TORVILL & DEAN

You didn’t have to know the first thing about space to get excited when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. There was no need for a lesson in man-to-man marking to appreciate the significance of that afternoon in 1966 when England won the Word Cup. And you weren’t required to understand which is the stern and which is the bow of a boat to share the pain and pleasure of Steve Redgrave rowing into history on a lake in Australia during the Sydney Olympics.

These are events that transcend themselves. These are moments of such impact that we remember where we were and whom we were with at the time. We might not be able to describe adequately what we felt – but we know we felt deeply.

Valentine’s Day 1984 was one such landmark. It was the day Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean represented the hopes of an entire nation, when 25 million people turned on their televisions and tuned in for four minutes of drama not knowing whether it would end in disaster or triumph.

We knew it would be agony and we longed for it to be ecstasy. The stakes were high but the skates were ready. For those four breath-taking Bolero minutes we became one with Torvill and Dean, while Torvill and Dean became one with each other. We shared it all - every lift, every slide, every look of smouldering passion as the music grew louder and faster, louder and faster. Some of us had our doubts... They had none.

Some worried that the judges might think the routine too radical, Ravel’s haunting score too extreme, their costumes too ethereal but the nine judges were caught up in the rapture like judges never had been before, or since. All they could do was reach for the sixes and award Jayne and Chris maximum points. It was flawless. Without equal.

Torvill and Dean. The sun and the moon. The ying and the yang. The complete package. Two hard-working youngsters from Nottingham who never even wished to be famous. All they wanted – he a former policeman, she an ex-insurance clerk - was to skate better than anyone else on earth. And that’s exactly what they did.

Jayne and Chris met in 1968 at Nottingham’s ice rink when Jayne was just eleven and Chris ten. Jayne had been skating since she was nine, Chris since he was ten, but it wasn’t until 1975 that they started partnering each other. It felt right - from the start. A year later, they started winning trophies. Two years after that, they claimed their first major competition and by the 1984 Winter Olympics they were the reigning British, European and World Champions.

“We knew we were the favourites and that meant there was a lot of pressure,” says Jayne. “But that’s what you train for. We knew we were in the best shape of our lives. We had prepared totally and completely. Every detail had been taken care of.”

But some of those details had been torturous. The choice of music, for example, had caused many a sleepless night. At one point, Jayne and Chris had contemplated dancing to 42nd Street, the raunchy Manhattan musical, but were persuaded against it. Then they spent hours in the Radio Nottingham library looking for something more apposite – or, rather, something more revolutionary.

“As soon as we listened to the overture of Bolero we knew that was it,” says Chris. The drawback was that the Bolero overture lasts for 17 minutes. Competition rules stipulated that the original dance routine in the Olympics must be four minutes long, give or take 10 seconds either way. Composers Richard Hartley and the late Bob Stewart shortened it, rearranged it and shortened it some more but it was still too long by 28 seconds. Jayne and Chris came up with an ingenious solution. They would make sure their skates did not touch the ice for 18 seconds once the music started.

Just before they stepped on the ice, Jayne and Chris nodded to each other knowingly and squeezed hands. Nothing needed to be said. Then, they skated around that rink as if possessed, like lovers who knew that this was their last dance.

“I don’t remember very much about it,” says Jayne. “I remember kneeling at the start and falling at the end but in between is a blur. It felt like the arena was silent except for the music. I couldn’t even hear our skates on the ice. We just did what we came to do.”

When they had finished, there was a half second delay, a pause for a sharp intake of breath. Then the whole building exploded and we knew – the whole world knew – that Torvill and Dean had achieved the unthinkable.

There were tears and hugs but theirs was a dignified victory. There were no high-fives,  no moronic gestures. As the Union Jack was raised between two Soviet Union flags, Jayne and Chris held back their tears so the rest of us could shed ours.

There is a moment in all sports when something shifts, when that sport and the world it inhabits is changed forever. On a global level, this unassuming couple dramatically had raised the bar, setting a new benchmark for skaters of all standards. .

Everyone knew it. The Queen and the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, sent telegrams; half a million people later would line the streets of Nottingham to welcome Jayne and Chris home and today, 26 years later, Torvill and Dean’s Bolero still makes the hair on the back of our necks stand to attention.

All it needed was four minutes and 18 seconds of pure gold.