Barbara started speed skating at a park near her home in Chicago in 1949, when she was eight years old, on a pair of old speed skates her father found in the basement of the Montgomery Wards store where he worked. Hall of Famer Elaine Bogda Gordon saw Lockhart skating and started coaching her. Barbara has fond memories of when Elaine gave her her first real pair of speed skates, along with a black and white wool jersey for the Northwestern Skating Club of Chicago. When she was 17 she won her division at the National Speedskating Championships. The IOC finally allowed women to compete in speed skating at the Olympics, and Barbara competed for a spot on the 1960 US team, becoming the first woman to make the team by winning the 500 at the US Trials. Before the 1960 games in Squaw Valley, she dislocated her knee playing field hockey at Michigan State University. She switched to a longer distance, finishing 15th in the 1500 with a time of 2:37.0, behind teammates Jeanne Ashworth and Jeanne Omelenchuk. (Timing was measured to the 10th of a second. Olympic speedskating events were timed to the 100ths starting with the 1972 games in Sapporo.)
Barbara continued her college work in exercise physiology and trained to make the 1964 team, often going with the team to train in Scandinavia. Note that the US did not have a refrigerated 400m oval until December 1966 when the oval opened at the fairgrounds outside of Milwaukee Wisconsin. Until then, races on natural ice were frequently cancelled with warmer than usual weather.
Barbara’s lap times improved leading up to the 1964 Innsbruck games. She finished 10th in the 1000, in 1:38.6. During her 3000 race her times were so fast she was on track for a podium finish. National team coach Leo Freisinger stopped telling her what her splits were and just started cheering. But, on the first corner of the bell lap she slipped and fell. She scrambled to her feet, but her finish time put her far down to 23rd position. She still considered that race her favorite, and one of her best.
In interviews, Barbara said that she valued friendships she made with skaters on the Russian team. American skaters often went to Europe to train where frozen ovals were more reliably available. The first refrigerated oval in the US was built in West Allis, near Milwaukee, opening in December 1966.
Barbara also represented the US at World Championships in 1963 and ’64. She trained for the 1968 Grenoble games, but was injured before the trials. Chair of the Hall of Fame Committee for US Speedskating, Rusty Smith, pointed out that there are very few women who meet the criteria for inclusion in the Hall of Fame from the “Classic” era, since opportunities for women skaters were very limited before 1960.
Barbara attended Michigan State University and started teaching physical education in Los Angeles in 1966. While completing her Master’s Degree she taught physical education and coached speed skating for several years in Wisconsin after the oval was built at West Allis. She completed her Masters Degree from Michigan State in 1967 and a Doctorate in Education from BYU in 1971. She taught at Temple University in Philadelphia for 15 years, and the University of Iowa for five years. She returned to BYU in 1991 as a professor in the Educational Sciences program, and retired from teaching full-time in 2016.
“She memorized everyone’s name in the class, and it wasn’t a small class,” said one of her students at BYU, Rachel Murdock. “She was always willing to help the student, not work against them.”
Barbara shared her advice for athletes: “Achieve you can naturally with wise training practices and develop your best technique. Keep a balance to your life so you have a life after competition.”
Barbara was one of hundreds of Utah residents who carried the Olympic flame in the torch run leading up to the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games. In 1998 she was appointed as part of the 5-person Ethics Panel investigating allegations of bribery by the 2002 Olympic Games organizers. The panel was headed by Gordon R. Hall, a former Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, and included Patricia Hanna, Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah, David Jordan, a former United States attorney, and Merrill Norman, an accountant. Their investigation took seven weeks and uncovered over $1.2 million in questionable expenses paid to IOC members who vote for Olympic sites. The payments and gifts were disguised as “marketing” for the Salt Lake City bid. 22 members of the IOC were implicated in the scheme to award the games to Salt Lake City.