Geraldine Fenton Crispo, left, with her skating partner, William McLachlan.Skate Canada/Supplied
More than a half-century before Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir captured a nation’s hearts, Gerrie Crispo spun, stepped and waltzed her way into Canadian sporting history.
Ms. Crispo, who competed under her maiden name of Fenton, joined with skating partner William McLachlan to become the first Canadian team to win an international title in ice dancing.
Ms. Crispo, who has died at 90, won two North American championships in the late 1950s.
The duo also won Canada’s first ice-dance medal in a global competition when they finished second at the world championships in 1957. They again won a silver medal the following year and took a third-place bronze medal in 1959.
The figure-skating couple also won three Canadian ice dance championships in the 1950s.
“She was a lovely dancer,” said Ann Shaw of Toronto, a contemporary competitor and one of Ms. Crispo’s bridesmaids. “She had lovely lines, lovely style, an erect body and a really good sense of musicality.”
Ms. Crispo helped carve Canada’s place in ice dancing, a discipline demanding intricate footwork but not the throws, spins and death spirals of pairs. Ice dancing gained popularity following the Second World War, being added to the world championships in 1952 and to the Winter Olympics in 1976. Ms. Virtue and Mr. Moir were five-time Olympic medalists, including a gold medal at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver that marked the first time North American ice dancers won the top prize.
Geraldine Marina Fenton was born on Nov. 20, 1935, in Toronto, an only child for the former Anne Winnifred Pollard and Harold Michael Fenton, a clerk who later became a branch manager for a trust company.
She swam, rode horses, and played tennis and basketball. She took up figure skating at about age 13, adding ballet five years later. She designed her own skating costumes.
Skate Canada/Supplied
Paired with Glen Skuce of the Oshawa Skating Club in 1950, the teenaged duo defeated 11 other couples to win the Canadian junior championship three years later. A senior national title proved more elusive, as she finished second in 1954 (with Mr. McLachlan), 1955 (with Gordon Crossland) and 1956 (with William Trimble).
The 5-foot-4 athlete was a senior at East York Collegiate when she first won the North American title in 1957. A “poised, contained young lady,” according to Skating Magazine, she and Mr. McLachlan benefitted from dance lessons taken at an Arthur Murray Studio.
“Gerrie is a lovely, slender brunette with warm brown eyes and softly curling dark hair,” the magazine reported. “A modest person, she has a sweet smile and a quiet, gentle manner.”
The two successfully defended their title in the biannual continental competition before a cheering hometown crowd at Varsity Arena in Toronto two years later.
As well, she and Mr. McLachlan won three consecutive Canadian titles from 1957-59.
In 1957, the couple finished second at the world championships in Colorado Springs, Colo., behind Britain’s June Markham and Courtney Jones, a dress designer on leave from the Royal Air Force. Two other British couples and two American couples completed the top six.
“It was a great thrill for us,” Mr. McLachlan said after the competition. “We don’t [train] as much as some of these other teams. We can work only about four nights of the week because of school, but we have had a week of intense practice and that helped a lot.”
The big Canadian news at the championships was the victory of Toronto’s Barbara Wagner and Robert Paul in pairs.
Britain’s Miss Markham and Mr. Jones repeated as world dance champions in Paris the following year with the Canadians once again winning the silver medal. Mr. McLachlan’s mother joined them for the sojourn, as she did for several other competitions.
The 1959 worlds returned to the Broadmoor rink in Colorado Springs, as Mr. Jones and a new partner, Doreen Denny, won gold. The husband-wife team of Andree and Donald Jacoby of Syracuse, N.Y., claimed silver, while the Canadians took bronze.
Ms. Crispo and Mr. McLachlan also won several national titles in discontinued events, including the waltz (four times) and the ten-step (five times).
All through her teenage years, Ms. Crispo took part in ice shows designed for entertainment, not competition.
The Fenton-McLachlan partnership was a predecessor to such well-known Canadian dance duos as Louise Soper and Barry Soper, Tracy Wilson and Rob McCall, and Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz, who in 2003 became the first Canadians (and North Americans) to win the world championship in ice dance.
After retiring as a competitor and marrying, Ms. Crispo continued to work in the discipline as a coach, handling such couples as Carol MacSween, of Glendale, Calif., and Bob Munz, of Syracuse, N.Y., who trained at the Cleveland Skating Club in Ohio.
Ms. Crispo died on Feb. 12 in Kitchener, Ont. She leaves a daughter, Catherine Pagett, and a granddaughter. She was predeceased by her husband of 58 years, Francis Martin Crispo, an insurance company executive, who died in 2019. Mr. McLachlan, her skating partner, died in 2013.
She was inducted into the Canadian Figure Skating Association’s hall of fame in 1997, as was Mr. McLachlan, on the 40th anniversary of their first international triumph.
“They were a good match,” Ms. Shaw said. “They had wonderful unison.”
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.