Note—The controversial Beijing Winter Olympics are in full swing and ever
popular figure skating competitions are underway with new stars with compelling stories. There
are more Black faces sprinkled among the athletes than in the past, due largely to international
teams. Afro-Americans include speed
skater Erin Jackson, short track racer Mama Biney, and bobsledders
Elana Meyers Taylor, Sylvia Hoffman, Kaysha Love, and Hakeem Abdul-Saboor but look high and low and you will find no figure
skaters.
Thirty-four
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.
Ever since Peggy Fleming and Dorothy
Hamill won Olympic Gold in 1968
and 1976 the sport had taken off in public
popularity, especially among young
girls. ABC TV’s Wide World of Sports had 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 would succeed at both.
On the ice at 5, by the age of 9 she
was taking formal lessons and winning competitions. At age 10,
Thomas signed on 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.
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.
The Winter Games confrontation was hyped as the Battle of the Carmens because both skaters had independently
chosen music from the Bizet opera
for their long programs. Thomas was ahead
after the first two round 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. This 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 Star 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.
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 a 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.
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.
By November 2015, Thomas was living
in a bed bug-infested trailer in the Appalachian Mountains with
her 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 failed medical practice, and
had 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 reportedly happy.
I wonder if she is watching the Olympics
and what she makes of them.
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