The applause was thunderous. Tracey Wainman, the 12-year-old Canadian figure skating phenomenon, had just completed her debut performance at the 1980 World Championships in Dortmund, West Germany. And the audience wouldn’t let her leave the ice. Showering the rink with flowers and stuffed animals, the crowd (some 10,000 people) couldn’t get enough of the tiny, dark-haired girl in the red sequined dress. The feeling was mutual: clutching a giant teddy bear, she lapped up the attention, hugging strangers at the boards and waving to the gallery. Sitting at the edge of the rink, CTV commentator Johnny Esaw was effusive: “That’s the most sensational debut I’ve seen, in any sport, anywhere, at any time,” he cried. Twenty-five years later, at the Ed Sackville Arena in Richmond Hill, Wainman is performing again, only this time, the audience is a dozen children on skates. Gliding slowly across the ice, a pink streak in her jet black hair, she demonstrates a series of moves, and her protégés follow her every step, like ducklings trailing their mother. Canada’s youngest ever figure skating champion is now 38, and coaching at the York Region Skating Academy (where she is co-director). But to skating fans, Wainman is remembered as a child star who went off the deep end. Her story has become a textbook cautionary tale.

I was 10 years old when she made her international debut. As an aspiring skater, I watched her perform with a combination of awe and yearning. I also watched her spectacular crash. Wainman hit a wall at 14. She’d sprouted almost six inches in two years and had grown curves everywhere. She couldn’t adapt to her new size and shape. By 1984, the year she was expected to win Olympic gold, she had quit—washed up at 16. Or that’s how the media told the story. The truth is more complicated.

Canadians have always been mad for figure skating. In terms of television ratings, it’s the country’s most popular sport after hockey. Four million Canadians tuned in to watch the Battle of the Brians at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. But in 1980, when Wainman emerged on the scene, Canadian figure skating was in the doldrums. Toller Cranston had retired. None of the champions of the day had great prospects. And a Canadian woman hadn’t won Olympic gold since 1948. The fans and the skating federation were hungry for a new star.

Tiny Tracey, as the media christened her, had huge celebrity potential. Though her tender age and diminutive size (four-foot-seven and 72 pounds) were talking points, it was her joie de vivre that captivated audiences; grown men cried in the stands. “Tracey knocked everybody’s socks off,” says Debbi Wilkes, the veteran CTV skating commentator. “Before she skated, she was like a little racehorse at the gate: ‘Let me out, let me out, let me out.’ She was absolutely fearless. And when she hit the ice, it was sparkle, sparkle, sparkle—you couldn’t help but fall in love.” Wilkes says she still receives an e-mail a month asking whatever happened to Tracey Wainman.

David Wilson, the skating choreographer who styled the Olympic routine of U.S. champion Sasha Cohen, saw Wainman compete when he was a teenager and calls her one of his biggest inspirations. “I get chills reminiscing about it,” he says. “Tracey had more charisma than Michelle Kwan and Katarina Witt put together.”

The press ran out of superlatives: “pint-sized dynamo” and “bundle of energy” were two favourites. Cranston, with whom Wainman used to practise at the Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club, dubbed her “the Canadian diamond in the sky.” Though she was a shameless charmer—she grinned and wiggled her bum at the judges—she had the talent to back it up: her powerful stroking could rival speed skaters (one of her programs was choreographed to “Flight of the Bumble Bee”), she knocked off double axels and triple jumps with ease and was a ferocious competitor. “She had everything,” remembers her former coach Ellen Burka. The grand dame of skating teachers, Burka has taught everyone from Cranston to Dorothy Hamill. “She could jump, she could spin, but she was also very expressive. And she was the most gifted skater of school figures I have ever seen.”

When top brass at the Canadian Figure Skating Association opted to send Wainman to the 1980 Worlds, it was a highly controversial decision; the national champion, 21-year-old Heather Kemkaran, who had expected to go, was so upset that she retired. The decision was viewed as a symbolic statement by the CFSA’s incoming president, David Dore, who was trying to shake up the skating establishment. As far as Dore was concerned, the name of the game was medals. He had no qualms about showing off Wainman: “We’re going to stage manage her entrance,” he told The Globe and Mail. “She will arrive later than the rest of the team and we have arranged for the West German press to meet her at the airport… She will leave the judges talking.”

Wilkes, who was doing TV commentary, says the attention lavished on Wainman fuelled resentment among other skaters. “In a sick sort of way, a lot of people hoped she was going to fall flat. Everyone was waiting for it to blow up in the CFSA’s face.” But the gamble paid off: Wainman finished 10th in the free skating and 14th overall—an impressive showing for someone her age. “Tracey steals the show,” wrote Howard Bass, the figure skating correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph. He also predicted she’d win gold at the Sarajevo Olympics.

Tracey quickly became Toronto’s most famous 12-year-old: she was invited to perform with Olympic champions at a prestigious gala in London and to skate at Madison Square Garden; she appeared on magazine covers and TV shows. Canada, it appeared, had found its next big winner.

Sitting at her desk in a small, shared office at the Ed Sackville Arena, Wainman’s eyes light up when she talks about Dortmund. “It was huge for me. I was so excited to be there, skating with my idols, all these stars I’d seen on TV. I spent the whole week running around with an autograph book.” And being chased herself. Crowds would turn up to watch her practise. There was such a mob scene that security guards had to escort her out of the rink. While there, she made dozens of new acquaintances, but one was particularly memorable: a 13-year-old Polish skater named Gregor Filipowski, who was also making his big debut. Their paths would cross again years later.

Fame had its downside, though. The rumour mill at the Toronto Cricket Club, where she trained, ranged from ruthless to ridiculous. “Kids said that I was taking drugs to stunt my growth, that I was secretly 27,” she recalls. “The best one was that my parents had doctored my birth certificate and locked me in a room to prevent me from growing.”