ENGLISH GIRL SKATING CHAMPION

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 150, 26 June 1937, Page 11

ENGLISH GIRL SKATING CHAMPION

SUCCESSOR TO SONJA HENCE CECILIA COLLEDGE’S RISE TO FAME Tall, long-limbed, fuzzy-haired, her stauesque figure and gleaming teeth her chief claims to beauty. 16-year-old Cecilia Colledge, has borne her fame and importance pretty well. When Sonja Henie, of Sweden, left the ranks of the amateur skaters, her most formidable rival, cool and relentless, well nigh as perfect as Sonja herself, and even more youthful, adopted the crown of world figure skating as her inheritance. This successor to tha bewitching Sonja is Cecilia Colledge, who now holds the world’s championship, which she won in London in March. At six years of age Cecilia Colledge was taken to the Pyrenees for a winter sports holiday and went on ice for the first time. At seven «he watched a figure-skating championship, decided her one ambition was to Yin one. No Time for School Since then her life has been a roun4 of training, competitions, exhibitions, winters in Switzerland, nerve-wrack-ing championships all over Europe, mayoral receptions, banquets, saying words into microphones, showing her pretty teeth (o the camera, signing autographs, and, above all, training thoroughly even to remorselessness. Her life is too public, too crowded, to leave time for school. She does lessons at home as she can fit them in. She is very well bred, smiles easily, has the social self-asurance of an experienced hostess and unbends to her admirers with the practised jand elegant charm of a prlma donna. She went to America in April and gave exhibitions in that highly publicised Madison Square Garden and other centres, and expert ludge« of figure skating (and you have to be expert to judge it in world’s championship class), say that Cedlla ’ls even more technically correct lhan Sonja Henie in her prim'’