After an amazing, largely fight-free 50 years together, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are hanging up their skates. Julia Llewellyn Smith joins them for one last dance.
Valentine’s Day, 1984, the day that transformed the lives of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, started early. “We were going to perform in the main arena in the evening and the last practice was at 6am,” Dean, 66, says. “So you had to be up at 4.30am and nobody else went – our British teammates nor the Russians. But we wanted to feel the ambience, so we warmed up and ran through our whole programme without breaks, just as we would that night.”
As they finished their final practice on the ice in Sarajevo, they heard an unexpected ripple of applause. “We hadn’t seen them before because it was dark, but the cleaners had put down their brushes and were clapping.”
The pair were back on the rink at 9.52pm, in their Quality Street-purple costumes. Their 4min 28sec performance to Ravel’s Boléro, evoking the agonies of doomed lovers, passed in a blur. “It felt like a dream,” Torvill, 67, says. “We’d done it so many times – it was almost like your body did it for you.”
“It was like a slow-motion sequence,” Dean says. “The arena crowd was silent. Then the music finished and we were brought back to reality by the loud applause.” Flowers rained down on the ice. The scoreboard lit up with an unprecedented full set of 6.0s for artistic impression, the maximum mark. Back in the UK, 24 million viewers watched the duo, then aged 26 and 25, step onto the podium to accept their Winter Olympics golds.
“There are certain ‘Where were you?’ moments – the 1966 World Cup, John Lennon, Elvis Presley,” Dean says. “Somehow our gold worked its way into the British psyche and that’s where I think it’s stayed.”
Stay it has and only now, 50 years of salchows, lutzes and lifts on from when they first danced together, they have announced they’re hanging up their skates. It’s not the first time they’ve tried to retire, but this time they mean it. Next month their Our Last Dance tour will start zigzagging around the country – with a quick detour to Australia, where they’re huge – before culminating in July in their home town, at the Motorpoint Arena Nottingham.
Is it going to be emotional? “I think it will be, yeah,” Dean says. “But then the body might be so sore,” Torvill says, “that the next day it’ll be, like, ‘Done!‘,” he finishes. “Yes,” she says, exhaling.
Torvill and Dean speak with the synchrony they share on the ice, finishing each other’s sentences while allowing the other airtime. They correct each other’s faulty memories and rib each other gently, she teasing more than him. Few creative or professional partnerships survive five decades. That Torvill and Dean’s has seems to be down to their complementary temperaments: he more emotional, she more placid; both with wills of steel.
Off the ice their passionate intensity is replaced by easy harmony, but still… what about romance? To this day most people assume there must have been some. “Britain invented Torvill and Dean,” the journalist Julie Burchill once wrote, “because Diana and Charles could not reasonably be expected to get married every year.” Spitting Image, which first hit our screens shortly after Sarajevo, featured a song called What Torvill Does with Dean.
“We were only ever a couple when we were acting it on the ice,” Torvill says.
Apart, I say, from “dabblegate” – Dean’s 2013 confession to Piers Morgan that they had “dabbled” as young teenagers training together at the Nottingham Ice Stadium. Dean shrugs, a little wearily. “We were kids. It was before we were skating partners. The team would go to competitions at different rinks. It was a back-of-the-bus kiss on one of those coach trips.”
Torvill giggles. “Later, when I was about 14 and still not into boys much, my coach said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t date your skating partner because if you fall out he won’t want to skate with you.’ That always stuck in my mind. We’d see Russian couples get married because it gave them more stability with the regime – it gave them a car, an apartment – but then they’d split up and not skate any more. Having a relationship just didn’t occur to us – we were more interested in skating, that was our passion. It sounds really boring but we’d train in the evening and go home.”
Being boring worked: they’ve made their golden friendversary. “It’s because we didn’t get married,” she says with a grin. Instead, they really are best pals. They talk all the time. “Almost every day.” About everything? “Oh, yes – ‘I’m off down to the shops again,‘” Dean says, making a phone gesture. So do they go on holiday together? “No,” they both say instantly.
After all, they have their actual romantic partners to consider. Torvill married Phil Christensen, an American sound engineer, in 1990 and settled in East Sussex. After a year’s unsuccessful IVF, they adopted Kieran and Jessica, now 22 and 19.
Dean, meanwhile, has been married twice, to skaters – first the French-Canadian Isabelle Duchesnay from 1991 to 1993 then, from 1994, the American Jill Trenary; they raised their two sons, Jack, 26, and Sam, 24, in Colorado Springs (Dean would commute to and from the UK to train). They split up in 2010 and for the past 14 years he has been in a relationship with Karen Barber, the 63-year-old head coach on ITV’s Dancing on Ice. He has now returned to the UK and lives in West Yorkshire. He coaches at Ice Sheffield, the figure-skating centre of excellence. “We all get a calling at some point to go back to our roots,” he says.
Their partners have had no choice but to accept their bond. “At first Phil was, like, ‘Do you really have to spend all that time together all day?’ But 30-odd years later, he gets it,” Torvill says. Even when he is called Chris by strangers (he tends not to correct them, to spare their blushes).
Dean’s first wife was openly jealous of Torvill, reportedly saying after they split, “I felt that he had two women in his life. Because his work was more important, that automatically made Jayne more important.” Barber, however, has said Torvill describes her as “the sister she never had”.
Christopher Dean is the son of a miner and a supermarket worker; he grew up in a council flat in Calverton, a mining village near Nottingham. He was six when his mother walked out after she discovered her husband’s affair and he was brought up by his father and stepmother.
Jayne Torvill’s parents were a Raleigh Bikes mechanic and a machinist at the Lace Market. She and Dean first set eyes on each other when she was 11 and he was 10, when he began training at the Nottingham rink; she had already been going for three years. When Torvill was 14 her partner moved away and the coaches later matched her with Dean.
“The first time we stepped onto the ice together I didn’t hear any bells – it wasn’t like the promised land – but there was a connection,” he says.
“We both had the same passion. We’d be thinking, we could do that bit better or we could try this – it will be more difficult. We just kept pushing ourselves,” she says.
Both left school at 15. Eventually Nottingham council gave them a grant that enabled them to skate full-time – they say it worked out to about £7000 a year each. Before that, Dean was a trainee policeman and Torvill worked as a clerk for Norwich Union. They trained during every spare moment. “To fit in around my shifts we’d have to train at 2am or 5am. We’d be switching the lights on at the rink – a cold, dark, dank old building inhabited by mice and rats. Then we had to clean the ice, so we had to learn to drive the Zamboni,” he says, referring to the ice-resurfacer.
“I didn’t, you did,” Torvill says.
“It was good schooling,” he says. “And it meant we appreciated it when we got to practise between 8am and 4pm. Nothing was handed to us.”
We stood on the balcony of the town hall and waved like the Queen.
It seems strange to recall just what a boost their 1984 gold gave to British morale. Margaret Thatcher had just won her second term as prime minister, unemployment was soaring, the miners’ strike loomed. Sport was dominated by the superpowers of the USA and the USSR. “It was all about taking part,” Dean says with a chuckle.
So a young, sweet, shy, working-class pair from Nottingham winning gold – and beating the hard-faced, trained-from-birth Soviets – was the sprinkle of optimism we needed. They returned home to adulation. “The city of Nottingham put on a parade for us – they organised a Popemobile! We were embarrassed by it and thought nobody would turn up,” Dean says. “But people lined the whole route. The main square was packed out with thousands and thousands of people. We stood on the balcony of the town hall and waved like the Queen. That brought it home.”
They won the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year – the only time the gong has been awarded to two people. Then at Christmas clips of their routines were broadcast directly before the Queen’s message. Two streets on a Nottingham housing estate were named Dean Close and Torvill Drive.
After winning World Championship gold in Ottawa six weeks after Sarajevo, they turned professional and made a mint touring the world. When in 1992 the International Skating Union relaxed its rules around professionals competing in the Olympics, they decided to enter the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics.
The nation was horrified when a Channel 4 documentary charting the pair’s Olympic comeback seemed to shatter the couple’s squeaky clean image. It featured a scene of Dean getting increasingly tetchy with Torvill as she attempted to master a move, telling her, “You haven’t even bothered to try.” As she wept before leaving the ice, he told her, “It’s no good f***ing crying, I’ve got no sympathy.”
He was feisty, I was calm.
He shrugs ruefully: “I had a few messages, ‘You’re a horrible person, leave Jayne alone!’ But it was a stressful session in an intense period. Not many people win the Olympics, take time off from competition and then come back and test themselves again.” They went on to win bronze.
“I was a bit upset but Chris came after me and apologised,” Torvill says. “We came back on the ice and the rest of the session was good – but they didn’t show that.”
“As the director said, ‘There’s not much tension between you – we need to make it more dramatic,‘” he says. “I suppose me swearing went down as well as if the Queen had sworn – it is unexpected from somebody in the public eye.”
He turns to Torvill. “Younger people now swear quite casually and it’s not considered offensive. I really don’t like it.” He grins, amused at his own words. “That makes me sound like an old person.”
“We are old people, Chris,” Torvill says. “Chris was impatient when he was younger, so if we made a mistake he was frustrated,” she continues. “He was feisty, I was calm.”
Her timekeeping infuriated him too – today he gives the faintest eye-roll of exasperation when the photoshoot overruns. “But I’m pretty good now,” she says.
“She’s better,” Dean concedes. “And I’m mellower. Am I mellower?” She nods.
They first announced their retirement from performing in 1998, going on to coach and choreograph, then in 2006 they became coach-pundits on Dancing on Ice, ITV’s riposte to Strictly, staying with the show for all 17 seasons, latterly as judges. If the show is recommissioned (they sound doubtful; viewing figures have fallen significantly) they say they will return as judges. But in the series 17 finale a fortnight ago – the Coronation Street actor Sam Aston won with his professional partner, Molly Lanaghan – Torvill and Dean danced their last televised dance.
During the show’s most recent season, a plane crashed at Ronald Reagan national airport in Washington, killing 67 people – 28 of them young skaters, their coaches and family members, all returning from the US Figure Skating Championships in Kansas. Dean was visibly upset when he talked about it on the show. “It’s unbelievably sad. It was felt all around the world,” he said.
Indeed, the sequinned sport they have dedicated their lives to has had a darker side. The Russians last year suffered humiliation when Kamila Valieva, who had won gold at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, aged 15, was given a four-year ban for doping and was stripped of her titles. With her points deducted from the total score, the Russian team lost gold too.
Torvill and Dean travelled the world alongside their Russian rivals, who were motivated by the prospect of huge perks from the Soviet regime if they triumphed. “We weren’t allowed to speak to them much – they always had minders. We were sure they were KGB,” Torvill says.
In Lillehammer in 1994, they also saw first-hand the fallout of the attack on the US skater Nancy Kerrigan – an attempt to break her knee carried out just a few weeks previously by two men hired by the husband and bodyguard of Tonya Harding, her American team-mate and arch-rival. “We saw it from the sidelines. Instead of arriving on the team bus, they had to arrive in separate cars,” Dean says. “The white queen and the black queen.”
Dean recalls being unable to produce a urine sample for the doping tests immediately after their Sarajevo triumph. “They had to give me beer.” Other than that, the closest they have come to trouble was their decision to set their gold-medal-winning dance to just one piece of music, rather than the medley most Olympic skaters chose. The Boléro was 18 seconds longer than the International Olympic Committee’s 4min 10sec limit – so they got round the rules by starting their routine on their knees.
Dean was the creative one and wanted to tell a story rather than simply flex impressive technique. “I was more practical,” Torvill says. “He’d say, ‘I’ve got this idea for a lift,’ and I’d say, ‘But Chris, how am I going to land it? I want to know before I go up there.‘”
“I’d say, ‘We’ll figure it out.‘”
Torvill winks at me. “I’d quietly let him think he’d won, that he was the boss.”
Now they’re training hard for that last dance. On the farewell tour a team of young skaters will help them reprise their greatest ice hits – including Boléro. “Not doing Boléro would be like the Rolling Stones missing out Satisfaction,” Dean says.
“Some people don’t choose when they want to finish, so I think it’s nice to do it on your own terms,” he says. “We know, with the physicality of it, you can’t keep doing it, nor should you. We wanted to be able to do one last tour while we felt that we were in good enough shape.”
He has slipped and dropped Torvill at times during their career, but as the one doing the lifts, he’s sustained more injuries. “Jayne broke my nose with a twist. I had a blade through my hand. I’ve torn both my rotator cuffs,” he says.
“Didn’t I kick you yesterday?” she asks.
They’re relishing the prospect of more free time. He has bought a solar-powered camper van – he’s looking forward to a few European odysseys with Barber, starting with the North Coast 500, the 500-mile Scottish route.
Will Torvill join him? “No. I’ve never slept in a tent.” She turns to Dean. “You can come and park in my field. I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.” She grins. “Or you could stay in the guest room and have a shower.” Her plan is “to have no plan” and instead enjoy spontaneous trips away with Christensen.
“We’ll never perform again together,” Dean confirms. And this really isn’t a big deal for them? They look at each other and shrug. “We’ve gone through every phase of life together from childhood to retirement, always there for each other,” he says, and starts laughing. “Now it’s going to be who’s first to the coffin.”
“Oh my God, Chris!”
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
