‘I will be very proud to be in the room, and to have that acknowledgment,” Robin Cousins says as he anticipates his emotions when, on Tuesday evening, he will be among the former winners invited to the 70th edition of the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year.
Cousins won the award in 1980, the year he became the Olympic figure skating champion at a time when it was almost impossible for him to reveal openly that he was gay. “I was not around in the beginning [when the BBC launched their programme in 1953],” jokes the 66-year-old, “but I will enjoy looking back. I’m sure I’ll be sitting alongside Jayne [Torvill] and Chris [Dean] again.”
In a very different sporting landscape to now, the ice skaters John Curry, Cousins and Torvill and Dean won the BBC award in 1976, 1980 and 1984, with their victories stemming from gold medals at those years’ Winter Olympics. Apart from the mainstream attention given then to ice skating, it is striking that Curry and Cousins became Sports Personality of the Year while having to conceal their sexuality. They dealt with the burden in contrasting ways, with Cousins avoiding the lonely tragedy that consumed Curry, while they emerge now as pioneering figures who found sporting fame during a repressive era.
As a boy growing up in Bristol, Cousins loved watching “MGM movies on Sunday afternoon television when my hero was, and always has been, Gene Kelly. I was five years old when I first saw An American in Paris and said: ‘I want to do what he’s doing.’”
Cousins was transfixed again when, a year later, he was on holiday with his family in Bournemouth. “I was drawn to this giant poster that looked like it was for an MGM musical. It was actually for the Bournemouth Ice Follies. The show was in the evenings but during the day there was a public skating session. So I said to my mum: ‘Can we go in?’ It was one of those very hot summer days and it was nice to get a bit of cool.”
He was such a natural skater that “a professional coach went up to my mum and said: ‘Where does your son skate?’ He wouldn’t believe it when she said I hadn’t been on the ice before and the only thing which convinced him was when my mum said: ‘We’re from Bristol. We don’t have an ice rink.’ He then told her that an ice rink was about to be built in Bristol.”
Cousins remembers how a sporting obsession took hold of him. “Every fourth or fifth Saturday, my dad took me and my brothers into town for haircuts. The only way I would do it was if he drove past where the ice rink was being built. So there was something in my head even then. Skating took all the things I loved and allowed me to do my version of it. Yes, there are rules and specific elements you have to do, but how you do them is not dictated at all. There was such freedom to it.”
His two older brothers played football and cricket and, as Cousins explains, “my mother was thinking: ‘How do I tell my sporting husband his son wants to dance?’ But it helped that my dad had been an apprentice goalkeeper at Millwall before the war. He’d never forgotten that Millwall were one of the first football clubs to engage a ballet teacher to help them stretch and keep fit. He said: ‘If dancing was good enough for Millwall, it’s good enough for our son.’”
Cousins’s talent was so obvious that he was soon winning local and national junior competitions. He left school at 15 and joined the senior squad, which trained mostly at the Queensway rink in west London. Skating was meant to be a strictly amateur activity then and so, after early morning training, he would work at Whiteleys department store in Bayswater.
“I lived in a bedsit, which was like a converted broom cupboard,” he says. “Apart from a small bed it had a Bunsen burner and a basin, with shared facilities down the hall, and cost £9.50 a week. I’d get up at five every morning to skate. After training I’d go to Whiteleys and the realisation grew that this is what it would take to make it. Eventually, Sports Aid came through, which meant I was paid a couple of hundred pounds a year.”
Cousins was not earning much more when he became British champion for the first of four times, in 1977, the year he won his first bronze medal at the European championships. He matched that the following two years, before, in 1980, he became European and Olympic champion. Cousins had been through two serious surgeries after tearing the meniscus in both knees and even before the season started he had decided that 1980 would be his last year of competitive skating:
“I’d been on the European and world championship podiums that season and I’d had an incredible career but I was very mindful that 1980 was always going to be my last year.”
He made an error near the start of his Olympic final routine but the performer in him helped him skate on brilliantly. “Any athlete worth their salt will tell you that you have two options when you make a slight mistake,” he says. “You can either dwell on it or spend the next minutes making people forget that it happened. I always tell people that I never won anything because of what I did. I won it because of how I did it.”
Cousins reaches for a photograph on the bookshelf behind him. “That’s the picture everybody knows,” he says of a picture where it looks as if he is crying on the Olympic podium. “But if you look down at the bottom you can see my parents, my brother, my team leader and coach. The people I was looking at were the people that got me there. That’s where the emotion comes from.”
His Spoty trophy can also be seen on the bookshelf. “I was thrilled to be nominated,” Cousins says, “alongside a veritable Who’s Who in five summer Olympic gold medallists: Seb Coe, Daley Thompson, Steve Ovett, Duncan Goodhew and Allan Wells. Seb was the frontrunner, so I was absolutely gobsmacked when my name was called out [as the winner].”
It helped that he had followed the template set by Curry. “We were teammates, although John kept quite separate. I would see his focus and watch him in training and how he dealt with everything in Innsbruck [where Curry preceded him as Olympic champion in 1976]. We were both coached by Carlo Fassi and there’s no question my success in Lake Placid came from all I learned by observing John in Innsbruck.”
Curry’s sexuality was revealed publicly by a German newspaper in 1976. “Obviously, we knew [Curry was gay],” Cousins says. “Watching him struggle while maintaining his integrity, to do what he was living for on the ice, was …”
Cousins pauses. “Difficult is not the word because I wasn’t around him to feel that. But we are here all these years later when nobody cares, which is wonderful. Did it change the way I performed or thought? I don’t think so. But as much as he had all this stuff thrown at him, what we now remember is what’s on YouTube and the legacy John left.”
Curry’s life appeared torturous and lonely and he died from Aids-related heart failure in 1994. But Cousins remembers his artistry most of all. “He was very much a ballet dancer stuck in an ice skater’s body. We had a conversation much later and he never understood why I gave up dancing to skate, while it would have been the other way round for him.”
Did he and Curry discuss their sexuality? “No. We never connected in terms of being able to speak to each other until about 1981. John was living in New York at the time and training. There was an event at Madison Square Garden with a wonderful meeting of minds and I remember sitting down with John, Toller Cranston, Peggy Fleming and others and having such a fun discussion about music.”
I mention to Cousins that I have read how his former boyfriend, the American ice-skater Randy Gardner, has spoken of how they had to keep their relationship on “the down low” and that, at Lake Placid, “we found empty trailers so we could go hang out”. Did Cousins find it hard to endure a double life as a gay Olympian? “No, because for me the focus was training every day, knowing you had somebody and people in your corner that were very good friends and helped you. The focus had to be on what happens when you step on the ice.”
Did it take a toll on him not being able to be open? “I’m going to say it didn’t, because that’s not the type of person I was. With hindsight you can go: ‘Oh!’ But we didn’t know any different even if we knew what the consequences would have been. You just hunker down and do what’s required. As a potential favourite at the Olympics I only wanted to think about what I needed to do on the ice.
“I suppose you then go back to John, who was probably the first Olympian at that level, certainly in winter sport [to be gay]. But there were no consequences for me because it was just me and my family. We didn’t have sponsors or agents. So you plough forward and hope you get what you deserve.”
He has always been a private person and so Cousins adds: “That’s exactly how I would be anyway, regardless of my sexuality. Some people want to wear their heart on their sleeve. My private life has always been private.”
Cousins married his male partner in 2007 and says: “When you’re older and able to process how things were, and where we are now, it is wonderful. But I have no qualms over how I was and certainly don’t feel I missed out on anything because what you don’t know you can’t miss. Now we have all the information for people to live their lives how they choose, not how other people think they should.”
He remains immersed in the sport and stresses that “my term as president of British Ice Skating is great and it’s lovely to be involved at board level, working to get a small national governing body back into the realms where funding is accessible – which we now have with Lila Fear and Lewis Gibson [whose ice dancing partnership won the silver medal at the European championships this year] and also with our long-track speed skaters, Ellia Smeding and Cornelius Kersten.
“To still be in my sport at this level all these years later is something I would only have dreamed of when I was 16 and thinking: ‘This is great, I get to compete at the European championships.’ I’m forever grateful.”
BBC Sports Personality of the Year is on Tuesday, live on BBC One and iPlayer from 7pm-9pm
