Mercer Islander Peter Kennedy will be watching the pairs figure skating finals at the Beijing Olympics with great interest this week. And for good reason. He and his sister Karol, who were affectionately called “the Kennedy Kids,” were silver medalists at the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo.
At 94 years of age, Peter looks back on their experience 70 years ago with a twinkle in his eye. It’s as if he has a secret he’d like to confess.
“I really think we deserved the gold,” he told me. “What did us in was the fact that we skated first and back then that was a disadvantage.”
According to the longtime Island resident, there was another reason why he and his sibling partner were denied first place.
“There were five judges in those days,” Peter recalls. “In addition to the American and Canadian judges, three were from Europe and the Canadian judge tended to vote with the Europeans.”
I recently had the opportunity to interview Peter about his life. He told me he and his sister began taking skating lessons in Olympia when he was 8 and she was 3. Their parents were very supportive from the start.
Early on, the sibling pair impressed their coach with their talent. Competitions became their life outside of school and it paid off. When the rink they frequented threatened to close, Peter’s father, a local dentist, purchased it.
When Peter turned 16, the family moved to Seattle so he and his sister could be closer to their skating coach. Such a move paid big dividends. Between 1948 and 1952, Peter and Karol won five U.S. Championships. In 1950 “the Kennedy Kids” became the first America pair to win the World Championship. Their amazing performance at the Winter Games would follow two years later.
Following the Oslo Olympics, Peter left competitive skating behind and focused on downhill skiing. Having befriended Nordic ski champion Gustav Raaum at the University of Washington, Peter’s love of ice gave way to powder. His physical conditioning as a skater enabled him to easily move from one sport to the other. And he proved to be an excellent skier. Within three years he fell just short of making the U. S. Olympic ski team.
After graduation and getting married, Peter spent a few years in the banking industry. Soon after, he found a way to combine his new love of skiing with a vocation that would pay the bills.
Peter started his own company designed to improve ski equipment. They invented and manufactured the first aluminum ski poles and the first all-aluminum skis. It was his company that helped outfit the 1964 U.S. Olympic ski team. If that wasn’t enough, he also pioneered the foam-filled ski boot.
Peter and his wife raised their son and two daughters on Mercer Island. Given their dad’s interest, it was only natural that they became a big-time skiing family.
And skiing continues to connect the Kennedy clan. The family frequent a condo at Sun Valley where Peter and his grown children and grandchildren spend time together on the slopes. And when he isn’t at Sun Valley, you can find the Kennedy patriarch, who will turn 95 this fall, on the chair lifts at Snoqualmie Pass ski area.
“I’m guessing I’m the oldest guy on the slopes,” Peter beamed. “I think it’s what helps keep me young.”
As Peter showed me a photograph of him and his sister (who died in 2004) from the Oslo Olympics, it occurred to me Peter was not the only Mercer Island resident to compete in 1952. The late Carl Lovsted was part of the four-man rowing team that won the bronze medal in the Summer Olympics several months earlier in Helsinki.
“I knew Carl,” Peter nodded with his signature smile. “He and his family lived just down West Mercer from us. Our kids were in school together.”
In 1992, Peter and Karol were inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Association’s Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colo., along with Dorothy Hamill and pairs skaters Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner.
