Surya Bonaly

Surya Varuna Claudine Bonaly (born 15 December 1973) is a French-born retired competitive figure skater. She is a three-time World silver medalist (1993–1995), a five-time European champion (1991–1995), the 1991 World Junior Champion, and a nine-time French national champion (1989–1997).

Bonaly is the only Olympic figure skater to land a backflip on one blade; she performed it at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and retired soon afterward. She had a long and successful career as a professional figure skater, performing in ice shows all over the world and winning many professional competitions. She became a coach in Las Vegas, Colorado, Minnesota, and Switzerland.

Surya Varuna Claudine Bonaly was born in Nice, France, on 15 December 1973. Her birth name was Claudine; she was adopted out of an orphanage at the age of eight months by Suzanne Bonaly, a physical education teacher in Nice, and Georges Bonaly, a draftsman who worked for the French government, who named her after the Hindu deities Surya and Varuna. Suzanne Bonaly said that they adopted a poor, nonwhite baby because "they are the babies no one takes". They initially wanted to adopt a baby from India, but received a call from an orphanage in France. Bonaly was educated at home by her mother. Bonaly's coach, Didier Gailhaguet, told reporters early in Bonaly's figure skating career that she had been born in Réunion and was abandoned as a baby on the beach, that she had been raised on a macrobiotic diet, and that the 17-inch ponytail she had at the 1992 Olympics had never been cut. Gailhaguet made up these stories about her early life "as a way to contend with better-established" skaters. Bonaly later found that her biological mother was from Réunion and that her biological father was from Ivory Coast.

Bonaly began gymnastics training from her mother when she was two years old and won a silver medal for the trampoline in team tumbling at the 1986 Tumbling World Championships when she was 12 years old. She began figure skating at the age of 12, when she successfully completed her first triple jump. Suzanne Bonaly was her daughter's first skating coach. In 1995, Johnette Howard of Sports Illustrated called Suzanne Bonaly "domineering" and stated that she had "near-total control" of her daughter's training and was intimately involved with her daughter's career. In 2016, reporter Susan Du described Gailhaguet's false stories about Bonaly's birth, the press' reactions to Suzanne Bonaly, and Gailhaguet's unsubstantiated accusations that she had abused her daughter.

Gailhaguet discovered Bonaly and invited her to train with him in Paris; her mother accompanied her there and her father stayed in Nice. Bonaly later told BBC's Outlook Podcast in 2019 that they lived in her parents' van and were "almost homeless". She made the French national team within a year.

Bonaly came in seventh place at Blue Swords, a junior-level competition in Germany, in 1987. At the 1988 World Junior Championships in December 1987, she came in 14th place. ...

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