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Ottawa to Oslo. Canada's Barbara Ann Scott was the girl everybody's eyes were on. Like a wind-whipped prairie fire, her fame has swept eastward from Ottawa to London and Oslo; a few sparks were even observed in Hollywood. In Prague, her photograph was printed in local newspapers 17 times in three days—Rita Hayworth, in Prague recently, got her picture in the paper only eight times. Back home in Ottawa, where a whole Dominion gurgles appreciatively every time Barbara Ann winks an eye, the wheels of government once stopped while the Canadian House of Commons adopted a resolution saying that it approved everything about her.
Barbara Ann, with a peaches-&-cream complexion, saucer-size blue eyes and rosebud mouth, is certainly pretty enough. Her light brown hair (golden now that she bleaches it) falls pageboy style on her shoulders. She weighs a trim, girlish 107 Ibs. neither as full-bosomed as a Hollywood starlet nor as wide-hipped as most skaters. She looks, in fact, like a doll which is to be looked at but not touched. But Barbara Ann Scott is no fragile mammet. She is the women's figure-skating champion of the world.
By next week, if Canada's 12,500,000 prayers are answered, Barbara Ann will wear the crown of an Olympic champion. No Canadian from Vancouver to Halifax doubted that she would, but it was comforting nevertheless to hear one neutral European judge say: "Scott shows up the others when she merely skates on one foot in a straight line." The last skater to do that was Norway's brassy Sonja Henie, who in 1936 danced off the Olympic ice into a $1,000,000 Hollywood contract.
Threes & Eights. When Barbara Ann skates, she seems to float on ice. She turns effortlessly and unexpectedly—only clever performers can manage that—and never has to push to get up momentum for an eight or a loop-change-loop. She always seems to be enjoying herself, and as a result people always enjoy watching her. She has equilibrium, charm and style. A U.S. skating judge, who likes to define the quality of a skater in one word ("push" is his word for Sonja), puzzled over Barbara Ann a while, then described her quality as "femininity."
She is also neat and precise, and neat and precise things please her. ("I know exactly where I put my nail file," she says, "and I like to find it exactly where I left it.") This is why she prefers, as few skaters do, the required school figures to free skating. The school figures, 41 types in all, are the tedious, exacting, incredibly difficult fundamentals of figure skating (like a vocabulary test that must be passed before being allowed to make a speech). They count 60% in championship competition.
Barbara Ann takes a perfectionist's delight in tracing threes (bunnies' ears, she calls them) and double-three-change-double-threes on the ice. Even ice—when it's smooth—delights her. "I suppose most people think of ice as cold and artificial. But to me it's warm. It isn't artificial, really—it's alive."