Figure skating legend was ‘tough as nails’
Burka coached in six Olympics, trained likes of Cranston, Stojko, Chan
Ellen Burka encouraged creativity on ice, asking her skaters to find a connection with their music, all while demanding technical excellence. The celebrated Canadian figure skating coach died Monday at the age of 95.
Burka coached in six Olympic Games — the last one in Albertville, France in 1992 — over a career that spanned six decades, and trained a roster of Olympic and world championship skaters that included Toller Cranston, Dorothy Hamill, Patrick Chan and Tracey Wainman.
She would continue coaching until the age of 93, and was remembered by the figure skating world as an in- novator who brought unprecedented creativity to her sport.
“She was one of the first coaches to take a figure skater, Toller Cranston, and let him be free with movement when nobody else was, and it started a whole new trend,” said her daughter Petra Burka, who won the 1964 Olympic bronze medal and 1965 world championship under her mother’s tutelage.
“She was a very strong lady and expected perfection from everyone,” Petra told the Star. “She was tough, tough as nails.”
Cranston, who died in 2015, is remembered as a highly innovative and expressive skater, known for his artistic work on and off the ice, a sensibility encouraged by Burka.
“I truly believe there would not have been a Toller Cranston without Ellen Burka,” choreographer Sandra Bezic told The Canadian Press. “She saw what he had when few others did and took him under her wing and nurtured him in the best way possible. He became what he became because she instilled discipline in him that he didn’t have and direction and focus and yet allowed him to be him.
“Those two, hand in hand, couldn’t have happened any other way.”
That tough coaching edge took some time to develop, though. Burka found her daughter’s competitions a challenge to watch: “She used to hide around the corner and not be there.”
Over time, Burka developed into a confident coach who brought an artistic sensibility to her work. Elvis Stojko, the three-time world champion and two-time Olympic silver medalist, trained under Burka from age nine to 15. He recalled her musicfocused approach to skating.
“Even when I was a kid growing up, working with her in my formative years, it was really imperative, it was all about connecting with the music,” Stojko said. “She loved music, she loved that marriage of the two, that self-expression. That really came out in the work that she did and the skaters she worked with.”
Born in the Netherlands to a Jewish family, Burka saw her parents loaded onto a train and shipped to their deaths during the Holocaust. Burka ended up in what is now the Czech Republic at Theresienstadt concentration camp, where she met her future husband, Jan Burka.
After the war, Burka won two Dutch national skating championships before she, Jan and their two daughters emigrated to Toronto. When Burka and her husband divorced, she turned to coaching to pay the bills, Petra said.
“My mother had a great influence on the lives of all her skaters,” said her daughter Astra Burka. “She was a life coach, she wasn’t just a skating coach.”
In a statement Tuesday, Skate Canada called Burka “one of the world’s most respected coaches and choreographers.”
She was awarded the Order of Canada in 1978, and inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1996.