Surya Bonaly’s illegal backflip

February 1998

Surya Bonaly does not like to be called a rebel – yet her reputation as the one to upset the status quo is iconic in the history of figure skating. The moment the French skater used her toe pick to propel herself through the air in a backflip, landing on one foot before raising her head to the crowd, her fate was sealed.

Bonaly knew she would never win an Olympic medal. In Nagano 1998 – her third and final Games – she trailed in sixth after her short programme. Gold was out of reach and, because of an Achilles injury, she could not land the jumps to earn silver or bronze.

In her free skate she made a split decision between throwing her triple lutz or something more spectacular. “That was my last Olympics, and pretty much my last competition,” she told The Root in 2014. “I wanted to leave a trademark.”

Bonaly knew she would be penalised. The backflip was banned in 1976 – when she was three years old – after American Terry Kubicka landed a two-footed version at the Innsbruck Olympics. Because Bonaly landed on one foot the judges could have deemed it legal, but they did not and she slid to 10th place.

Even without the gold medal, Bonaly proved she was one of the best skaters of her time. She executed a jump so dangerous, so complex and so extremely illegal that no skater has landed anything similar at an Olympic competition since.

But Bonaly’s decision to execute the backflip was formed upon something deeper: as a black woman growing up with a white family in France, and then later joining the conservative world of figure skating, she was treated as an outsider.