Alone: The Triumph and Tragedy of John Curry

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.

One winter's night in 1976, millions of people all over the world watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet and changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art.

And yet the man was--and would always remain--an absolute mystery to a world that was dazzled by his gift. Surely, men's skating was supposed to be Cossack-muscular, not sensual and ambiguous like this.

Curry himself was an often-tortured man of labyrinthine complexity. For the first time, Alone untangles the extraordinary web of his toxic, troubled, brilliant--and short--life. It is a story of childhood nightmares, furious ambition, sporting genius, lifelong rivalries, homophobia, Cold War politics, financial ruin and deep personal tragedy. Alone reveals the restless, impatient, often dark soul of a man whose words could lacerate, whose skating invariably moved audiences to tears, and who--after succumbing to AIDS, as so many of his fellow artists and friends did--died of a heart attack aged just 44.

Bill Jones is a British journalist, who has worked on hundreds of documentaries for the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4. His first book--The Ghost Runner--won him The Times Best New Writer in the 2012 British Sports Book Awards and was shortlisted for the William Hill award. Alone is his second book. Born in Bridlington, the author currently lives in Ampleforth, North Yorkshire, where--despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary--he insists that his ancestry is Welsh.