CARR, Danielle Vanessa OAM, and Stephen Alexander OAM

BORN NOVEMBER 6TH 1969 in Sydney Australia, Danielle is a former Australian pair skater with her older brother, Stephen, who was born three years earlier on January 6th. Based at the Sydney Figure Skating Club, their first coaches were Karen Millgate and Diana Wolf then Jack Lee and Gretchen Doolan (Malitz). Among their later coaches were Belinda Trussell (Noonan), Tamara Nikolayevna Moskvina (Bratus), Sergei Shakhrai and Kerry Leitch. Danielle was a pint-size 11 year-old, 38cm shorter than her brother, when she won her first national in 1980. From that time until 1998, the duo won the Australian national pairs title for a remarkable nineteen consecutive seasons.

The Carrs were 4 times Junior World Championship competitors placing 8th in 1980, 13th in ’81, 7th in ’82, and again in ’83. In 1984, they placed 11th at the World Championships, the first of 14 successive appearances up until 1997. Their 10th placings in 1988 and ’93 were best overall. In the 1993 Worlds at Makuhari in Japan they finished 8th in the technical program. The Carrs also placed third at the Prague Skate in 1988, and the prestigious Pziruetten and Skate Canada in 1992. Among their choreographers were Tom Dickson, Jo Jo Starbuck, Brenda Trussell and Catarina Lindgren.

The Carrs debuted at the Winter Olympics in 1992 in Albertville, placing 13th from 18 pairs. Injured in a fall in the lead-up to the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Danielle recovered in 3 weeks to return to limited training. “We don’t really know what we’re going to do after Lillehammer,” said Stephen at the time, “it will depend on Lillehammer, how we skate there. We want to make a better impression than the last one, Albertville. We want to climb up again, we don’t want to be stagnant”. The couple finished 11th, equalling Australia’s best performance by a pair.

In 1998, the Carrs felt they needed to train again with the best figure skaters in the former Soviet Union. “We had previously trained there in 1983, 1984 and 1985. We had missed out on the 1988 Olympic Team and were determined not to miss the next Olympics in Albertville, France. We planned to train for a month in St Petersburg, travel to Detroit, then do more training in Canada before the World Championships. After our flights were booked, our Soviet visas were cut short with no explanation given”. [2] Instead, they spent more time in Detroit. “One week after arriving in Detroit, we saw the horrible news. The flight we were originally booked on, Pan Am flight 103, had exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland”.

At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, their third, they again placed 13th and retired from competitive skating in 1999. Stephen Carr also placed 18th in the individual event in Lillehammer, the first Australian to land a triple axel at the Olympics. [1] In 2000, Stephen and Danielle were awarded the Order of Australia for services to figure skating as competitors at Australian and World Championships, and to the Olympic Movement. The pair were inaugural inductees to the Ice Skating Australia Hall of Fame in 2004.

Both skaters continued as skating coaches in Sydney. Among their students were Emma Brien and Stuart Beckingham, and Stephen also coached Sean Carlow. Danielle’s son Joshua has competed in national ice hockey tournaments. The siblings are a record nineteen times Australian Pair Skating Champions, four times Junior World Championship competitors, fourteen times Senior World Championship competitors, and three times Olympic representatives. 

Pairs Short Program, 1998 Nagano Olympics

GTV Nine news feature, c1993.