The finish line is coming for Kurt Browning, the last of the bows and the applause, the last of the shows and the Axels and he isn’t exactly sure how he feels…
Looking back isn’t always easy for the greatest of athletes. It can be more painful than falling after a missed triple jump. Browning holds a distinction in skating that no one else has or would want. He is the only men’s skater in history to enter two Olympic Games as a world champion and fail to come away with a medal in either Olympics. For a long time, with a busy life as skater, husband, father, athlete, performer, it was easy to dismiss the past.
“Well, I was somewhere else. My mind was somewhere else. I was in ‘92 during the ‘94 Games. I was whining and complaining in my head about what happened to me in ‘92 and then falling on the flip in the short program. I was so gone that I singled my Axel. I was that gone. And so occasionally, I’ll do a double Axel in practice and just do it naturally and think, that double Axel might have given me a bronze in hindsight.
And since then, in his mid-50s, newly married to Alissa, he is closer than ever to the Olympics in his mind, even if it happens to be in a humiliating way. “You know, we favour our memories the way we want to favour them. Those failures are much closer to me now.”The Olympic moment he will never forget happened in Calgary. He was 22 years old and Canada’s No. 2 skater behind Brian Orser. That was the Olympics of the legendary Brians — Orser and Boitano.
But since Lillehammer, when most Olympic athletes watch their career fade to memory, Browning has never stopped. He joined the Stars On Ice show before his last Olympics and has been entertaining ever since. There is a coat rack in his basement full of costumes and hats. He isn’t stepping away now because he can’t do it anymore. He’s blessed to have a body where his hips are fine, his back is fine, his knees are fully functional.
Hundreds of spectators were delighted by the on-ice antics of champion figure skater Kurt Browning, who was in Kingston on the Springer Market Square rink for an open-air show as part of this year’s FebFest on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2019. “Elvis and I bonded very quickly in competition. He came up fast. I remember him and we would go on long roller blades runs together. At the Olympics in ‘92 we’d just find things to do. We were done competing and we decided one day, let’s go find Eric Lindros. So that’s what we did. We spent the whole day filming stuff and looking for Eric Lindros. I don’t remember if we found him.”
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