Sandra Stevenson
Ice skating journalist during the era of British Olympic glory
SANDRA STEVENSON, who has died aged 76, was the doyenne of ice skating writers, covering every major event from 1968 until the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. She chronicled Britain’s glory years, when John Curry, Robin Cousins, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were in their pomp, and spent many years as the Daily Telegraph’s ice skating correspondent.
In Innsbruck in 1976 she saw John Curry become Britain’s first men’s Olympic figure skating champion. “He gave a superb showing, possibly the most graceful any male skater has ever given in a skating event,” she wrote. “Each finger tip was in the correct position to match each note of the Don Quixote ballet music. Even the final move in which he progressed from a double axel jump to a kneeling position was accomplished without the slightest tremor or gasp for breath.”
Sandra Ann Catherine Stevenson was born on July 27 1941 at Greenock in Scotland. Her father, a naval officer, was stationed there, and after the war the family settled in Coventry, though her mother died when Sandra was young.
When she was 14 she took a Saturday job which gave her the funds to pursue her hobby of ice skating at Solihull Ice Rink. She attended St Andrew’s University, and while there she began writing for the DC Thomson titles, particularly the new magazine for girls, Bunty.
Her full-time writing career did not get underway immediately, however, and after graduating, she secured jobs in the chorus lines of ice shows, culminating in a spell with the corps de ballet in the 1962 season of Gerald Palmer’s Carnival on Ice.
Realising that she was a better writer than skater, however, she decided to forge a career reporting on the sport she loved. First, she needed to make some money and she worked as a secretary in London until a visitor to her office offered her a job as an air stewardess, which gave her an opportunity to indulge her love of travel.
She moved with the job to Los Angeles, which she hated, but when she was required to move again, to New York, she fell in love with the city and stayed there for the rest of her life.
She combined life in the air with reporting on skating, and in 1968 she covered her first World Championships, in Geneva, and the Olympic Games in Grenoble. Three years later she was taken on as the Guardian’s ice skating correspondent, and she later joined The Daily Telegraph. She also wrote skating obituaries for The Independent.
She wrote for skating magazines, often as Alexandra Stevenson or Sonja Springs, and in 1984 she wrote The BBC Book of Skating. The following year she ghost-wrote Spice on Ice, the joint autobiography of the former British ice dance champions, Karen Barber and Nicky Slater.
With her effervescent personality, and her habit of asking quirky questions at press conferences, Stevenson was a popular figure on the skating circuit – “people liked to be around her,” said one former colleague.
Given the subjective nature of judging ice skating, there has always been opposition in certain quarters to its inclusion in the Olympics, but Sandra Stevenson fought its corner eloquently. It hogged the TV ratings, she pointed out, while “such sports as biathlon and luge simply benefit as tag-along events.” And in any case, she pointed out, “Why would you deny such harmless, pleasant entertainment to a world in need of beauty?”
She suffered from arthritis in later years, but carried on working until 2014. Sandra Stevenson was unmarried and had no children.
‘People liked to be around her,’ said one colleague of her bubbly personality
Sandra Stevenson, born July 27 1941, died July 7 2018