Fassi: The Man with the Midas Touch

Darting around Innsbruck's Olympic Stadium last week, Figure-Skating Coach Carlo Fassi kept the uniforms of several nations on hand and changed colors midway through events. "I go like crazy," he explained. "I'm everywhere." Everywhere Fassi was last week, there seemed to be gold. In a sport where most coaches would be satisfied to guide just one competitor into the Olympics, the ubiquitous Fassi brought four skaters to the Winter Games and left with two gold-medal winners: America's Dorothy Hamill and Britain's John Curry. The double victory confirmed what many people in figure skating already knew: that Carlo Fassi, with his inexhaustible energy and shrewd skating sense, is the best coach in the business.

An Italian transplanted to Denver, Fassi, 46, is the Pied Piper of his sport: a community of 35 skaters, plus in some cases their entire families, have migrated to study with him inside the green sheet-metal walls of the Colorado Ice Arena, of which he is part owner. The Fassi tribe includes skaters from the U.S., Italy, Finland, Britain, Yugoslavia and Sweden--plus several Russians who have come for briefer consultations. All pay $9 for 20 minutes worth of Fassi's wisdom. Most think it is a bargain. "I owe 75% of my gold medal to Carlo," says Dorothy Hamill. John Curry feels that he does too. His highly expressive style had been ridiculed for years. He went to Fassi in 1974, after he had finished a disappointing seventh in the world championships. The following year, his best moves refined and his excesses trimmed, he came in third.

Fassi calmly reassures his skaters that they are good even when they are depressed. "To make a champion," he says in his slightly fractured English, "I have to be patient. With Dorothy, it is not always easy. She gets mad at herself." Curry also benefited from Fassi's encouragement: "Months before a major competition he starts telling everyone how good you are. Pretty soon you think so yourself."

Fassi is regarded as skating's best compulsory figures tutor. Says Hamill: "Before I got to Carlo, I was tied up in a knot doing figures. I looked like a pretzel."

Fluid, elegant body movements are a hallmark of his style. Moreover, he is a master at manipulating the politics of figure skating. When judges attended practice sessions in Innsbruck, Fassi ordered his skaters to work on their best moves: he told Hamill, for example, to trace her strongest figures near the judges and her weakest on the far side of the rink. It also does not hurt that Fassi coaches skaters from so many nations. In competition, judges from those countries sometimes give his pupils the benefit of the doubt: in Hamill's short program, the Italian judge gave her a perfect mark of 6.0 for presentation.

Fassi started skating when he was six, at a rink in Milan where his grandfather worked as an electrician. Though he was excellent in compulsory figures, he was never an inspired free skater; Fassi's best showing was a third in the 1953 world championships. He began coaching Italians in 1956, and later took on Europeans and Americans--including 1968 Gold Medalist Peggy Fleming.

Off the ice, Fassi loves to regale his pupils with stories about Italian history, or show them his basement full of electric trains and handcrafted wooden ship models. How much time he will have for such pastimes in the future is debatable. "We go back home soon and rest," he said last week. "At least I hope. But I got some young skaters you should see."

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