Dancing on Ice original legends Torvill and Dean tell of final sentimental skate
EXCLUSIVE: The British Olympic legends have long since won the nation’s heart with their performances in the rink – and 35 years later they are wondering how long their ice magic will continue
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When Olympic legends Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skate together on Dancing on Ice , they share the same troubling thought…is this it?
Thirty five years ago their unsurpassed Bolero routine at the Sarajevo games cemented their place in sporting history and the nation’s hearts.
Chris, now 60, admits: “Do we feel those 35 years in our bodies? Yes! You reach a certain age and that downward slope. Nowadays every time we perform we feel like we don’t know if that’s our last performance.
“So each time we skate it feels like a little added bonus. It’s quite sentimental. We like performing together, but there is an emotion each time we skate now.”
Jayne wistfully says there are some moves her body stops her perfecting.
Jayne and Christopher with their gold Olympic medals (Image: Getty)
And it’s been a couple of years since Chris has held her high above his head while gliding across the ice.
“I could still do it,” he says. “But there are age appropriate things and I don’t think I should be throwing a 60-year-old lady around the ice.
“We still feel in our 20s. In our mind we can do everything but our body doesn’t allow it. We’re the best we can be at the moment.”
Jayne Torvill (Image: FilmMagic)
He adds: “I hope we’ll realise when it’s time to stop skating before other people realise it.”
Adoring audiences are unlikely ever to feel Jayne and Chris should stop. But if their dancing ends, it’s doubtful their amazingly close relationship ever will.
In the early 1980s Jayne, with her Princess Diana hairdo, shyness and flushed cheeks on the ice, was as much of a pin-up as Chris, with his blond quiff and John Travolta dimpled chin.
Chris and wife Jill and Jayne and husband Phil in 1994 (Image: REX/Shutterstock)
They were clean cut, modest, hard working, thrilling to watch and world beaters. But were they in love?
“It was what it was at the time,” says Jayne, mysteriously.
“We were, and still are, very close,” says Chris.
After decades of batting away the question of romance, Chris confessed in a TV interview that they “dabbled” in romance and told of a teenage kiss on the back seat of the bus.
Jayne’s memory was more hazy and she refers to Chris’s revelation as “dabblegate”.
Perhaps we will never know if they were secretly in love.
But clearly their friendship spanning almost 50 years is something very special.
“Our friendship is unique and unshakeable,” says Chris.
