The ice skating champion Cecilia Colledge might never have set foot on an ice rink had she not attended the 1928 World Championships at the Ice Club in London as a spectator. The seven-year-old was captivated watching the vivacious jumps and spins of the Norwegian skater Sonja Henie — who won the second of her ten world titles on that occasion — and told her mother: “I should like to skate like her.” Colledge was crowned world champion just nine years later.

She went on to become one of the innovators in the sport of figure skating. She was the first woman to execute a double jump (the salchow), at the 1936 European championships in Berlin, and is one of only four Britons to have won the women’s world championship.

Magdalena Cecilia Colledge was born in 1920, the daughter of Lionel Colledge, a Wimpole Street specialist in ear, nose and throat diseases. She learnt ballet under Harold Turner, of Sadler’s Wells, and devoted a good deal of her youthful energy to tennis, swimming and music.

She took skating lessons with Eva Keats and the renowned coach Jacques Gerschwiler. She progressed rapidly and became one of a small group who made Britain supreme in the sport just before the Second World War. From the moment she decided that she wanted to become a champion skater until she won the world title, Colledge followed the same routine for eleven months of each year — every day there were six hours of skating lessons, supplemented by dancing lessons, exercises and massage. For recreation she studied cooking and English literature.

At the age of 11 she and another girl only a month older — Megan Taylor — represented Britain at the Lake Placid Olympics of 1932. Colledge came eighth, and the following year created a great impression when she was runner-up to Henie in the European championships.

Taylor won the British title in 1932, 1933 and 1934. Colledge was second each time, but after that was never again beaten by her British rival, except on a famous occasion in 1938. Under Gerschwiler’s guidance she developed an unrivalled technique in the school figures — geometrical patterns drawn on the ice. Classical style and near-faultless tracing made her the finest woman figure skater of her own or any earlier time, and she was usually able thereby to withstand any advantage that Taylor might gain in the free skating. As a free skater, she have might lacked some of Taylor’s popular appeal, but she was a pioneer in the development of the advanced jumps. She was jumping double salchows in the 1930s, and she also invented the “Cecilia Colledge” or one-foot-axel jump.

In the 1936 Winter Olympic Games at Garmisch-Partenkirchen Henie was seeking her third gold medal. She had been world champion since 1927, and there was no one to threaten her supremacy except the strong young British champion. Henie wrote in her autobiography: “In the school figure competition I took a small lead. Cecilia was very close in second place. My title hung on what I should do in the free-skating finale.”

Henie won but by a narrow margin. She finished ahead by some 45 points out of nearly 3,000; the third girl was more than 160 behind Colledge.

Sonja Henie then turned professional to find fame as a film star, and in 1937 Colledge was unbeatable. In three great contests with Taylor she won the British, European, and world championships. In 1938 and 1939 she won further European titles, but in Stockholm in the 1938 world championship there was a reversal of fortune. Colledge led after the figures, but a brilliant free-skating performance by Taylor just gained her the victory. A year later, a strained Achilles tendon prevented Colledge from seeking to regain the world title.

In the war she enlisted in the Mechanised Transport Corps as a driver. Her much-loved brother Maule Colledge, a flight lieutenant in the RAF, was killed in action in September 1943, and this was a blow from which she never entirely recovered.

In May 1946 she won the British figure-skating championship for her sixth and last time. She then turned professional to appear at the Stoll Theatre, London, in Ice Revue. She was British open professional skating champion in 1947 and 1948, and appeared in ice shows in Brighton and at the Roxy Theatre in New York. In 1952 she made her permanent home in Massachusetts, and became a teacher of skating. One of her pupils was Albertina Noyes, of Boston, who was fourth in the 1968 Winter Olympic Games; another, Paul McGrath, was the world professional champion in 1974.

Colledge was a consistent advocate of the artistic aspect of skating; her love of ballet and music were evident in her teaching, and she often regretted the modern emphasis on increasingly athletic jumps at the expense of style. She also had a firm belief in the spirit of sportsmanship; according to her code, the judges’ decision was final, no matter how unjustified anyone else might think it.

Colledge was inducted into the US Figure Skating Association Hall of Fame in 1980.

Cecilia Colledge, ice skating champion, was born on November 28, 1920. She died on April 12, 2008, aged 87