McKNIGHT, Don OAM

BORN IN 1931 in Rydalmere in Sydney, McKnight won the NSW Skating Championship and the F C Brown Cup, then secured the Gold Medal for skating skill at Sydney Glaciarium, before leaving for overseas in his late teens. [2] He gave an exhibition for the Danish Skating Union at Copenhagen on his way to England where he joined Tom Arnold's ice skating troupe, and became a professional show skater for several years.

At Brighton he performed in Ice Circus, then Robinson Crusoe at Wembley, Dick Whittington at Leeds, followed by a tour as understudy to the leading-man in Rose Marie. In 1953, when the company reorganised, he was leading-man at 22 in a Rose Marie reproduction at the Bristol Hippodrome in which Pamela Gaye played the titular character.

On his return to Australia in 1954, he married Fay Kelly [6] and met Colin Jackson, a future National Pairs Champion representing Queensland. Jackson was to become Knight's life-long partner. The couple lived and breathed ice skating. They ran a small ice rink in the '70s and dreamed of developing a full size rink for Queensland. They did that twice for the state association with the two Iceworld rinks at Acacia Ridge (1979) and Boondall (1994). "They could have done it privately," said their friend Gillian Levett, "but they chose to do it for the association so ice skating was ensured of its future". [3]

"We were both keen judges, keen skaters ourselves," McKnight told ABC Radio National in 2002. "We decided that we needed to do something to try to ensure the sport survived. So we leased this ice-rink for a period of three years, and we were able to make some money out of that. With that money, we then approached the State government, who came good with a loan to us, and we then approached the banks for money, which they gave to us only on condition that we personally guaranteed the loan, so that was a bit of a hurdle. Nevertheless we got around that one.

"We bought a piece of land and we built an ice-rink [at Acacia Ridge in 1979], and that ice-rink belongs to the Ice Skating Association of Queensland, and we act as Trustees of that Association. After we'd been operating for a period of about 12 years, we'd made sufficient money then to buy another piece of land, and we built a second ice-rink [at Boondall in 1994], and that is a magnificent facility, if I may say so, on the other side of the city from the first one, and that's equipped with a gym and with a licensed bar and restaurant, and we use those rinks to promote the training of our skaters".

A trailblazer for the staging of two world junior championships in Brisbane, McKnight served as national president for more than two decades, and as president of the Australian Professional Skaters' Association. Made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to Ice Skating in 1990, he was a figure skating judge at the 1994 Winter Olympics, and last judged at Nagano in 1998 as the ISU retirement age of 70 loomed.

Still national president in 2002 when vote-rigging affected the judging of the Pairs figure-skating at Salt Lake City, Australia's Wendy Langton judged the Men's and Ladies' Singles events in which Australians Anthony Liu and Stephanie Zhang competed. Allegations of bribery were leveled against many ice skating judges, and the ISU came under pressure to change the judging system to make it more honest and objective. McKnight said that although he always believed the judging was above-board at the Olympics in his day, undue influence is always possible in a sport as controversial to judge as figure skating.

"I've been on the Appeals Commission for some years. I've always taken a very significant interest in the political system of the International Skating Union, and it's my intention this year [2002] to stand for membership of the ISU Council, which is the controlling body for figure-skating and ice-racing in the world. I've found over the years that the powers-that-be, you know, the big powerful skating nations, tend to control the system very much, and I think there's a role in it for small countries, of which there are many more than the big ones.

"But the small countries don't have the voice, and it's my intention to try to get on to that Council so that I can be the voice of the small countries. How successful I'll be of course, is another matter, because the big powerful countries tend to try to make voting blocs, to ensure that they get their representatives on that body, and I guess that's like any political system: the people that have the entrenched power try to retain it. The ones that don't have it, struggle to get in." [4]

McKnight was involved in setting up the World Skating Federation, which was intended to supplant the ISU as the sport's global governing body after it became obvious reforms intended to restore figure skating's integrity were more conducive to sustaining corruption. The WSF vowed to put skaters first, guarantee unbiased judging under the familiar 6.0-based scoring system, and ensure judging panels are geographically balanced and held accountable. McKnight later "dissociated himself from the WSF", retaining ISU eligibility.

As Trustees of the state association's No. 1 Trust for the Brisbane ice rinks, in 2007 McKnight and Jackson applied to the Supreme Court for direction to claim reimbursement for their services, and transfer the rest to the association. [7] Formerly of Surfers Paradise, Don McKnight died at Ashmore on August 5th 2018 aged 87. [1] Colin Jackson, his partner of 53 years, who coached two-time Olympian Anthony Liu, died earlier in 2017. They both played a pivotal role in ice skating across Queensland, and their last gift to the sport was a bequest for promoting skaters, a $500,000 development fund. [3]