Olympic Skating Legend Dick Button Lifeless at 95

Dick Button, America’s first Olympic gold medalist in determine skating, is useless, and the legend’s passing comes on what was already a darkish day for the game.

Button died Thursday within the Upstate New York city of North Salem … based on his kids, who first confirmed his loss of life within the Washington Put up.

Maybe nobody in historical past’s had extra of an impression on U.S. determine skating than DB, who first dominated as a competitor within the Nineteen Forties and Fifties … after which turned a longtime broadcaster overlaying the game around the globe.

Dick nearly actually put America on the determine skating map — at a time when European nations dominated — when he received his first of 5 consecutive world determine skating titles in 1948. That was additionally the yr he received his first gold medal, on the age of 18. He stays the youngest man to ever obtain Olympic gold in determine skating.

He struck gold a second time, on the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, and did it with some critical flare — changing into the primary particular person to land a triple soar, a triple loop to be actual, on his strategy to the medal stand.

After that Dick went professional … scoring a large (for the time) $150,000 contract with the Ice Capades. May not sound like a lot now, but it surely made him one of many world’s highest paid athletes — after which, in 1960, he began a legendary profession in broadcasting.

He coated the Winter Olympics that yr for CBS, earlier than leaping to ABC’s “Large World of Sports activities” … the place he actually turned the voice of determine skating for generations of athletes and followers.

Dick was beloved for the actual fact he known as it as he noticed it, and had no points calling a skater’s program ugly, or as he as soon as labeled an Olympic efficiency, “slapped collectively.” His last stint overlaying the Olympics got here in 2010 in the course of the Vancouver video games.

He nonetheless holds 2 U.S. males’s information — his 2 Olympic gold medals, and his 7 nationwide championships.

In what appears like eerie timing, the undisputed icon of American skating died on the identical day the game mourned the deaths of the proficient younger skaters who had been on American Airways 5342, which crashed Wednesday evening into the Potomac River after colliding with a navy helicopter. Fourteen individuals within the determine skating world — skaters, coaches and fogeys — had been onboard the flight which took off from Wichita, the place this yr’s U.S. Determine Skating Championship was held.

Button is survived by his 2 kids. He was 95.