Barbara Ann Scott - Telegraph Her accomplishments were seen as a beacon of national recovery, leading Canada out of decades of economic depression and bloodshed on foreign fields. As the then prime minister, Mackenzie King, put it, she gave Canadians "courage to get through the darkness of the post-war gloom." On February 6 1948, the day of the Olympic free skating event, the American Eileen Seigh returned to the changing room in St Moritz with her dress in tatters after falling three times in deep ruts left by two hockey games played earlier on the outdoor ice. She warned her Canadian rival about the danger spots, and Barbara Ann Scott - clad in cream-coloured fur - revised her programme on the hoof, going on to win Canada's first Olympic figure skating gold medal. A year earlier, aged 19, she had won the world figure skating championships in Stockholm, arriving home in Ottawa to be greeted by an unprecedented crowd of 70,000, a third of the city's population. Barbara Ann Scott was born in Ottawa on May 9 1928, the youngest daughter of a former colonel in the Canadian Army. When she was three she was given her first pair of skates for Christmas, and started figure skating at the age of seven. Four years later she was Canadian junior champion. By 13 she had became the first girl skater to land a double lutz jump in competition, and two years later she won the first of her four Canadian senior singles titles. When she was 16, the New York Herald Tribune wrote of her North American championship performance at Madison Square Garden: "A spectacular display of youthful skating exuberance ." Following her Olympic triumph Time magazine put her on the front cover. A toy company marketed the Barbara Ann Scott doll, she was invited to the White House and Buckingham Palace, and the Fifth Avenue hats she favoured - the one she wore for her 1948 homecoming had a poppy suspended six inches above it - started a nationwide craze. Barbara Ann Scott signed her first professional contract in June 1948, a month after her 20th birthday, and starred in the Hollywood Ice Revue, succeeding the Norwegian skating sensation Sonja Henie. In London she appeared in Tom Arnold's Rose Marie On Ice at the Harringay Arena. After retiring from skating in 1955, she married her publicist Tom King and moved to Chicago, her husband's home town, where she opened a beauty parlour and became an accomplished horse rider. She took dual American citizenship and the couple moved to Florida in 1996. Last month she returned to Ottawa to dedicate the new Barbara Ann Scott Gallery, a semi-permanent home for the collection of skating memorabilia - including her 1948 Olympic gold medal - that she recently donated to her home city. Barbara Ann Scott, born May 9 1928, died September 30 2012