Sonja Henie as a skater

I look at Sonja Henie as the first lady of Figure Skating. She may have been "primitive" as you point out, but she basically put figure skating on the map for the general public. She was a great competitor and she genuinely loved to skate. I read that her private life was not that happy, but she was always happiest on the ice - like the rest of us fellow figure skaters can relate. She made figure skating popular through her movies. One can't fairly compare Sonja's style of skating to today's skaters because figure skating has evolved so much over the years. In Sonja's days the emphasis was on tracing figures. Sonja Henie influenced a lot of little girls to take up figure skating - she even had a doll made in her honour. I would love to have a time machine to see the likes of Sonja Henie skate live!

Yeah, getting back to my original question, Henie was a skating pathfinder, and I am especially interested in what has evolved from her day and what hasn't. Of course the jumps are better, but that goes without saying. The posture issue is the one that surprised me the most, because if you look at film dancing of the time, posture and carriage were just as important to people such as Eleanor Powell and Ginger Rogers as it is to dancers of today. This was true even though I'm pretty sure that the tap and ballroom dancers of the time did not generally have ballet training. (A notable exception is Eleanor Powell.) Of course, later MGM musical stars did include some ballet-trained dancers, especially Leslie Caron and Cyd Charisse.

What I really want to know and can't tell for myself is whether Henie's bladework is superior compared to today. I would assume so because school figures were so important.

There is a very interesting thread at FSU: "Retrospective on the 1936 Olympics" which adds a lot to what we have here on Henie.

Thanks, Scrufflet! I'll have to check it out. Interesting: of course in those years, winter and summer Games were held in the same year. And in 1936, both of them were in Germany. In 1940, both were supposed to be in Japan, Germany's ally in World War II. Germany's other ally, Italy, was the planned host for the winter Games of 1944, in Cortina d'Ampezzo (eventually the host for the 1956 winter event.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_Games_host_cities

I dug around at the above site, and I realized that before World War II, it wasn't unheard-of for the same country to host both summer and winter Games. The U.S. was the host country for both of the 1932 Games, and France was the host country for both 1924 Games. I don't think that doubling up was either politically or financially feasible after 1945.

The FSU thread is in the Trash Can part of the forum.

Thanks, Doris! I've been hunting fruitlessly.