John Nicks died Monday at 97, closing the career of a coach who shaped some of figure skating’s biggest names and left former students reaching for words that could match what he meant to them. Sasha Cohen led the tributes, saying on Instagram that he always told her, “Remember, dear, we don’t fall, we bounce.”
For Cohen, that line was more than a memory. She said Nicks was her coach through two Olympic Games, three Olympic Trials, and countless other competitions, a span that captured the patience he was known for and the pressure she learned to live under. She also called him a great legend, and her post made clear that his voice stayed with her long after the ice.
His reach went well beyond one skater. Nicks coached more than 1,200 skaters even in his nineties, a number that speaks to the length of a career that kept going long after most coaches would have stepped aside. He helped guide Olympic champions Peggy Fleming and Kristi Yamaguchi, and he worked with pairs skating champions Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, building a reputation as a coach who could turn raw ability into results.
That reputation was hard won. Nicks nurtured talent at Iceland Arena in Paramount in Southern California, but his success did not come from easy relationships or simple progress. Cohen wrote that he believed in her “including the times I made it hard,” a line that gets at the grind behind the medals and the resets that often followed them. She won world silver medals in 2004 and 2005, the 2005 U.S. silver, the 2006 national championship, and Olympic silver in Turin under his watch, but the road to those finishes was never smooth.
Ashley Wagner also paid tribute, writing, “Mr. Nicks, you were a champion maker.” She said she would always be grateful for her time with him, the lessons she learned and the athlete he transformed her into. Matt Farrell said in a Tuesday statement that “The skating community has lost a tremendous ambassador,” a view that matched the scale of the loss felt around the sport.
Nicks had earned that standing long before the tributes began. He won the 1953 world championship in pairs with his sister Jennifer Nick while representing Great Britain, then was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 1993 and the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2000. His death leaves a gap that is larger than one coaching tree, because he was part of the lineage that helped define modern U.S. figure skating, and the tributes suggest the people he trained still hear his voice when they lace up.
