Debi Thompson on ice at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
The 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics get underway this Friday. Ever popular figure skating competitions and new stars with compelling stories will be centerpiece stars of the competition. There are more Black faces sprinkled among the athletes than in the past, due largely to international teams, but look high and low and you will find no Afro-Americans among U.S. figure skaters.
Thirty-eight years ago, at Calgary, figure skating was about the Whitest sport imaginable. OK, maybe yachting or some other contest that requires millions of dollars for the basic equipment may have been paler. But not by much. Then, along came Debi Thomas and changed all of that.
Since Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill won Olympic Gold in 1968 and 1976 the sport took off in public popularity, especially among young girls. ABC TV’s Wide World of Sports even managed to keep interest up between Olympiads by regularly broadcasting the U.S., European, and World Championships every year. And when the athletes retired from amateur competition, folks could see them in arenas in their own hometowns touring with popular shows like the Ice Capades.
Debra Janine Thomas was born on March 25, 1967—the year Fleming won the fourth of her five National Championships— in Poughkeepsie, New York. She moved to San Jose, California at an early age. By age five she had settled on two ambitions—to become a champion ice skater and a doctor. She became both.
On the ice at 5, by the age of 9, she was taking formal lessons and winning competitions. At age 10, Thomas signed with coach Alex McGowan, who guided her career as she trained intently for national, international, and Olympic honors. Thomas enjoyed the strong support of her mother who sacrificed much of her time driving her daughter more than 100 miles a day between home, school, and the ice rink. In 1979 at age 12 she made her mark as national Novice Champion.
As she entered ever more serious competitions, she encountered judges who had never seen or imagined a Black skater and consciously or not were tougher on her than her white peers. But eventually there was no holding her back.
She entered San Mateo high school where she earned top marks in a tough class load heavy on math and science in preparation for her dreamed of medical career.
In 1983, Thomas began to represent the Los Angeles Figure Skating Club. She competed very successfully including a second-place finish at the National Championships and fifth place at World in 1985 but was almost universally advised that she would have to abandon college plans to concentrate on the intense training necessary to compete on the elite level. Thomas ignored the advice in 1985 enrolled as an engineering student at prestigious and challenging Stanford University.
Her double life did not seriously impede her. That year she won the U.S. National Senior Women’s Championship and on March 21, 1986 won the Gold Medal at the World Championships. She was the first, and still the only, Black woman to win both. The accomplishment also won her recognition as Wide World of Sports’ Athlete of the Year.
Time was one of the media outlets hyping expectations for Thomas before the Calgary Games.
Although injured with tendonitis in both ankles the next year she placed second in the Nationals and second to the reigning Olympic Gold Medalist, East German Katarina Witt at the World. Witt was to be Thomas’s great rival.
Thomas bounced back to win the Nationals for a second time in 1988 bringing fan expectations of a confrontation with Witt at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. She suspended her studies to concentrate on her skating. At the ’87 World competition Witt barely beat her on the strength of her long program.
Rivals on the Olympic podium--Canadian Elizabeth Manley Silver, German Katarina Witt Gold, and Thomas Bronze.
The Winter Games confrontation was hyped as the Battle of the Carmens because both skaters independently chose music from the Bizet opera for their long programs. Thomas was ahead after the first two rounds winning the compulsories in which Witt placed third and finishing second in the short program. Witt landed four triple jumps and downgraded her planned triple loop jump to a double loop in her long program. That left room for Thomas to win the long program, but Thomas missed three of her planned five triple jumps. Canadian skater Elizabeth Manley won the long program, but Witt retained her Olympic title based on her overall scores and Thomas slipped to third place to take home the Bronze Medal.
Despite being the only Black to ever medal in the Winter Olympics up to that point, Thomas’s Bronze disappointed American fans who expected, even demanded, a Gold Medal. She would never ascend to the heights of adulation of Fleming and Hamill.
Thomas and Witt met again for the final time in the 1988 World Championships at which Witt again placed first and Thomas third. At the age of 21 she retired from amateur competitive skating.
The same year she married her college boyfriend, Brian Vanden Hogen. They divorced a few years later. During the next four years she captured three World Professional skating titles and toured four years with Stars on Ice. She also returned to Stanford completing her undergraduate degree and graduating in 1993.
Thomas then went on to enroll in Northwestern University Medical School in Evanston, Illinois. While a student there she married former University of Arkansas football player Chris Bequette. Their son, Christopher “Luc” Jules, was born just after she completed her demanding final year of medical school in 1997.
Dr. Debi Thomas, Orthopedic surgeon.
She completed her residency at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Hospital and an orthopedic surgery residency at the Martin Luther King Jr./Charles Drew University Medical Center in South Central Los Angeles. She became a Board Certified orthopedic surgeon and in 2006 began a one-year fellowship at the Dorr Arthritis Institute at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, California, for sub-specialty training in adult reconstructive surgery. Thomas went into private practice in Virginia where her son was a star high school baseball player.
Although she stopped skating after leaving professional performance, Thomas remained engaged in the sport. She occasionally has worked as a judge and broadcast commentator. In 2000 she was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame. She was named by President George W. Bush to be part of the U.S. Delegation for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy along with other former Olympians, Hamill, Eric Heiden, Kerri Strug, and Herschel Walker.
Perhaps most impressively after 15 years off the ice Thomas trained for just three months to participate in the Caesar’s Tribute: A Salute to the Golden Age of American Figure Skating in Atlantic City in 2012 with a host of other U.S. National, World and Olympic Medalists in a show aired on NBC Christmas Day. She performed an ambitious routine to music from the movie Burlesque and skated flawlessly.
But her life was unraveling. By November 2015, Thomas was living in a bed bug-infested trailer in the Appalachian Mountains with a new fiancé and struggled with anger and alcohol issues. Thomas told reporters who found her that she was broke, having lost most of her savings through her two divorces and a failed medical practice, and lost custody of her son when he was 13. She was featured in the November 7, 2015, episode of the television series, Iyanla: Fix My Life, on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Her life was not repaired.
Thomas also had interest in a host of charitable and social causes including acting as spokesperson for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Yet then her seemingly perfect life began to unravel. Although a highly skilled surgeon and popular with her patients, her competitive type-A personality led to clashes with colleagues, and she drifted from clinic to clinic almost yearly before opening her Virginia practice. In 2012 Thompson was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and her condition rapidly deteriorated. Her practice failed and she could not find other employment.
Happier today, Thomas with fiancé Jamie Looney in Virginia.
By November 2015, Thomas was living in a bed bug-infested trailer in the Appalachian Mountains with a new fiancé and struggled with anger and alcohol issues. Thomas told reporters who found her that she was broke, having lost most of her savings through her two divorces and a failed medical practice, and lost custody of her son when he was 13. She was featured in the November 7, 2015, episode of the television series, Iyanla: Fix My Life, on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Her life was not repaired.
Today Thomas lives with fiancé Jamie Looney, co-founder of Save Coal Country’s Economy & Environment Network and his two sons in southwest Virginia. They are intensely private but reportedly happy.
I wonder if she will watch the Olympics and what she will make of them.
