Sport: Skating

3 minute read
TIME

From Feb. 3 to Feb. 5 the figure skating championship of the world will be held in Manhattan. There, last week, famed skaters were practicing their loops, rockers, counters, brackets—the 48 figures that every skater must know before entering a tournament. Last week in Madison Square Garden a charity pageant was arranged on the ice in which all the socially registered people who know how to skate took part. Tall, ruddy Irving Brokaw, onetime holder of many amateur titles, was the King, a role properly awarded him in recognition of his 20-year patronage of fancy skating and of the interest which makes him hurry out of his big house on Fifth Avenue with his skates under his arm whenever, from his drawing room window, he sees figures moving on the lakes in Central Park. Sonja Henie was the Princess, and it was she whom the spectators had come to see. In a gold costume, with the spotlight on her. she stood chained to the mast of a Viking ship; later she gave an exhibition by herself.

Sonja Henie is a well made, light-haired girl with a good-natured, intelligent face and muscular legs. She is 17 and has been figure-skating champion of the world for the last three years. She has won the Olympic title once and the Norwegian six times. Her father, William Henie, runs a trade in women’s wear that has been in the Henie family for 100 years. His store on the Prinsens-Gade, with its flag over the door and the costly sheen of the fur coats behind the thick plateglass, is one of the most expensive, the most profitable in Oslo. As a boy he liked to ride bicycles, and won the world’s amateur championship at Antwerp in 1893. Pleased that his little girl had inherited a snub nose from her Irish grandmother, he taught her to skate when she was seven.

She was eleven when, in 1924, she won her first championship for figure skating. She did not skate in the earnest way of most young girls, and when turning an outside left with her arms out she did not look like a pullet. On the lakes at St. Moritz, and the rink at Budapest, in London, Stockholm, she was wildly applauded. She gave a command performance for the Queen of Norway, and afterward the Queen wrote to her brother George V in England and asked him to see Sonja when she was in London. King George did as he was asked, and later that evening his wife said to Sonja Henie: “You know, I often wished I had learned skating—but one has to start young, I can see that.”

Another time, Baron Henri de Rothschild asked her to a party on his yacht, along with Prince and Princess Olaf of Norway, and she gave a command performance for Viscount Lascelles. In the U. S. she has been practicing a new whirl the Alex Paulsen—which is a turn and a half in the air, the skater landing on one skate going backward. She skates a little every and between times dances, dines, goes the theatre.

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