Hardly a day goes by without someone telling us off about our bodies: they’re too big, too small, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they just don’t behave in the way we want them to.
How we interact with contemporary sport can be a productive way to explore our relationship with our bodies and how they respond to the demands we make of them. We follow performers and athletes, clubs and countries, the ups and downs of the elite; and we are encouraged – daily – to get off our sofas, to join in and be part of some team or another. We identify, and sometimes, over-identify with our sporting heroes. We become appalled at their behaviour when they fall from grace, but can’t help getting drawn into their stories, whatever age we are, and whatever age they are.
The Confessions series of books explore these matters in, hopefully, an entertaining and thought-provoking manner. Whilst a particular sport might be more prominent, the books themselves are not really about that sport at all. Tennis Player explored dreams and delusions; Footballer, loneliness; and Basketball Player was my take on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater follows this tradition by exploring the expectations of growing up and adulthood. There is, however, a caveat to this exploration. Where previous editions of the Confessions series explored the condition of the ageing sports person from one end of the age spectrum (usually a narrator who is looking back at their life), Figure Skater is written from a young person’s point of view. A person in their teenage years who has, for various reasons explored through the story, aged prematurely.
Unlike Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up, Peter, the narrator of this story, has had to grow up much too soon. By telling this story from his point of view during the early 1970s, it necessarily includes his memories of certain celebrities and incidents. Viewed from a modern perspective, the reader may well look at these figures or events in horror or disgust, but for Peter, at that time, they seemed glamourous, inspirational, and were part of his and his peers’ everyday lives.
It’s possible that the horror and disgust the reader might feel upon reading parts of his story, reflect the uncomfortable fact that those celebrities were entrenched in society’s everyday lives. Whilst the testimonies of many young people have since given us a radically different understanding of those celebrities’ behaviours and actions, many of us are still wondering how on earth it was possible that wider society could have unwittingly condoned and celebrated those actions which led to so much damage, distress and personal trauma for so many, caused by so few.
Figure Skater doesn’t attempt to provide answers to the disconnect between what we know now and what we thought we knew then; but offers the perspective of one vulnerable young boy who saw the artistry of figure skating as being a route out of that disconnect and a way to save his life.
Structured around imagined Top 30 Hit Parades of the late 1960s and early 1970s (and beyond), and inspired by the 40th anniversary of Jayne Torville and Christopher Dean’s iconic performance at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984, their story still speaks to me and this book offers my respect to them for all they have achieved in this most enchanting of sporting endeavours: figure skating.
Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater will be published on Monday 6 May.
