Sjoukje Dijkstra, RIP

Funny, sometimes, how the mind works. Today's Telegraph has an obituary for figure skater Sjoukje Dijkstra, who has died at the age of 82. It's a name that--today--will likely trip lightly off the tongues only of those native to Holland, but I'm a geezer, and I know that it's pronounced something on the order of "SHOU-kee DIKE-stra."

Miss Dijkstra won the gold medal at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, the same year she also won both the European and the World Championships, making her one of a select group of very few skaters, male or female, who've accomplished that feat. I remember her.

But when I read the news a little earlier today, my first thought wasn't of figure skating at all. It was of a family funeral which was held at a church I didn't frequent, and of which I'd been told that the family nickname for the organist was, "The Thumper." I quickly discovered why, at the outset of the first hymn.

My mother avidly followed championship figure skating all her life, and I delighted in it myself in my youth, learning to skate when we lived in Boston, and enjoying the rather more accessible coverage that living in the States brought, even in 1964 when the Winter Olympics were first telecast, with the major events having been recorded in Austria and then flown back for broadcast stateside, the same evening, in black and white.

Mum didn't care for Sjoukje Dijkstra at all, finding her much too athletic, and--even though her compulsory figures were peerless--entirely lacking in charisma and elegance in my mother's favorite portion of the competition, the skate-to-music free program. (The judging and requirements for figure skating today are nothing like they were fifty years ago, when skaters spent hours in training each day--and then in competition--silently tracing circular "figures" with their blades on the ice, and then skating over them--first with one foot, then the other--time after time, to see how consistent, proper, and exact their motions, leg and arm movements, blade angles and edges, and tracery were, as scored by a team of judges equally silently poring over each effort. Those scores, for technical precision that most of the audience didn't understand, and couldn't have cared less about, were hugely influential in the final outcome of the competition.)

But although the compulsories are long gone from most prestigious figure-skating tournaments, and with them many of the technical expectations of the sport, the tension has continued between the delicate, elegant, precision skaters, and the athletic "thumpers," those who come storming onto the ice, and who bring the house down with their triples and quadruples, often at the expense of finesse and exactness, as long as they manage--even just barely--to stay on their feet. Occasionally, a skater like Michelle Kwan manages to excel without succumbing to the demand for ever-more outlandish tricks as skaters fight to pack as much excitement as possible into each routine. (I saw Kwan win her last World Championship in 2003, in Washington DC.) South Korea's Yuna Kim is a more recent example of grace and beauty on the ice, but it's a rare sight anymore.

Rest in peace, Sjoukje Dijkstra. Thanks for the memories. You were, by all accounts, a perfectly lovely woman, who, apart from a rather odd and brief stretch when you and your husband ran a quite unsuccessful circus, seems to have retired to a rather ordinary life, and to have remained a good friend to, and good servant of, the Dutch Figure Skating Federation throughout it.

But I'm afraid, due to the vagaries of my not always "as the crow flies" brain, now you'll always be "The Thumper" to me.

Do your brains fly as the crow? Or do you sometimes make weird connections that might not seem obvious to others? I worry, sometimes.....

PS: In my own (and I suppose my mother's) defense, the Telegraph obituary does mention that Peggy Fleming, 1968 Olympic gold medal winner who, along with Michelle Kwan, is probably the most celebrated female figure skater in US history, described Sjoukje Dijkstra as "a huge muscular lady who performs huge jumps; all I could think was, couldn't she be a little more feminine?" So it wasn't just us. (Or "we," as I think a true grammarian should say.)