Brian ORSER

One of the world’s leading figure skaters in the 1980s, Canada’s Brian Orser won two Olympic silver medals before becoming a coach and choreographer and helping South Korea’s Yuna Kim win gold at Vancouver 2010.

Born to skate

“I love skating, I love performance and I love perfection.” Brian Orser has stayed true to those words throughout his career, first as a figure skater and latterly as a coach. Born in Belleville, Ontario, Orser took to the ice at a very early age, like all true Canadians, though it was not the national sport of ice-hockey that attracted his interest. Urged on by his mother JoAnne, who found him a young coach by the name of Doug Leigh, he developed his talent as an ice dancer. The coach and his young prodigy worked together through to the end of Orser’s amateur career. In 1979, he won the national junior title, becoming in the process the first skater in the world to land a triple axel in his age group.

An Olympic first

In making the step up to senior competition, Orser performed more triple axels than any figure skater anywhere, and even began to string them together in his routines. Lying a lowly seventh after the compulsory figures at Sarajevo 1984, he recovered to take the silver medal behind the USA’s Scott Hamilton after landing the triple axel in the free routine, becoming the first man to perform the manoeuvre at the Olympic Games. The Canadian finished second to Hamilton again at the World Championships that year, and would have won both titles but for his low scores in the compulsory, which was eventually removed from all international men’s and women’s competitions in 1990.