Not many athletes can boast about having a 50-year-long career in their chosen sport. But Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have reached that feat, spending the last five decades dancing together on ice.
“Not bad for a girl whose mother wouldn’t buy her her own pair of skates when I started because she thought I would quit any day,” Torvill tells WHO with a giggle. “We didn’t have much money then, so I had to rent a pair at the rink every week for a year. If only she could see me now.”
But as they say, all good things must come to an end. On February 14, exactly 40 years after their historic gold medal-winning performance to Ravel’s ‘Boléro’ at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, the pair announced they are finally ready to hang up their skates.
Wanting to go out with a bang, they’ll perform the ‘Boléro’ and many more of their memorable routines during their Torvill & Dean: Our Last Dance international tour. Their final shows will be Down Under from June 14, 2025.
“It makes sense to finish in Australia as it is actually where we started our professional skating career after the Olympics,” Dean tells WHO. “An Australian promoter named Michael Edgley had signed the Russian skaters up ahead of the Games assuming they were going to win, so when we did, his comment was, ‘We’ve got to get those bloody Pommies down here because they’ve won,’ so we ended up being the headliners.”
Edgley wasn’t the only one who was shocked by their win. In a feat not achieved before or since, the pair scored sixes across the board. The only people who weren’t surprised, it turns out, were Torvill and Dean.
“I didn’t matter what people may have been saying, [going in], we knew it was our medal to lose,” Torvill says. “We had won the European Champions heading into the Olympics and we were the current World Champions. But everyone talking about another pair winning meant we were left alone and could just concentrate on training and what we needed to do.”
The pair have known each other since they were 10 and were partnered to skate together by a coach when they were 15.
“Chris wasn’t too excited because he didn’t think I was a good enough dancer,” Torvill reveals. “We decided to just try it for a week and we’ve been going ever since.”
During their gold medal-winning routine, the pair passionately stared longingly into each others eyes, leading to questions over the years about what is the true nature of their relationship. But apart from a single cheeky pash as teens, things have never been romantic between them.
“We are best friends,” Dean says. “Our passion was always for skating. But if we were playing lovers during a routine and people believed that, it is flattering because it means we were convincing, just like two actors in a movie.”
Their win at the 1984 Winter Olympics made them superstars on the sporting stage and opened many doors. But the most “surreal experience” was being invited to Buckingham Palace for an intimate lunch with Queen Elizabeth.
“There were so many knives and forks on the table that we didn’t know how to use – we were just a couple of kids from Nottingham. The butler told us to just wait for the Queen to start to eat each course and copy what she did,” she recalls.
As for their retirement plans, lots of holidays with their families are on the agenda. “I’ve got a campervan, so a big road trip around Europe is coming up,” Dean says.
