Olympic champion legend Dick button dead at 95

Tail buttonAmerica's first Olympic gold medalist in the figure Skating is dead, and the death of the legend comes for sport on a dark day.

Button died on Thursday in the state of New York from North Salem … according to his children, who first confirmed his death in the Washington Post.

Perhaps nobody in history had an impact on the US ice skating runs than on DB, who first dominated as a competitor in the 1940s and 1950s … and then a long -time broadcaster that covered the sport all over the world.

Dick literally brought America to the figure Skating card -at a time when the European countries dominated -when he won his first of 5 consecutive world figures in 1948. This was also the year in which he won his first gold medal age of 18. He remains the youngest man who has ever reached Olympic gold in the figure Skaten.

At the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, he hit gold a second time and did a serious flare – as the first person who landed a triple jump, a triple loop that is exactly on the way to the medal stand.

After that, Dick Profi … a massive (for the time) 150,000 US dollars with the ice capades. Couldn't sound a lot now, but it made him one of the best paid athletes in the world – and in 1960 he started a legendary career on radio.

This year he covered the Olympic Winter Games for CBS before jumping to ABC's “Wide World of Sports” … where he has really become a voice of the Figure Skating for generations of athletes and fans.

Dick was loved because of the fact that he called it as he saw it, and had no problems making the program of a skater as ugly, or as he once described an Olympic performance. His last stay over the Olympic Games took place in 2010 during the Vancouver Games.

He still holds 2 US men's records – his 2 Olympic gold medals and 7 national championships.

In what feels like scary timing, the undisputed icon of American skate died on the same day when sport mourned around the species Deaths of the talented young skaters who were at American Airlines 5342The Potomac river that collided with a military helicopter on Wednesday evening. Fourteen people in the figure skating world – skaters, coaches and parents – were on board the flight that started from Wichita, where this year's US ice skating championship took place.

Button is survived by its 2 children. He was 95.