Legendary Canadian figure skater Toller Cranston, shown in this undated handout photo, has died. He was 65.HO/The Canadian Press
At the 1968 Canadian figure skating championships in Vancouver, coach Ellen Burka had two competitors on the podium, but her attention was focused elsewhere: on a young athlete who did not place.
"That was Toller Cranston, and he had tears running down his face, and I just felt sorry for him," she recalls.
"He was badly trained, and I could see that. Instead of looking at my men's champion, I was putting my arm around his shoulders and saying, Toller, your time will come."
Determination, dedication and a desire to go where no skater had gone before would eventually make her prophecy come true.
Within a decade of that tender encounter, the skater born Toller Montague Cranston was living up to his first name, a German word which when translated means "beyond great."
Exotic, flamboyant, bizarre and exciting, Mr. Cranston was a trailblazer who represented a new breed of Canadian sports figure: the athlete as artist.
"He was a sensation," declares Mrs. Burka, 93, of Mr. Cranston, who was found dead at his home in San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico, on Jan. 24, at the age of 65.
The 18-year old who entreated Mrs. Burka to coach him after his failure in Vancouver ended up becoming, in her expert opinion, the best male freestyle skater Canada has ever produced. Infusing skating with the expansive expressiveness of dance, he has influenced generations of skaters who have come after him.
Says Canadian two-time Olympic silver medalist Brian Orser, "He was a pioneer in men's skating on a global scale."
Mr. Cranston's legacy is the creation of a new style of skating that was revolutionary in its day for giving men greater freedom of expression as they tore up the ice with their blades.
"He opened the doors for the rest of us," says Kurt Browning, a four-time world champion and a four-time Canadian champion who grew up in Alberta watching Mr. Cranston's groundbreaking skating on his family's television set, an experience that inspired him to embrace the sport.
"He made skating people and judges around the world respect Canada. He made figure skating cool."
Mrs. Burka, the mother of 1965 world champion Petra Burka, hammered Mr. Cranston into award-winning shape when he went to work with her at the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club. He also moved in with her, living in her basement for seven years while she trained him.
As a result of her exacting tutelage, Mr. Cranston went on to win the Canadian men's title six years in a row, from 1971 to 1976, the bronze at the World Championships in 1974 and bronze again at the 1976 Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria.
While the gold always eluded him – he despised the compulsory figure eights which accounted for up to 65 per cent of his score, excelling more at free skating, which was given less weight – Mr. Cranston was a figure-skating pioneer whose dramatic flourishes, on and off the ice, forever altered his sport.
"He believed that the artistic part of skating was important or more important than the athletic, that's what he believed in, and he followed through," says Don Jackson, the 1962 Canadian men's champion who, at 75, is old enough to remember what skating was like pre-Toller Cranston.
"He was born with his leg over his head; he was supple to begin with," Mr. Jackson continues. "He liked doing the spirals, he liked being so outgoing and so different and he tried many different moves that men then just didn't do. Toller … took the brunt of the criticism at the time only because it was something new and not seen before. But he changed the sport for the better."
That something new was a style known as theatre on ice. Largely Mrs. Burka's invention, it stemmed from a belief that skating should be an art, inspired by music and incorporating movement borrowed from ballet and modern dance.
"People in Canada thought I was crazy at the time," recalls Mrs. Burka, a native of Holland who moved to Toronto after surviving the Holocaust. "But I could not take that figure skating was so stiff, and that the men put on monkey suits with their arms pinned to their sides.
"I am a dancer as well, and I thought that figure skating should be different, that it should be about understanding the music, about using your arms, using your feet. Toller was the only one who understood that. He was the best toy I ever had, and after two years, we developed a style which is the style of today."
But being an innovator came at a price.
"Initially the judges were against Toller," Mr. Jackson recalls.
"They did not accept him at first, and they didn't give him the winning points. To win, you have to have the judges on your side. But then TV helped him, because the general public liked what they saw, and they gave him standing ovations. The judges started to come around after that."
For his achievements, Mr. Cranston was inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 1976, named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1977, received a Special Olympic Order from the Canadian Olympic Association in 1995, and was inducted into the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in 1996, and the Canadian Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 1997. He joined Canada's Walk of Fame in 2003 and the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2004. In 2013, he was appointed the Official Artist of Skate Canada.
Mr. Cranston was also an accomplished painter who had studied for four years at Montreal's School of Fine Arts and by his own – likely exaggerated – account painted more than 70,000 canvases, bursting with fantastical, often skate-inspired imagery, which sold well around the world. He created angular forms that were Daliesque in their ability to shock and alter perceptions. He was not easy to pigeonhole.
On the ice, where his long, brown curls churned in the turbulence created by his signature clockwise spirals, Mr. Cranston would take on the persona of a Romantic poet.
Feathering his arms in the air, his feet dancing like moonbeams over the frozen flatness of a sports arena, his shoulders cantering, he dramatized the emotion of his accompanying music; he wore his heart on his sequined sleeve.
"A Nureyev on skates," is how the New York Times described Mr. Cranston in 1977, a year after he turned professional and appeared on Broadway in a skating spectacular called The Ice Show, in which he was the undisputed star.
Performing choreography by Mrs. Burka and Canada's Brian Foley, Mr. Cranston wore lavish Folies Bergère-style costumes and made his entrance down a spotlighted staircase with his hands held high over his head. It was definitely a look-at-me gesture, outrageously camp and a deliberate poke at the staid skating establishment.
But critics agreed that his talent matched his ego and welcomed his out-sized personality, recognizing his uniqueness.
"Like Mr. Nureyev, Mr. Cranston is a wayward spirit in his own art," wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff, comparing the skater to the most famous dancer on Earth. "And like Mr. Nureyev, he has a strong discipline that allows him to keep the basic form of his technique while breaking the rules."
Break the rules Mr. Cranston did, and not just on the ice.
Plagued by drug addiction, depression and acute feelings of loneliness, Mr. Cranston was an iconoclast who alienated people as much as he drew crowds to wonder at his talent.
Mr. Cranston was aware of his cocaine-fuelled shortcomings. In his 1997 autobiography, Zero Tollerance and again in that book's 2001 sequel, When Hell Freezes Over: Should I Bring My Skates?, he wrote candidly about his foibles.
"At the end of 1991, drugs and drug-related problems loomed large. I lived from day to day. I didn't even know if I'd be able to eat. I was flying by the seat of my pants, chronically depressed," he wrote in Zero Tollerance. "If I was having a nervous breakdown, I was too much of a chameleon to let anyone see how desperate, how out of control I was. Rather than tell someone (at the time, I didn't feel that I had the sort of friends whom I could tell), I chose to cover it up."
He also closed himself off from his family.
Born in Hamilton on April 20, 1949, and raised in Kirkland Lake, Ont., and Montreal, he was one of four children born to Montague Cranston and the former Margaret Stuart Chubb, middle-class parents who were veterans of the Second World War. His mother, known as Stuart, had served overseas with the Red Cross. Both now deceased (he in 1995, she in 2002) , they had supported their son's ambitions throughout their lifetimes.
Speaking to The Globe and Mail in 1972, shortly after Mr. Cranston became the Canadian senior men's champion, Ms. Cranston, brimming with pride, spoke of the sacrifices made to get her son to the top of his game.
"His dad and I had a lot of meatball meals during the early years," she said at the time. "We piled on 100,000 miles or so on family cars in endless searches for ice time. Wealthy kids have three or four skating club memberships. But we had to go the hard way around Greater Montreal. When desperate, we'd hire ice for $20 an hour and get two to three skaters to come in. The skates, with custom-made boots, cost $150 a pair." This is equivalent to $850 today, which is a great deal of money for a family that "wasn't rich."
But Mr. Cranston appeared to forget all that in 1997 when he publicly accused his mother of having thwarted his skating ambitions.
Ms. Cranston, who was also artistic and outspoken (her son once surmised that they must be "clones"), retaliated with a newspaper story, published in her community of Almonte, Ont., whose headline read, "Toller is a selfish liar, mother says."
"He did not get along with his family," Mrs. Burka observes.
"At the end of his life he didn't talk to anyone any more. But that was Toller."
Autopsy results confirm that the cause of Mr. Cranston's death was heart failure. A private funeral was held Saturday in San Miguel. A celebration of Mr Cranston's life is being planned in Toronto, his brother, Guy Cranston, an Ottawa-area painter, told the Globe and Mail.
In addition to Guy, Mr. Cranston leaves his older sister, Phillippa Baran; brother, Goldie; and five nephews and nieces.
Drama seemed to follow Mr. Cranston wherever he went. It was always his dream to loom larger than life, damn the consequences.
When he lived in Toronto, he filled his Cabbagetown home with angels – fat ones, skinny ones, painted, sculpted, innocent looking and also wizened – which were symbolic of his need to rise above this Earth, leaving gravity and other everyday constraints behind.
"I have probably had the most turbulent career of any skater in this century," Mr. Cranston once said. "But I have always had a sense of my own destiny."
Up there, where all the flying creatures are.
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