By Canadian Press

Figure skating coach Ellen Burka leaves behind legacy of tough love

Sep 13, 2016 | 9:30 AM

TORONTO — It wasn’t enough for Ellen Burka’s students to perform to music, she needed them to feel it.

Those who trained with the Canadian hall of fame figure skating coach, who died Monday at the age of 95, say she helped revolutionize the sport by adding drama and passion to her skaters’ performances and demanding that they achieve the potential she saw in them.

“Her background was always about being artistic, artistry. She loved that part of skating. That was her thing,” said three-time world champion Elvis Stojko, who trained with her between the ages of nine and 15. “Even when I was a kid growing up, working with her in my formative years, it was really imperative, it was all about connecting with the music.

“She loved music, she loved that marriage of the two, that self-expression. That really came out in the work that she did and the skaters she worked with.”

Stojko is among a who’s who of skaters coached by Burka. Others include Canadian champions Toller Cranston, Patrick Chan and Tracey Wainman, Americans Dorothy Hamill and Christopher Bowman and her daughter Petra Burka, who won a bronze medal at the 1964 Olympics and a world championship in 1965.

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With all of them, she put an emphasis on the art, not the sport.

“When she chose our music it was always a big production,” said Sandra Bezic, who along with her brother Val , won the Canadian pairs figure skating championship five times, between 1970 and 1974. “We would go to her house and she would show us the album and tell us about the composer and what the history was and it was all part of it. She made you understand and love the music before you started working with it rather than just plopping it on our laps.”

Cranston, a six-time Canadian champion and 1976 Olympic bronze medallist who died last year, was her star pupil.

Together the two revolutionized figure skating, adding a sense of drama and flair that had not been seen in men’s competition.

“A lot of the small skating clubs and stuff you’d skate at, people weren’t used to seeing men’s figure skating,” said Donald Knight, who won three Canadian championships under Burka’s guidance. “I remember one little carnival somewhere up in northern Ontario she said ‘You be ready for a lot of hooting and hollering, especially from the hockey guys. You just show them what you can do and how you can skate and they will appreciate the skating ability you have.’”

Burka began coaching Cranston in 1969, with her encouraging him to use his whole body to express the music and create what he later described as “theatre on ice.” Cranston’s style put an emphasis on dancing and performance rather than technical skill alone.

“I truly believe there would not have been a Toller Cranston without Ellen Burka,” said Bezic, who trained under Burka at the same time as Cranston. “She saw what he had when few others did and took him under her wing and nurtured him in the best way possible. He became what he became because she instilled discipline in him that he didn’t have and direction and focus and yet allowed him to be him.

“Those two, hand-in-hand, couldn’t have happened any other way.”

Burka encouraged her students off the ice as well, going so far as to host Cranston’s first art exhibit in her home in the spring of 1969. Even if her students moved on to other coaches, Burka remained supportive and encouraging.

Stojko fondly recalled her reaction when he won his first national championship two years after he’d moved on to a different coach.

“Right after I’d known I’d won, I was in the kiss and cry and I came out from behind the curtain and the first person standing there waiting for me was Mrs. Burka,” said Stojko. “I remember she hugged me and she whispered ‘I always knew you were going to be a champion.’

“I could see that she was so proud of me. The work that we did together made my skating today.”

Although always nurturing, Bezic describes Burka’s relationships with her students as “complicated.”

“She was an extraordinary force,” said Bezic. “She was a real contradiction because she was a disciplinarian and yet she valued free spirit, creativity, passion, individuality. She was a rule-breaker and she loved to see that in others and yet she was also a disciplinarian so there was that contradiction and this sort of heightened emotional electricity in the air from day to day.”

Born in Amsterdam in 1921 to Jewish parents, Burka was a Holocaust survivor. She met her husband Jan Burka, a Czech-born artist, in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and married him after the Second World War. She won the Dutch national figure skating championship in 1946 and 1947 before moving with her young family to Toronto in 1950 with the Burkas divorcing shortly after.

Burka hid her ancestry from her daughters Petra and Astra, raising them in the Anglican Church, before telling them about their Jewish heritage in their late teens. She grew to embrace her Judaism and was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2013. She had already been named to the Order of Canada in 1978 and Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1996.

“When she revealed her own heritage and her own life experiences I better understood her harshness, her intolerance for weakness. Her toughness,” said Bezic, who introduced Burka at the induction ceremony for the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. “It all kind of made sense to me as an adult. It wasn’t always so easy to be her student. She’s always had a warmth for us.”

Burka continued to coach young skaters well into her 90s, with her unique brand of tough love and a desire to bring out the best in her students.

John Chidley-Hill, The Canadian Press