Fritzi Burger
Friederike "Fritzi" Burger was an Austrian figure skater. She was a two-time Olympic silver medalist, a four-time World medalist, the 1930 European champion, and a four-time Austrian national champion.Life and career
Burger was born on 6 June 1910 in Vienna. Her family was Jewish.
She won the first-ever contested European Championships, held in 1930. Sonja Henie, who held a monopoly in women's figure skating at the time, was not present at this championship and Burger never defeated her in competition. She placed second behind Henie at the 1928 and 1932 Winter Olympics, and in the 1929 and 1932 World Championships.
After the 1932 Olympics, Burger ended her skating career and went to London, where in 1935 she married Shinkichi Nishikawa, a grandson of the Japanese pearl tycoon Kōkichi Mikimoto. She returned with her husband to Vienna, where she gave birth to her son in the summer of 1937, just before the Anschluss.
In the 1990s, living in the United States, Burger was interviewed for several documentaries on the history of figure skating. She joked in a 1994 interview, "I had two husbands. even beat me at that. She had three." She died on 16 February 1999 in Bad Gastein, Austria.Results
Book
