In the 1980s and '90s, competitive figure skating enthralled me. The sport’s balletic arm movements and glittery-glam unitards, along with its powerful leaps and dizzying triple axels, guaranteed that I’d be seated in front of a TV during every Winter Olympics of my childhood. But not even in my most far-fetched girlhood fantasies did I ever imagine myself on the ice. Early awareness of my athletic limitations aside, figure skating just never seemed like a sport that was welcoming to black women and girls. If it were, I reasoned, more of us would’ve taken it up. Instead, I only recall seeing three black women figure skating on an Olympic level in my two decades of fandom: Tai Babilonia (who is of black and Filipino heritage), Debi Thomas, and the French Surya Bonaly—and none of them seemed to have an easy go of it. Babilonia battled substance abuse, after withdrawing from the 1980 Olympics due to her partner’s injury. Thomas was saddled with a late-career reputation for being “unsportsmanlike,” following the 1988 Olympics. And Bonaly—the brownest, strongest, and most convention-flouting of the three—was penalized for her daring.

On Friday, ESPN debuted Rebel on Ice, a documentary short that detailed the highs and lows of Bonaly’s career. Part of Eva Longoria's Versus series, which focuses on athletes whose cultural impact transcends their success in sports, the 13-minute segment featured interviews with sports journalist Christine Brennan, various skating coaches, actress Retta (who directed the film), and Bonaly herself. But with its short runtime, Rebel On Ice could barely scratch the surface of the sport's history or Bonaly's unique place within it. For girls like me, Bonaly’s skating career wasn’t just admirable because she was one of very few black girls to make it to the top competitive tier; it was remarkable because she did it on her own terms, refusing to tamp down her flashiest moves or her mercurial, post-performance temperament.

Just after the film’s opening credits, over black and white footage of white women in long dresses, Brennan muses on figure skating’s lack of diversity. "Figure skating goes back to the 1800s but for most people it really came into its own in the 1900s,” she says. “The sport wasn't as diverse then as it is now [and] certainly needed to work on its diversity. There’s no doubt that once Debi Thomas had retired, that there was no one who looked like Surya Bonaly."

In the first half of the 20th century, figure skating needed to do more than "work on its diversity." It needed to eliminate the blatant, de rigueur discrimination that barred black athletes in most U.S. sporting fields from participating.

Mabel Fairbanks—who, in 1997 became the first African American woman inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame at the age of 82—was never allowed to skate competitively. Though she's credited with breaking the sport’s color barrier, having toured with an overseas company and started her own integrated skating school upon return to the states, Fairbanks had to circumvent the segregation that barred her entry to practice rinks and to all U.S. competitions. She developed her own professional ice shows and performed for mostly black audiences in Manhattan before becoming a coach who worked with some of the earliest black competitive figure skaters, including Babilonia and Thomas.