page_title: Surya Bonaly
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Surya Bonaly / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Слева на право: Дидье Гайаге (президент Французской федерацияи ледовых видов спорта), Оттавио Чинкванта (президент Международного союза конькобежцев) и Альбер II (князь Монако) на трибунах чемпионата мира по фигурному катанию 2012 (Ницца)
context_page_description: Surya Bonaly is a French former competitive figure skater. She is a three-time World silver medalist, a five-time European champion, the 1991 World Junior Champion, and a nine-time French national champion.
  Bonaly is the only Olympic figure skater to land a backflip on only one blade; she performed it at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
context_section_description: Surya Varuna Claudine Bonaly was born in Nice, France, on 15 December 1973. Initially named Claudine, she was adopted at eight months from an orphanage by Suzanne and Georges Bonaly, who gave her the name Surya, a word meaning "the sun" in Sanskrit. Suzanne worked as a physical education teacher and Georges as an architect for the government. Journalists, mainly American, began in the late 1980s to claim that Surya Bonaly was born on the island of Réunion, a island off the coast of Madagascar, and was found lying on a coconut-strewn beach. The skater's passport, however, indicates that she was born in Nice. The story spread as she prepared for her first European championships in 1989. Bonaly believes that the media couldn't accept that a young black adoptee could have been born in France. For Didier Gailhaguet, the first coach in her competitive career, the media attention given to the skater allowed her to achieve better results in international competitions. He later admitted fabricating the story in order to draw attention to his skater, adding that he only mentioned Reunion because he dreamed of going there on vacation. When Surya approached the age of 18 and began researching her birth history, she discovered that her biological mother was indeed from the island and that her biological father was from the Ivory Coast.
  Two years after her adoption, the Bonalys bought a sheepfold in ruins and began to renovate it into a house. Surya grew up in this sheepfold fifty kilometers from Nice, a house without running water or electricity and populated with twenty-six goats. She took part in the daily work of the farm, milking the goats in the evening after training and even, with her parents, helping goats to give birth to kids. The sheepfold, located on the hills of Nice, is nicknamed Sannyasa, a Sanskrit term that refers to a stage in a person’s life, a period of spiritual development during which one renounces material possessions to concentrate purely on spiritual matters. She had flute lessons at eight in the morning, followed by English lessons, then diving lessons and gymnastics.
  Her mother practiced many sports and quickly encouraged Surya to follow in her footsteps.
  The first sport she practiced was fencing. She continued with ballet, diving, and figure skating. In each discipline, she was very gifted. When Suzanne Bonaly took her students to the ice rink, she also took Surya, still a baby, with her. At around two years of age, Surya began to skate on double blades, which facilitate balance. She skated to keep busy while her mother finished teaching her class. In figure skating, Nicole Erdos was Surya's first childhood coach.
  At age four, Surya developed a passion for gymnastics, training with Éric Hagard, the current coach of the multiple European medalist Mélanie de Jesus dos Santos. Despite Surya's love for gymnastics as a teenager, it was nevertheless figure skating that really fascinated her. Forced to specialize, she chose figure skating. Nicole Erdos indicates that Bonaly's gymnastics practice strengthened her more than other skaters, giving her an advantage on the ice.
caption: Didier Gailhaguet in 2012
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