Surya bonaly refuses silver medal
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'Please, Try To Be Fair': Surya Bonaly Confronts 1994 World Championships Loss
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Surya Bonaly is a three-time World silver medalist in figure skating, a five-time European champion, the 1991 World Junior Champion and a nine-time French national champion.
She's also the only Olympic figure skater to land a backflip on one blade.
You might wonder, then, how a figure skater of her stature ended up in the Netflix series "Losers" — which offers "a survey of noble failure," director and executive producer Mickey Duzyj told On Point's Meghna Chakrabarti. These are the moments of finding great strength and opportunity in great loss.
But Bonaly experienced a frustrating failure at the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships. She was performing at the highest level, en route to what looked like a gold medal.
In the end, though, she fell short to Japan's Yuka Sato in a tiebreaker. A 1994 Los
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Silver Isn’t Enough for Bonaly : Figure skating: She objects to decision giving Sato the gold medal. Kwan finishes eighth with strong freestyle performance.
It came down to a choice between Yuka Sato’s artistry and dynamic footwork and Surya Bonaly’s gymnastic jumping, and the judges gave the women’s world figure skating championship to Sato Saturday in Chiba, Japan.
Bonaly at first refused to join Japan’s Sato and bronze medalist Tanja Szewczenko of Germany on the awards podium. Afterward, she quickly took off her silver medal.
Asked later what message she meant to convey, the French skater said: “It’s not right.”
When Bonaly tried to succeed with technique, she said she had been told she wasn’t artistic enough.
“When I change to just normal skating, that’s not good, too. I don’t know what I have to do. It’s crazy,” she said.
The vote was close. Sato received higher artistic marks--six 5.9s and three 5.8s--and the first-place votes of five of the nine judges. She got technica
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Surya Bonaly
French figure skater (born 1973)
| Surya Bonaly | |
|---|---|
Bonaly in 2001 | |
| Born | Surya Varuna Claudine Bonaly (1973-12-15) 15 December 1973 (age 51) Nice, France |
| Height | 1.56 m (5 ft 1 in) |
| Country | France |
| Began skating | 1985 |
| Retired | 1998 |
Surya Varuna Claudine Bonaly (born 15 December 1973) is a French retired competitive figure skater. She is a three-time World silver medalist (1993–1995), a five-time European champion (1991–1995), the 1991 World Junior Champion, and a nine-time French national champion (1989–1997).
Bonaly is the only Olympic figure skater to land a backflip on one blade; she performed it at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
Early life
[edit]Surya Varuna Claudine Bonaly was born in Nice, France, on 15 December 1973.[1] Her birth name was Claudine; when she was adopted out of an orphanage at the age of eight months by Suzanne Bonaly, a physical education teacher in Nice, and Georges