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Carol Heiss Jenkins (born January 20 1940) is an
American figure skating|figure skater. 

Heiss grew up in Queens, New York, where she
started skating at the age of 6.
She was coached by Pierre Brunet.  Heiss first
came to national prominence in 1951, when she was
U.S. Novice Ladies' Champion at age 11. She won
the U.S. Junior Ladies title in 1952, and then
moved up to the senior level in 1953. In
1953-1956, she finished at the national
championships second to Tenley Albright.

Heiss's 1956 performance qualifed her for the 1956
Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.  She
won the silver medal, while Albright took the
gold.  However, at the following World Figure
Skating Championships at
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, Heiss
defeated Albright for the title; it was the first
of her five consecutive world titles.

After the 1956 Winter Olympics, Heiss had offers
to turn professional and skate in ice shows. But
her mother, Marie Heiss, was quite ill with cancer
at the time, and before her death in October,
1956, she asked Carol to stay an amateur to win a
gold medal for her. Between 1957 and 1960, Carol
Heiss dominated women's figure skating like nobody
since Sonja Henie. She was U.S. and World Champion
every year, and at the 1960 Winter Olympics in
Squaw Valley, California, Heiss captured the gold
medal, being ranked first by all nine judges. 

Following her retirement from figure skating in
1960, Heiss played the female lead in the 1961
film Snow White and the Three Stooges. She married
Hayes Alan Jenkins, who had won the 1956 Winter
Olympic gold medal in men's figure skating, and
whose brother David Jenkins (athlete)|David
Jenkins had won the men's figure skating gold
medal in 1960. Although Heiss briefly skated in
ice shows after the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics,
she retired from the sport in 1962.  However, in
the late 1970s, she returned to coach several
skaters in her hometown, Akron, Ohio, area, and
became a prominent figure skating coach.
Her most notable pupil has been Timothy Goebel.  

Heiss was known as a very athletic skater for her
time.  In 1953, she became the first female skater
to land a axel jump|double axel jump.  Another one
of her trademarks was doing a series of
alternating clockwise and counterclockwise single
axels.  Heiss, incidentally, normally rotated her
jumps clockwise and spins counterclockwise; it's
much more common for skaters to do both in the
same direction, usually counterclockwise.