Toller Cranston is: six-time Canadian figure-skating champion, celebrity, costume designer, artist extraordinaire, broadcaster, choreographer of skating routines, raconteur, bon vivant, coach, world traveller, art collector, legend, and enigma. In 1976 he won Olympic bronze (so why did it feel like defeat?). This book tells the story of his life after those fateful games at Innsbruck. The rise and fall of Toller’s first professional ice show is described in soul-searing detail. His subsequent triumphant tour of Europe as the Skater of the Century is recounted, in contrast, with wicked humour. There are vignettes here of his encounters with the rich and famous from Leonard Bernstein to Pierre Cardin and of his life among Europe’s aristocrats and bohemians. Toller has experienced the high life and the low. He has stayed in the most luxurious hotels, held court in palatial houses, sought seclusion in beautiful estates. But the hard times have taken their toll. In the early 1990s a combination of circumstances, including a disastrous professional association with out-of-control American skater Christopher Bowman and a lawsuit that dragged on for years (ending in complete victory for Toller), led to a personal crisis from which recovery came slowly. But even in the blackest hours, Toller’s humour and creative powers never deserted him. This generously illustrated book is an extraordinary self-portrait written by a uniquely gifted individual. Toller’s wit, insight, and delicious way with words will entertain and astound readers whether they are skating fans or not.

Zero Tollerance : An Intimate Memoir by the Man Who Revolutionized Figure Skating

Sports & Outdoors

Cranston, Toller

Kimball, Martha Lowder

Biographies

MCCLELLAND STEWART

He has been described as “bold, brazen, and totally unabashed,” “one of a kind,” and “clearly a genius.” He won the Canadian figure-skating championships six times and brought back a bronze medal from the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. He revolutionized men’s figure skating, single-handedly transforming an athletic competition into a modern art form. He is an artist, celebrity, costume designer, broadcaster, choreographer of skating routines, coach, bon vivant, world traveller, art collector, legend, and enigma. And Toller Cranston has stories to tell. Like the time at Lake Placid when a woman drove her car directly into his bedroom and seduced him, and the groupie who broke into his house and waited for him naked except for a few strategically arranged rose petals. He writes about his encounters with the great and famous. (On meeting Joni Mitchell, for example, he asked, politely, “You sing, don’t you?”) With mixed feelings, he describes his reaction upon viewing a German-made pornographic film in which he played an unexpected part. This is not so much a sequel to Toller Cranston’s previous best-selling memoir, Zero Tollerance, as a companion volume. There are skating stories and stories from the world of art, there are stories of good times and of bad, high times and low. There are portraits of extraordinary people who have shaped and coloured his life, parting thoughts about his relationship with the management group IMG, about his own retirement, and about the condition of skating today. But this is chiefly an entertaining look back on the first half of an eventful, unusual life by a great Canadian artist and performer.

When Hell Freezes Over: Should I Bring My Skates?

Biographies & Memoirs

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