Sonja Henie
Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Sonja Henie leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Sonja Henie at #2 and Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean at #8.
The case for Sonja Henie
The most dominant competitor the sport has produced and the woman who invented its commercial future. Henie won ten consecutive world titles from 1927 to 1936, six European championships, and Olympic gold at St. Moritz 1928, Lake Placid 1932 and Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936, a total of three matched only by Gillis Grafström and Irina Rodnina. She had finished last at her first Olympics in 1924, aged eleven. Her influence ran well past results: she raised the skating skirt to mid-calf, wore white boots rather than black, and imported ballet training and full choreography into a discipline that had been an exercise in tracing figures on ice, changing what women's skating looked like within a decade. After Garmisch she turned professional, signed with 20th Century Fox and became one of the highest-paid film stars in Hollywood, while her touring ice revues created the template every ice show since has followed. Nobody has matched ten straight world titles in singles, and nobody has converted the sport into that scale of mainstream celebrity.
The case for Jayne Torvill & Christopher Dean
The most famous four minutes in the history of the sport. At Sarajevo in 1984 the Nottingham pair skated Ravel's Boléro and received nine perfect 6.0s for artistic impression, the only unanimous set of maximum marks ever awarded in an Olympic figure skating event, part of twelve 6.0s across the whole competition. The program was itself a rules exercise: the free dance limit was 4 minutes 10 seconds and the clock started when a blade moved, so they opened kneeling on the ice for the first 18 seconds to fit their 4:28 arrangement inside the rule. They won four consecutive world titles from 1981 to 1984 and four European championships, turned professional, then returned under reinstatement rules to take bronze at Lillehammer in 1994. Their influence on ice dance was structural rather than decorative: they replaced ballroom pastiche with narrative choreography and theatrical staging, and every free dance judged on composition since works in the vocabulary they built.