The brilliant black figure skater Mabel Fairbanks, who died on September 29th aged 85, first took to the ice by hobbling downstairs to a frozen park lake on second-hand blades two sizes too big - only to be turned away by white youngsters. Eventually she reached Olympic class, but was again rejected because of her colour.
The young Mabel Fairbanks had been watching the skating children from a living room overlooking Central Park in New York, where she was baby-sitting for a wealthy white woman.
She was so fascinated by the ice that she managed to buy an old pair of skates for a dollar from a pawn shop and stuff the toes with cotton wool. She had been born in the Florida Everglades into a poor African-American family that was also part Seminole Indian. What happened between Florida and Central Park remains unknown.
In New York she was soon sailing across the ice in Central Park. "Blacks didn't skate there," she remembered. "But it was a public place, so I just carried on."
To enable her to practise, her uncle built her a 6ft by 6ft rink in her room, made of wood and tin with dry ice underneath; with added water it became a mini-rink. She continued to refine her skill until the manager of the public rink noted her persistence and let her in. From then on, her ability and sparkle began to overcome some of the racism in figure skating. By her early 20s, she had formed a novelty act in partnership with a roller skater and took her portable rink and show on the road. Soon she was skating at the Gay Blades Ice Arena in Manhattan to mixed-race audiences.
The sport has a tradition of naming creative spins, leaps and splits after their creators - such as the Lutz jump after Alois Lutz - but this, too, was denied Mabel Fairbanks.
Yet skating historians credit her with inventing at least two spins, one the familiar pose as the skater raises her leg at the back until it is almost above her down-tilted head. This, and another spin, in which the leg is held straight up, were merely called "variations".
During the 1930s, she attempted to take part in the Olympic trials in which all US athletes must compete to be chosen for the national team. But she was never permitted to try or allowed into any competitive figure-skating event.
In the 1940s she moved to Los Angeles, travelled to Mexico with the Ice Capades, and finally broke into the famous Ice Follies shows. Yet again she would suffer discrimination, once being barred from a show by her heroine, Sonja Henie. Then she started appearing in ice shows in Las Vegas and was befriended by Frank Sinatra and the "rat pack".
As she grew older, Mabel Fairbanks turned to coaching, and is credited with helping the careers of US and world champions, including Scott Hamilton, Atoy Wilson, Tiffany Chin,and 1970s champions Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner. She also coached Kristi Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic gold medallist.
Atoy Wilson, now 50, became the first African-American to win the US national championship, and first met Mabel Fairbanks when he was eight at an LA skating rink. She forced LA's Culver City skating club to become the first such institution to admit an African American in 1965.
Mabel Fairbanks: born 1915; died, September 2001