Name  Barbara Ann Scott 

Olympics  1948 St. Moritz, Switzerland 

Event  Figure skating, women's

The setting  Scott was a strong hopeful for Canada, a country that had never won figure skating gold at the Winter Olympics. She had won the North American championship from 1945 to 1947. In 1947 she became the first North American to win the European and world titles.

On the day  The Ottawa native was forced to compete on a flawed outdoor rink during her event. Canada had played its men's hockey game the night before, and the rink was flooded afterward to try and repair dents made by the players. However, warmer temperatures prevented the ice from smoothing over properly, and Scott preformed her routine in slushy conditions. That didn't stop "Canada's sweetheart," as she became affectionately known, from showing why she had collected a plethora of titles prior to her Olympic debut. Scott beat out Austrian Eva Pawlik and Briton Jeanette Altwegg to claim Canada's first-ever figure skating gold.

Afterlife  Scott was awarded the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada's top athlete of the year in 1948 after her gold-medal performance. She was also inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame in 1948, Canada's Sports Hall of Fame in 1955, the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame in 1966 and the Canadian Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 1991.

Recently, she was chosen to be the torchbearer for the Olympic flame, where she carried it into the House of Commons for the first time in the flame's history. The 81-year-old spent two months training for the occasion in Florida, where she now lives. To compensate for the weight of the 1.5-kilogram torch, Scott decided to get creative.

"I had to have something that was 3 1/2 pounds to practice with," she said. "The only thing I could find was my big long garden shears, and I had to tell my neighbours I wasn't attacking them, that I was only practising."