Ice Skating

The duo from Nottingham wrote their names in British sporting history at the 1984 Winter Games following their routine to Ravel’s Bolero at the Zetra Olympic Hall in Sarajevo.

Forty years on from their Valentine’s Day performance, they have returned to Sarajevo to celebrate the day with the city, where they confirmed they will embark on one last UK tour next year.

Reflecting on how their golden moment inspired more appreciation of ice skating, Dean told the PA news agency: “That was really a launching pad of then going off to do other things.

“Touring around the world, skating in front of hundreds of thousands of people and then Dancing On Ice starting up because of winning the Olympics.”

Olympic glory followed a sustained period of success at the World, European and British Championships during the early part of the 1980s.

As they took to ice at the 1984 Winter Games, they did not skate for the first 20 seconds of their routine – in order to comply with Olympic rules – before they burst into life.

With intense passion and intensity on display, the finale saw the athletes collapse on the ice and lay motionless in each other’s arms, sparking a standing ovation inside the arena and perfect scores of 6.0 were awarded from the 12 judges.

Recalling the day, Torvill, 66, revealed they had not had many opportunities to practise the routine in the arena before the final but were given a 6am slot on the day which no other competitors in their training group turned up for due to the performance being that evening.

Dean, 65, said after they performed the routine, they heard a “ripple of applause all around the gods of the building” from the cleaners, a memory from the day which has stuck with them.

He recalled: “When you think about the whole day, nobody was there, and then as the day goes on, people start to fill the building and the competition happens and it gets to a climax and the gold medals are awarded.

“Then the people start to disappear and then you’re just left with how it was in the morning, we’re almost closing the door on the day.”

He also revealed that the Princess Royal waited for them in the Olympic village with Champagne to celebrate despite them not arriving until late after being held up by the Olympic doping checks after the performance.

Torvill and Dean turned professional after their Bolero performance but competed in the 1994 Winter Olympics, where they won bronze before retiring from competition.

They later branched out into touring, coaching and choreographing before becoming the faces of ITV’s Dancing On Ice, which ran from 2006 until 2014, and later becoming head judges on the show when it was revived in 2018.

The duo will now retire from dancing together following their upcoming tour – Torvill & Dean: Our Last Dance – which will run from April 12 to May 11, 2025.

The shows, including dates in London, Belfast, Newcastle and Glasgow, will celebrate 50 years since they formed their skating partnership in 1975.

Reflecting on the decision to draw things to a close, Dean said: “I think there comes a time when you know.

“We’re not spring chickens any more. We’re still able to do it to a certain degree that we feel good about it, but that will go.

“So I think this is the right time for us to be able to do that and go and skate and do some of the old routines, be very nostalgic, but then do some new fun, upbeat (dances) with friends of ours from the skating world and from Dancing On Ice.

“We’re looking at it as a celebration.”

Among those they have inspired is British ice skating number one Lewis Gibson, who has previously said he started skating after watching Dancing On Ice, and his ice skating partner Lilah Fear.

Torvill is sure they will get a medal at the next Winter Olympics in 2026, and hopes it will be a gold one, which will pump more money into the sport in the UK.

“You really need to build into the infrastructure at a very early age and that’s where the funding needs to be, is to support young skaters and staying with them, developing them all the way through”, Dean added.

:: ‘Torvill & Dean: Our Last Dance’ will travel across the UK from April 12 to May 11 2025, with tickets on sale from February 14 at TorvillandDean.com

Olympic medals have been won and lost, oceans of tears have been shed in the ‘kiss-and-cries’, quads have been celebrated, kneecaps have been clubbed, strawberry desserts have been allegedly ingested.

But Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s performance to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics remains the byword for skating beauty, the perfect moment that, for all the sport’s enduring majesty and penchant for controversy, remains unsurpassed.

The pair are in their late sixties now but they remain synonymous by their surnames, and their influence on the sport and its subsequent generations, increasingly due to their association with ITV’s ‘Dancing on Ice’ is as indelible as ever.

‘Bolero’ is still routinely used for Olympic programmes, mostly recently in Beijing in 2022 by 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, who wiped the mousse from her mouth and became the first female skater to land a quad jump to its creaking restrain.

But Ravel’s 1928 orchestral composition will always belong to Torvill and Dean, its opening bars instantly sweeping those of us of a certain age back to the night when we were one among 24 million others sat in front of our television sets to witness sporting history.

Dozens of British ice dancers have been both inspired and burdened by Torvill and Dean’s unrepeatable achievement. For the Kerr siblings, John and Sinead, two European bronze medals was enough to spark comparisons with their illustrious predecessors.

Speaking prior to their second Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, where they would finish a creditable but scarcely comparable eighth, John Kerr felt the need to remind an interviewer: “We are not the new Torvill and Dean and we never have been. We are ourselves.”

It has been a proven a more fruitful relationship for the current British number ones, Lewis Gibson and Lilah Fear, whose two European silver medals and current world ranking of two make them the most successful British ice dance pairing since the halcyon days of the 1980s.

Gibson was born in 1994, a full decade after that avalanche of uninterrupted sixes, so it is not the memory of that string of perfect sixes that inspired him to take up the sport, but rather Torvill and Dean’s professional after-life on ITV.

“I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t create (that),” Gibson told Olympics.com in 2022. “I remember watching that first episode and my mum shared with me where she was when she watched them (in 1984), so it came full circle.”

“They created the legacy of ice dance in Britain, they pushed the limits of the sport and did all these new things, and the pride we have for ice dance in Britain comes from them,” said Fear.

To mark the 30th anniversary of their famous moment in 2014, Torvill and Dean returned to the scene of their greatest moment for the first time, performing their routine in front of 5,000 spectators in an arena that had been ruined then rebuilt after the Bosnian war.

“I have thought back so often to that night and the thing I still remember more than anything is kneeling down to start the routine, and the way the crowd went silent,” said Torvill, as she prepared to reprise their routine inside the Zetra Ice Hall.

Forty years on, theirs is a legacy that shows no signs of defrosting.