» Robin Cousins interview
Robin Cousins Olympic Gold medallist and world free skating champion talks to Andrew Kay about a career that combines creativity and athleticism
What was your introduction to ice skating?
I was five and we were on holiday in Bournemouth. It was a hot summer. My dad was playing golf with my brothers and my mother and I were wandering around the shops and there was a very cold breeze coming from this doorway so we stood there to cool off and it was the entrance to the ice rink. In the entrance was the poster for the Bournemouth Ice Follies of 1964-65 and the pictures got my attention. There was public skating happening I asked to go in and look. The next thing my mother remembered was paying one and sixpence for me to be on the ice and I remember whizzing around.
Could you do it straight away?
I don’t remember, my mother’s recollection was that a man came up and said: “Oh, your son’s very good, where does he skate?” and she said: “No, it’s his first time, he’s never been on the ice before”. She told him that we were from Bristol, and he said that he knew there was no ice rink, only then could he believe that I had never actually been on the ice before. But he made the mistake of telling me that there was going to be an ice rink built in Bristol.
On Saturdays, we would all go and get hair cuts and the only way I would go is if we drove past where they were building the ice rink. Something about it that had obviously captured my imagination. I asked for skating lessons for Christmas, there was a board with all the professionals names and my mother said you can have so many lessons with this one or two lessons with that one and I said that I wanted lessons with that lady because she just smiled at me. It was Pamela Davis who had skated alongside John Curry in Birmingham. She took me from my ‘learn to skate’ class through to my first World Championship.
“I tell kids when they get nervous, just look at the panel of mean, nasty old judges and imagine them naked, it will make you smile and you won’t be able to think about them”
Where did you come?
Fifteenth. Not a bad start, 15th out of 29 and I was the youngest by a year. I had three major coaches in my life and the other two both said that the reason I was winning was because of the way Pam had taught me at the beginning. She was only 19, Bristol was her first teaching job and she was passionate. There were probably 8 or 9 of us competing regionally and locally at club levels. We were all at her house picking our music. She was taking us out to look at fabrics for our outfits and we were very involved in the whole process. She did not say, “This is what you are going to skate to and how you are going to do it”, it was “What do you want to do? How would you like to skate? What do you want to feel like? What music do you like?”.
Did that give you your ability to choreograph?
Absolutely, there is no question that what Pam instilled in us as pre-teenagers was the magic of show business even though we were on the ice. It was always about how we looked, and how we did it not what we did. There were people that were trying complex jumps when we were only allowed to do singles but we did the most beautiful perfect singles. I did not win the Olympics because of what I did, I won it because of how I did it.The technique is wonderful but it is that extra, the ‘IT’ factor and she had it and passed on what she could to her students. I was the one who made it the furthest but there were four or five of us that were great performers and I credit everything to that ‘Learn to Skate’ class.
You were part of a wave that was a change in the way ice dance and free skating looked, very much a British thing.
There was no ‘this is how it has to be done’, until I had to move to London and started to work with the great Gladys Hogg, a world champion in her own right, and had taught five or six world champions. She was old school, this is how it is done and this is how it is.
How old were you then?
13 or 14, I was Junior National Number one and I was doing a cross over between junior and senior, and, I have to be honest, it was not that I was that good, it was just that there were not that many boys competing so I did jump through the ranks quite quickly, although, you have to reach a standard to be able to move on. We would go up once a week to do a day of training in London with Gladys. I was learning from one of the greats and of course training in London alongside our national rank team. It was interesting but Gladys and I clashed a lot over my ideas, how I wanted to look and the type of music. A woman who befriended a few of us at the rink took what I had learned from Pam a step further and introduced me to some obscure American music, folk singers, rock or a bit of this and that – the diversity of what I was exposed to was going to make me who I was to become.
Was there a moment when you realised you were good enough to get a world championship, or get gold at the Olympics?
It sort of just happened, I was junior champion in spring 1972, in summer I skated at my first senior level international competition in St Gervais in France. I did not medal but I was top five and then at the British Championship that December was my first senior British Championship and I was third. John Curry was winning his third title at that point. I certainly did not compete against him that year. That was the first time I saw him, although we never spoke.
I was on the National Senior Team the same year that I was Junior Champion. I competed the following year at the European Championships when I was 15 and a lot of people were coming up to Pam and to Gladys and saying he is going to be fantastic, there is such exuberance. I have been a speed demon all of my life on the ice.
You hurtled around the ice the other day, not knocking over people but falling to the ground and flipping yourself back on to your skates to their amazement.
Yes, yes, it was great fun. That was at Slough, I was showing off a bit.
Did they recognise who you were?
Yes, people of that era certainly know who I am, the younger ones know me because of Dancing On Ice.
The international scene happened quickly and I thought if this is what it feels like to compete at this level I will have more please. It was a question of doing whatever I could and whatever hours needed to be done,whether it was 2am because that was when the ice was available in Bristol or due to travelling. It was tough, financially, it was getting more difficult, there were no sponsorships around, everybody was amateur. No managers and agents.
Your family made a lot of sacrifices.
Dad was a civil servant and mother was a secretary. My brothers took extra paper rounds in order to help pay for extra lessons in competition weeks, it was very much and always was a family affair, whether it was me with my skating or my brothers with their rugby, cricket or football. The word sacrifice was never used in the house, we were brought up to be thankful that we were a family unit. I assumed that everybody lived like we did, so it was quite odd to find that it was not the norm. My local Bristol skating club would also do fundraising and in the end it was the Sports Aid Foundation who were the saviours, Sports Aid Foundation South West, and then the National Grant.
Which came first, the World Championship or the Olympic Gold?
The big finish with the Olympics was the pinnacle year, European Gold that year, then the Olympics, World Championship Silver medal. I was World Free Skating Champion four times but never overall world champion. Absolutely my own fault, stuff happens as they say, but I had made the decision that win, place or show, in 1980, that was the end of competitive skating and that performing was what I wanted to do. I had been trained as a performer; and I had competed as a performer if that makes sense. Carlo, my coach for the Olympics, I call him the ‘master diamond cutter’, he could take any stone and turn it into a diamond by giving the attention that specific stone needed.
He trained four Olympic champions including John Curry and myself,and his wife said that he never taught any one of us the same way. We were taught the way we needed to be taught. He said to my parents when I went to Colorado, “I have no magic formula and I have no wands, I will just give him the information as I see fit and he will do with it what he does,” it is a very honest and simple approach. There is no magic formula to winning anything. You do what you need to do.
Did you know that you would perform after your competitive career was over?
Yes, Carlo always said that it was the audience who have paid to see you skate, the judges are there for free. Perform for the audience, get them on your side and make the judges think they are missing something. I always tell kids now when they say they get nervous in front of the judges, stand there on the ice, just look at the panel of those mean, nasty old judges and imagine them naked and it will make you smile and the music will start and you won’t be able to think about them anymore. I knew that is what I wanted to do. The Olympic Gold Medal opened lots of doors. Had the Olympic medal been a fourth or fifth place then I would have found the key to open the door myself. I may not have had the same journey but I think I would still be doing what I am doing now because it is the passion I had for what I did. It is not only the performing but how I performed, how the music is done, where the lighting is. I actually choreographed for some of my competitors at the Olympics.
Competing against your own work, that must have been strange?
No, it was fun. It goes back to that philosophy you can only do what you can do on that day. I have gone through my career knowing that there were championships I have won where I thought I should have been second or third and there were championships were I was fifth and I thought I should have been second or first. I won in Lake Placid on that day, what would have happened with a different set of judges who knows? All you can do is prepare yourself and go out and do the performance that you do. We live in a subjective environment in skating, there is no tape measure or a stop watch, that is where people have problems with it being a sport. In the old days you did not have to have skated to judge skating there were people judging me at the Olympics who had never set foot on the ice but they have learned about judging the sport and know a lot about it, obviously enough to be at the Olympics but it was not a requirement. It is now.
You now work with Holiday on Ice.
In 1980, after the Olympics, I had an offer from Holiday on Ice to perform with them and that is exactly what I wanted to do. I didn’t know whether it was going to be Holiday on Ice or America and Icecapades or Ice Follies. Being in Europe was more exciting and closer to home, which I had not seen for a while.
Were the shows quite old fashioned?
They were up to date for the time but it was very much the guest star who was delivering. A version of my Olympic programme with Holiday on Ice is now on You Tube along with many other very, very, old performances but it was a chance and I spent my first summer of 1980 in Holiday on Ice as the most fantastic amateur and the worst professional because it is a different environment entirely. Going from eight or nine championships a year, to eight or nine performances a week was tough.
“Kyran’s great, just like any 10-year-old, you just have to keep their attention and reign them in”
You had already had quite a lot of injuries.
I never thought about it to be honest. I never once thought “Oh my knee I’ve got to be careful, or my back I need to be cautious”, which is why I ended up having so many operations and I just always tried to skate the way I needed and wanted to skate, which included this outrageous back-flip. The back flip was something that came after the Olympics and I was certainly not the first it was always something that was done in Ice Shows or Circus Acts on ice and certainly nothing an Olympic champion would be seen doing – so of course I had to do it, I never wanted to conform. I was doing a show in California for Charles Schultz, the Snoopy creator, and the man who first did it, Skippy Baxter, was still doing back flips. He was my mentor and he taught me. It grew, it got bigger, it got faster and I had to get to a point where it got comfortable and spectacular,19 feet and one inch is the back flip on record in the Guinness Book of Records. Which is my record and is still there now after 20 years.
Because no one is mad enough to try it?
I have taught people to do back flips including one girl but nobody does it the way I did – I can’t say they are not mad enough.
You joined as a performer, how long was it before they allowed you choreograph?
I did three seasons with Holiday on Ice, 80, 81, 82 and I performed with five different units at that point. My first choreographic call was from Kenneth Feldt of Disney on Ice. I was not doing a Disney production but he was going to put Wizard of Oz on ice and would Ibe interested in choreographing. It was a wonderful, creative process and fun, with 40 skaters. I did Wizard, Toy Story, Starlight Express on ice. Then I had the opportunity to come back to work with Holiday on Ice on a production called Colours of Dance, which was I think one of the turning points for HOI they had just been taken over by State Entertainment and Endomol. They had done a show called Exotica created by one of the Cirque de Solei team and written by their firstmusical director. From a skating point of view it was quite a departure. The first one I got to do on my own was Celebration, my first collaboration with the team that has been around for 10 years.
It requires you to travel extensively.
A show is prepared at the end of the summer with a September opening. The problem is that all the shows open at the same time. You get the new shows at the end of October, beginning of November then the second year tour is started, then the third year tour starts, and then there might be a children’s production that is around somewhere… One of my jobs as a creative consultant to HOI is quality control, I want to make sure that what people are seeing, and what my name is on the following year is still being maintained.
At the same time you are doing TV.
Dancing on Ice in the UK begins 13 January.
Last year’s winner, rugby star Kyran Bracken is in Holiday on Ice. What’s he like?
He is, and he’s great, just like any 10-year-old, you just have to keep their attention and reign them in. HOI said shall we do it and I said you have to be very careful, with no disrespect to the celebrities, they are great on TV but put them in the real ice world and their flaws will show up quite dramatically. Obviously people that have been doing it for 30 years from a world championship background are going to show up somebody who is a novice. Kyran has worked hard, he is a ham, a performer and an athlete and he knows what his body has to do to make it work but he was also very interested in the craft of skating and learning the art of figure skating. He will bring something to the show that the others won’t. In Act two he just gets to play. He is doing a solo. I have just put him out there, let him run around. I might have a few girls behind him, I might not need to and it is short and sweet, get on, play, and he is jumping, and he can spin a bit.
Ice obviously still holds the same excitement for you. But you have actually made forays in to legitimate ‘theatre’.
Yes, Rocky Horror. But Cats came first, Cats was great because it was an ensemble show.
And have you got a singing voice?
Yes, there is a voice. It is trained and it is not bad but when it sits for a while it is like anything, it gets rusty around the edges. There is an option someone has offered me for next year in Brighton, which could be interesting.
Is it a musical?
Yes with a friend and in fact a voice coach I have worked with, Simon Gray, so we shall see what possibly comes out of that.
Did you ever doubt that you would be able to make a career out of skating?
I didn’t think about it, you can’t plan to be a champion successfully. You can plan to do your best and be good at something.
Have you any great ambitions left?
Oh, not really, I have been very fortunate, and very lucky career and performance wise. I suppose finally getting the ice rink at Black Rock to happen and then get skating back into Brighton is the next big ambition.
Holiday On Ice, Romanza, Brighton Centre, Brighton
10–27 January 2008
www.brightoncentre.co.uk
