Frank Carroll, who coached world-champion figure skaters, dies at 85

For more than four decades, Mr. Carroll was a ubiquitous and debonair figure in American skating, watching from the boards — always nattily dressed in a suit — as his skaters collected national titles, world championships and Olympic medals. He coached Linda Fratianne to two world championships in the 1970s, taught the charismatic but troubled skater Christopher Bowman and spent 10 years coaching Kwan, a five-time world champion who dominated the sport in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“To me, figure skating is a divine sport,” Mr. Carroll told USA Today columnist Christine Brennan. “It’s a sport made by the gods. It’s frictionless, there are beautiful, flowing costumes done by a costume designer, there is musical interpretation, there is emotion, there is athleticism and tremendous physical strength involved. It inspires people to cry, it inspires people to cheer, it pulls the emotions out of people.”

A former skater who competed for national titles while in college and later danced with the Ice Follies, Mr. Carroll was self-deprecating and unassuming, attuned to the stresses and anxieties the sport inflicted on his students. Even his youngest skaters, children 10 or younger, were told to call him “Frank,” never “Mr. Carroll.” At competitions, he would calm their nerves by talking about the books he was reading (he adopted the title of “Undaunted Courage,” Stephen E. Ambrose’s account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, as a mantra) and by playing a game to see who could keep their hands more still.

Far beyond some other coaches in the sport, he also insisted on rigor and discipline. When he began working with Timothy Goebel before the 2001 competition season, he surprised the skater by bringing in a ballet master and other specialists to improve Goebel’s artistry and posture.

“It was unsettling,” Goebel later said. “We didn’t really even spend time on my jumps.” (The regimen paid off, as Goebel won the U.S. national championship in 2001 and took home the bronze medal at the Olympics the next year.)

Between 1976 and his retirement in 2018, Mr. Carroll coached skaters at 10 of the 12 Winter Olympics. He could be a ferocious advocate on behalf of his athletes, as when he declared that Fratianne, the runner-up at the 1980 Olympics, was a victim of Cold War-era intrigue when she fell short and received the silver medal instead of the gold. For years, he accused five German-language judges of conspiring to rig the results by giving the women’s gold medal to an East German, Anett Pötzsch, and the men’s to a Brit, Robin Cousins.

“I thought that I might not continue in skating after that,” he told USA Today, recalling his dismay at Fratianne’s defeat.

Mr. Carroll was disappointed again at the Olympics in 1998, when Kwan placed second in Nagano, Japan, behind her American rival Tara Lipinski. He blamed the loss on Kwan’s father, saying that he had discouraged her from being aggressive. “Her father told her, ‘Be slow, take your time, stay on your feet and you’ll win,’” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview with the New York Times. “She stayed on her feet and she didn’t win.”

But in 2010, Mr. Carroll had his Olympic breakthrough in Vancouver, coaching Evan Lysacek — the previous year’s world champion — to an upset victory over Evgeni Plushenko, the reigning Olympic gold medalist, 257.67 points to 256.36. Lysacek gave most of the credit for his gold medal triumph to his coach, saying that “today was 99 percent him, maybe 1 percent me.”

Nonsense, said Mr. Carroll, who insisted the victories belonged to the athletes, not him. “People would tell me, ‘You’ve got to motivate these kids,’ but a kid is either motivated or not,” he told sportswriter Philip Hersh much later. “Those I taught who became champions always wanted it themselves. I was along for the ride. I helped but didn’t make anyone a champion.”

The younger of two children, Francis Michael Carroll was born in Worcester, Mass., on July 11, 1938. His father was a shop teacher, and his mother worked for the city as a clerk.

Mr. Carroll grew up skating outdoors on a frozen pond, inspired by newsreel footage of two-time Olympic champion Dick Button. He later trained under Maribel Vinson, a champion skater turned coach whose toughness served as a model for his own disciplinarian rigor. She was killed in 1961, along with the entire U.S. figure skating team, when their plane crashed near Brussels as the group was traveling to the world championships.

Although he was not part of the team, Mr. Carroll had by then established himself as an elite skater, winning bronze medals at the U.S. junior national championships in 1959 and 1960, the year he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester with a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

He toured for four years with the Ice Follies before moving to Los Angeles, where he attempted to launch a career as an actor and appeared in a few forgettable beach movies. “I would go to auditions, and when they would ask what I did, I said, ‘I ice skate,’” he said. “I was like a joke to them.”

Mr. Carroll began working as a skating teacher to occupy himself between screen roles. Soon he was coaching full-time, working with skaters who eventually included Olympic athletes Gracie Gold, Mirai Nagasu and Denis Ten of Kazakhstan, who won a bronze medal at the 2014 Games.

His most decorated skater, Kwan, was about 11 when she met Mr. Carroll through Fratianne’s mother, a skating judge, and began working with the coach. They continued their partnership until October 2001, four months before the Olympics, when Kwan announced that she wanted to pursue a gold medal on her own, without a coach. The two remained close, and Kwan went on to win bronze.

Mr. Carroll leaves no immediate survivors. He was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 1996 and the World Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2007, although he preferred to keep the focus on his skaters’ accomplishments rather than his own.

“One of the basic sayings of my family was, ‘Don’t be so full of yourself,’” he told the Times in 2010. “When I’m alone and start thinking about accomplishment, and whether people revere me, I stop and say, ‘Get over it Frank.’”