Fleming, Peggy

Peggy Fleming

American ice skater Peggy Fleming (born 1948) was the only U.S. athlete to win an Olympic gold medal at the 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, France. One of skating's first bona-fide celebrities, Fleming is credited with luring legions of youth to the sport and for making figure skating a staple of sports broad casting on network television. "Pretty and balletic, elegant and stylish," noted Sports Illustrated writer E. M. Swift, "Fleming took a staid sport that was shackled by its inscrutable compulsory figures and arcane scoring system and, with television as her ally, made it marvelously glamorous."

Unlike many of her homegrown competitors, Peggy Gale Fleming came from a working-class background. She was born on July 27, 1948, in San Jose, California, to Al and Doris Fleming. The family, which would eventually grow to include four daughters, initially lived on a farm in Morgan Hill, California, but began relocating frequently as Fleming's star rose in the junior ranks. Her father was a newspaper-plant press operator who first put his daughter on skates at the age of nine at a Bay Area rink. She proved a natural from the start and began skating daily.

The Flemings went to Cleveland, Ohio, for a time, while Al Fleming took a six-month stint in order to learn how to run a color printing press, and Fleming's supportive mother found a coach for her there. The coach put the young skater through a series of paces and tests and suggested she was already good enough to compete. Fleming was only 11 years old in 1960 when she came in last in Los Angeles at the Pacific Coast Juvenile Figure Skating Championship. As she recalled the event in her autobiography, The Long Program: Skating toward Life's Victories. "I was humiliated, especially for my family, who had made the drive down to L.A. The sheer embarrassment of it all gave me a jolt. From that day on I was serious about every competition I entered." Two weeks later, she entered another Pacific Coast event and took first place.

Father Drove Zamboni

Her first-place win began a long winning streak for Fleming in juniors events. Her family moved to Pasadena, and she began working with a new coach there. Her father worked in the printing department of the Los Angeles Times and actually learned how to drive the ice-resurfacing machine—called a Zamboni—because the ice was too rough for the early-morning practice sessions Fleming put in. The cost of renting the ice time in some of the skating arenas where she practiced was more than he sometimes earned per hour as a press operator. Her mother, meanwhile, sewed all her competition costumes at home. As Fleming recalled in her memoir, "We were often made to feel that we were crashing the party. We just weren't from the same world as the more well-off families whose sons and daughters were part of the country club set known as 'the skating world.'"

A tragic event occurred in February 1961 when Fleming's Pasadena coach, Bill Kemp, was killed in a plane crash in Belgium. He and 18 members of the U.S. figure skating team were en route to the World Championships in Prague, Czechoslovakia, when their plane went down. The loss decimated the U.S. figure-skating program. Fleming proved to be a key to the rebuilding of the U.S. figure skating team following the crash. She won the Pacific Coast Women's Championships in 1963 and the U.S. championships the following year, making her, at age 15, the youngest national title-holder in the event's history. In 1964 she won the senior nationals and found herself on the way to the Olympics soon thereafter.

Heralded as Ice Star

In the run-up to the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, Fleming was touted in the press as skating's new star and the potential savior for American figure skating after its tragic loss. "There is a dash of flamboyance to her skating that everyone finds appealing," New York Times writer Lincoln A. Werden remarked of her style on the ice. Fleming faced stiff international competition at the Innsbruck Games, however, and harbored no illusions. As she told the New York Times, "If I'm among the first 10, I'll be satisfied." Indeed, at the Games she managed only a sixth-place finish, but the experience was a pivotal one for her career. "Seeing the other skaters in Innsbruck was a very important thing for my growth as an athlete and a competitor," Fleming wrote in The Long Program. "Being there gave me a different perspective on the European skaters. This was before the days of skating on television, so I really had no idea what the competition looked like or what their style was."

Returning home, Fleming went on to win her second U.S. national title in 1965 and came in third at the 1965 World Championships that year as well. Realizing that the World Championships' high-altitude setting in Colorado Springs, Colorado, had seemed to make her tire more easily, Fleming and her family relocated there so that she might train under such conditions. She spent four hours practicing each morning, then attended classes at Cheyenne Mountain High School, and worked with her coach for another three hours later in the day. She readied for the 1966 World Championships in Davos, Switzerland, which was to take place at an outdoor venue. Before she departed, she told the New York Times 's Werden that the Davos event was going to prove more of a challenge for her than the indoor rink in Colorado Springs the previous year. "That makes a big difference," she explained. "You need more physical force, you have the wind to skate against, the rays of the glaring sun and the texture of outdoor ice."

The dedication paid off, and Fleming won the women's World Championship title that year. Skating aficionados were enthused about Fleming's potential. Dick Button, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, called the teen "a delicate lady on ice. She is not a fiery skater, and she shouldn't be made to be," he told the New York Times. "With some skaters there is a lot of fuss and feathers, but nothing is happening. With Peggy there's no fuss and feathers, and a great deal is happening. The only other skater in her class since the war has been Tenley Albright."

In 1966 Fleming began classes at Colorado College in Colorado Springs and continued her arduous practice sessions in preparation for the 1968 Olympics. She won another world title in 1967 and arrived in Grenoble early the next year with a chartreuse-colored skating costume her mother had sewed. The unusual green shade was a nod to a monastery near Grenoble at which the odd green liqueur of the same name was made. There were few other American athletes who were predicted to take a gold medal in any of the other Winter Olympic events save for her, and though she appeared nonplussed at the time, Fleming later recalled in an interview with Winston-Salem Journal writer Lisa O'Donnell that she was indeed unsettled by the pressure. "My overwhelming memories are of the nerves," she said that day in February of 1968. "When I get nervous, I fiddle with my hair. I kept putting on more and more hair spray. I used a can of Aquanet. I don't think my hair moved for two weeks."

Won Olympic Gold

In her free-skate event, Fleming glided across the ice to a program that featured musical selections by Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, and Rossini and came in first. She was the sole American athlete to win a gold medal at the Games, but the event was historic for another reason as well: it was the first time that the Olympics were broadcast live on television and in color as well. Fleming's verve and grace in her chartreuse-green skating outfit made her a media sensation and awakened television executives to the potential gold in televising figure-skating events. She returned home a celebrity, appearing on the covers of both Life magazine and Sports Illustrated. Button told New York Times journalist Lloyd Garrison that Fleming represented a new, balletic era for figure skating. "You see a lot of Peggy's competition clumping around, skating fast like hockey players, flailing the ice with quick stops, trying to overpower you with gimmicks. The crowd may like it but it's not beautiful and it's not good skating.… Position and recovery are just as important in skating. With Peggy, there's not a misplaced move."

Fleming turned professional soon afterward and was signed to a television contract for her own NBC special. The check for that job alone was $35,000, a huge sum of money in those days. She bought a Porsche with it but also provided for her parents, who had sacrificed so much over the years. She went on to appear in four other television specials that pulled in impressive ratings, filmed in such picturesque locales as St. Petersburg, Russia. She also began appearing regularly with the Ice Follies and Holiday on Ice and even performed at the White House—the first skater in history to do so. "I had no idea what lay ahead of me because no one had done the things that I did as a professional …," Fleming said of this era in an interview with Christian Science Monitor journalist Ross Atkin. 1960 Olympic champion Carol Heiss "did a movie with Snow White and the Three Stooges, and that was about it, so I had to do kind of groundbreaking things. Television was the tool at that time. There was satellite coverage of the Olympics and color TV."

Skating Commentator for ABC

In 1970 Fleming married Greg Jenkins, and her earnings helped put him through medical school. They had two sons and remained in the San Francisco Bay area. Fleming became a television commentator for ABC Sports in 1980, broadcasting from national, world, and Olympics events alongside Button. She has often been termed the first celebrity athlete that American skating produced in the modern era and was credited with bringing legions of new devotees to the sport in the years after 1968, thanks to the huge ratings her Olympic accomplishment garnered. Fleming, noted Sports Illustrated 's Swift in a 1994 issue commemorating the most important athletes of the past four decades, "pulled U.S. skating back to its feet after the 1961 tragedy, jump-starting a program that for the next 26 years produced an unbroken string of U.S. women stars."

In early 1998, Fleming underwent surgery for breast cancer, almost 30 years to the day after she won her gold medal in Grenoble. The diagnosis was devastating, she told O'Donnell in the Winston-Salem Journal. "It was like someone pulled the rug out from me." After her lumpectomy, she endured six weeks of radiation therapy. "My athletic training kicked in," she told St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Ellen Gardner. "I wanted to be the best patient … I wanted to win." The experience and the overwhelming outpouring of support she received spurred her to write her 1999 autobiography. She has also become active in breast-cancer awareness issues and speaks publicly on the importance of early detection. The former Olympic champ rarely skates, as she told the Tampa Tribune. "I've been doing it all my life, and I just don't have time to do that anymore," Fleming admitted. "And I don't think that's a challenge for me anymore." Fleming did however, put on her skates for SmithKline Beecham Consumer Healthcare's television commercials as their spokeswoman for a calcium supplement called Os-Cal. In March 2003 Fleming was honored with the 13th Vince Lombardi Award of Excellence.

Books

Great Women in Sports, Visible Ink Press, 1996.

Fleming, Peggy, with Peter Kaminsky, The Long Program: Skating toward Life's Victories, Pocket Books, 1999.

Periodicals

Christian Science Monitor, February 11, 1998.

Life, February 23, 1968.

M2 Presswire, October 29, 1999.

New York Times, January 19, 1964; February 21, 1965; February 9, 1966; February 28, 1966; February 28, 1967; February 11, 1968; March 2, 1981.

People, March 2, 1998.

PR Newswire, March 11, 2003.

Sports Illustrated, September 19, 1994.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 6, 1998.

Tampa Tribune, March 7, 2002.

Winston-Salem Journal (Winston-Salem, NC), November 26, 2002.