken many years for his skating style to germinate in my mind before I could understand and appreciate it.

As an Olympic gold medallist, John enjoyed substantial box-office appeal. However, many times when we both skated in the same exhibitions, his bad behavior destroyed the experience for me.

In I98I, Dick Button's Candid Productions, founded in I980 to produce figure-skating events for television, sent a cast of skaters to Beijing, China, where a television crew filmed our individual skating performances for Chinese audiences, as well as our sightseeing experiences, and turned the material into a documentary that appeared on HBO as International Skating from Peking."

Going to China at that time was a rare privilege. We were one of the first Western contingents (in any art or sport) to do so. All of us found the cultural and historical novelties more than mind-boggling. What could have been one of the greatest experiences of our skating careers was made more memorable, in the most negative way, by John's obnoxious behavior. At least for me, his unpleasantness entirely ruined the trip.

JoJo Starbuck, American pairs champion with Ken Shelley, continued to skate as an individual performer after a splendid Ice Capades career with Ken. During her years as special guest star with John's ice shows, she was his partner. The atmosphere in China at times was so thick (it seems humorous now in retrospect) that, on a particular bus ride to the Great Wall, John used JoJo as his go-between. He refused to address any of the rest of us in person.

On another occasion, at an early version of Dick Button's World Professional Figure Skating Championships in Landover, John and I participated together in a team competition. It was difficult and uncomfortable for me to try to whip up team spirit when John, as a member of my team, obviously didn't want to be there, didn't seem to like any of us, and refused to speak to his fellow competitors. Directly before the competition, although the fact was not publicized, John refused point-blank to wear the assigned team uniform and threatened to flee to the airport. Somehow a deal was struck. John consented to wear part of the uniform.

Dick Button, with the most sterling credentials of any male skater, past or present, displayed a personal weakness in such circumstances. Rather than acting with authority, he consistently caved in to every one of John's silly little demands.

A number of Olympic skaters - JoJo Starbuck, Ken Shelley, Peggy Fleming, John, and I - were asked to perform at a special exhibition in La Jolla, California, sometime during the same era. One pleasant surprise awaited me in La Jolla. A former colleague and world medallist whom I had not seen for many years taught figure skating at that ice center. It was such a pleasure to see Julie Lynn Holmes, to catch up on gossip, and to reminisce about our mutual skating experiences.

The pleasure of that reunion quickly evaporated when John informed the club professional, Bruce Hyland, a Canadian and a good friend of mine, that he did not wish to share practice ice with me. He announced to one and all that his demands must be met, because he did not "have to skate the exhibition otherwise. Bruce replied in a cold and deliberate voice, "Yes, John, you don't have to skate here." That was the one and only time I ever heard anyone stand up to John Curry Both John and I did practice and perform on the same ice, but the acid in my stomach virtually corroded what would have been a pleasant exhibition.

Once, at a professional competition, it seemed that every conversational topic created tension between John and me. The one and only civilized discussion that we held centered on a shared passion. The common denominator that bound us in peace was our extreme admiration for Janet Lynn. When Janet began a run-through of her competitive program, we instantly and compulsively expressed our awe. At the end of Janet's routine, we agreed that figure skating had never produced, and never would produce in the future, an athlete with such sensitivity and quality. John and I then resumed our hostile silence.

In I984, John made a great splash at the Metropolitan Opera House with a tongue-in-cheek tango number, "Tango Tango," that he skated with JoJo Starbuck. JoJo was a fabulous performer and usually stole the show, but at that time she was experiencing the extreme pain that comes at the end of a failed marriage. She and the famous American football icon Terry Bradshaw were heading toward divorce. JoJo spent much of her practice time sobbing into the telephone, presumably to Bradshaw.

In the middle of an emotional telephone call, a television crew asked JoJo to perform the tango with John for the camera. The second she started the number, her ardent professionalism kicked in. She performed meticulously and passionately. Her metamorphosis from grieving young woman to slick, savvy professional had taken place in seconds. I always remembered that lesson, and it influenced my future professional career.

Some memories are painful, yet they shouldn't be repressed forever. There are lessons to be learned. Elva Oglariby was a housewife from Vancouver, B.C., who became my personal manager and a shareholder in my ice show. I barely survived that shipwreck (as detailed in my book Zero Tollerance). Elva then went on to manage Robin Cousins' Electric Ice, which eventually ended like Toller Cranston's The Ice Show.

There was one curious moment during a I984 Pro Skate event, a professional competition that Elva co-produced with David Spungen. John, Robin, and I were among the performers at Madison Square Garden in New York. My show and Robin's were already history, and Elva had gone on to involve herself in a major way with John Curry's repertory company.

During the intermission of that endless competition (I believe that it went on for four-and-one-half hours), John was given an award that Elva, his manager, had specially created for him. She pronounced him "Skater of the Year." In his acceptance speech, John dedicated the award to his dearest and most loyal friend, Elva Oglanby.

When Robin and I watched that incestuous spectacle together, the public meeting of the mutual admiration society, we shared one of the heartiest laughs of our lives. What situation could be more absurd? We agreed, between chuckles, that it was just a matter of time until John became another of Elva's casualties.

At the end of the run of my Broadway show, I had engaged a lawyer with the encouraging name Stanley Plesent to help me extricate myself from Elva. Although he was unable to do so, in the process he became an Elva Oglanby expert. Irony of all ironies, when John Curry needed legal help to extricate himself from Elva's grasp, he happened by chance to choose the same New York lawyer, Stanley Plesent.

I had tearfully entered Stanley's office to explain the macabre situation in which I found myself. When John, nearly a decade later, entered Stanley's office teary-eyed and dropped the name Elva Oglanby, Stanley nearly fell off his chair. He gasped at John, "Not Elva Oglanby! Surely not the Elva Oglanby who was with Toller Cranston and Robin Cousins?"

I heard that, because of prior contractual arrangements, John was required to give Elva a percentage of his salary for all future skating performances. It is my belief that, when he eventually decided never to perform upon ice again, one of his motivations was to avoid giving Elva one cent of his paycheck.

During the late I980s, a nasty cloud began to waft over the figure skating world. That horrible black cloud was the fear of AIDS. Because certain well-known skaters had already fallen victim to the horrible disease, many other major players came under scrutiny. Had the AIDS virus infected them as well?

Rumors began to swirl around John Curry His initial response was to deny them, in part because he wanted to continue to work in the United States. If his condition were to be discovered, he would be deported. Eventually he would tell the London Sunday Mail that he had first heard about the disease in I986 and even then hadn't fully understood its lethal nature. That may or may not have been the truth. As early as I985, two of his recent lovers had tested HIV-positive; another had already died. John was diagnosed HIV-positive in December I987 and developed symptoms of AIDS in I99I.

A number of AIDS benefits took place in the I990s. Important New York City skaters mounted one of the earliest of those events in the historical New York Armory Many well-known skaters performed in that show. Once again, John and I locked antlers.

John had always been immensely thin and somewhat frail in appearance, but, at that particular benefit, he did not look at all well. Our one and only conversation took place in the men's dressing room, where our close proximity forced him to say hello. After his terse greeting, I responded, "Well, hello, John. Speaking to me this decade, are you?" That was all that either of us said.

A year or two later, I was invited to skate in a New Year's Day television show in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Once again John and I bumped into each other. John usually refused to mingle with the other skaters, customarily surrounding himself with a male entourage.

The running order of the show was such that John skated directly before I did. I had been performing a great deal, so my skating ability and physical conditioning were at a high level at the moment. I suspect that John had not been practicing much, and his skating routine contained one solitary single jump.

WWhen John finished his number, he came backstage through the curtain, breathless and close to fainting from exhaustion. Had I known that he was ill from AIDS, I wouldn't have made the remark that I did as I passed him and went out onto the ice to perform my own number. With John gasping for air, I said, "That was a lovely single Axel you did." it was a cruel way of damning him with faint praise. Today I regret having made that comment.

In September I992, John Curry went home to England, essentially to live out his remaining days as peacefully as possible, then to die of AIDS in the bosom of his family I never saw him again.

In May I993, however, Robin Cousins staged an AIDS benefit, Skate for Life, at the National Indoor Arena outside Birmingham, England. Moments before I was announced on the ice, I could not help but be cognizant of the fact that, some fifteen miles away, John lay in a hospital, ailing from one of the periodic complications of his condition. As nervous as I was about performing that evening, I decided to secretly dedicate my performance to him.

The announcer of the evening was a famous British gentleman from the BBC, Alan Weeks. As fellow commentators, we had met many times at the Europeans and the Worlds. When he announced my name to the people of Birmingham, his brief introduction changed my outlook. His said, in essence, 'Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to present one of the most important skaters in history, as well as a great star."

For some reason, I suddenly felt that the score had been settled. Whatever anxieties and animosities John had provoked in me were instantly exorcised from my soul. The strange and poetic irony of our lives and careers was that we had suddenly changed places. So many years after the Innsbruck Olympics, I could ask myself who really had won and who had lost. I decided at that moment that I had been the lucky one.

John died on April I5, I994, in Binton, Warwickshire, at the age of forty-four.

A year later, I received a telephone call from his brother in England, asking me for evidence against Elva Oglanby, who had written John's biography, Black Ice.

John's mother, Rita, had heard about the book at the I995 Worlds in Birmingham and had obtained a pre-publication copy from London publisher Victor Gollancz. She objected to some of its content, especially certain material about John's early family life. Under threat of a lawsuit, Gollancz recalled all the copies that had been distributed. Many had already been shipped to reviewers and others.

Meanwhile, Elva maintained that she and John had planned the book for years and had discussed many episodes of his life with just that intent. She had taken notes and kept a diary. Unfazed, she announced her intention to find an American publisher. That didn't happen. The few extant copies of Black Ice became collectors' items. Those who were lucky to obtain photocopies, including my co-author, discovered a large measure of reality, liberally seasoned with petty inaccuracies and self-serving truths.

In an interview with the Manchester Guardian, I netted front-page headlines with a particularly snappy remark: I never regretted losing the Olympic gold medal, but I did regret meeting Elva Oglanby."

John was truly a unique contributor to the art of figure skating. To paraphrase the lyrics of Frank Sinatra's song, he did it his way I can imagine him floating around heaven (accompanied by classical harp music) with all the other skating angels who have left us.

Of all the male skaters I have known during nearly five decades of life in figure skating, no one is more important than John Curry. Yet it took me thirty years to recognize that simple truth.