Just The Perfect Couple

They're the best thing to come out of Nottingham since D.H. Lawrence and Raleigh bicycles.
—THE LONDON MAIL ON SUNDAY

This is the story of two ice dancers from Nottingham. They're so smooth, so elegant, that together they've picked up their sport, shaken it vigorously and changed it all around. One skater is named Jayne Torvill, the other, Christopher Dean. He's an ex-rookie cop, and she's a former insurance clerk; he has dimples, she hasn't. They started out with different partners, but when they teamed up in 1975, something magic happened. Magic.

It's still happening. The most vivid proof of that came last March 12 in the ice-dancing competition at the 1983 world figure skating championships in Helsinki. At the conclusion of Torvill and Dean's free-dance program, the scoreboard first flashed a row of nine 5.9 scores—out of a possible 6.0—for technical merit; then it lit up with a display of nine 6.0s for artistic impression, something that had never before occurred in any form of figure skating. Those scores, of course, gave them the 1983 world title, their third in a row.

Since then, Torvill and Dean have continued to grow and build, deliberately weaving mystery around everything they do, opening a gap on the rest of the ice-dancing field that assuredly won't close before they turn pro early next year. If there was ever a gut-sure bet, it's that Torvill and Dean will win the gold medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in February, and then knock off still another championship at the world meet in Ottawa a month later. After that, they will step aside. They won't just join an ice show. Not these two. Torvill and Dean are an ice show.

"Well," says Dean, "all sports lay down certain rules, and we have a lot of them in ours. In the free program—which counts for 50% of the score—we've got to wrap it all up in four minutes. Not much time. So there's only one thing to do: We turn on the music and try to lead the audience into fantasy."

"The idea," says Torvill, "is to take an ordinary sports event and bring to it a sense of occasion."

Torvill and Dean are saying this between rounds six weeks ago at a London meet called Ice International. T & D, as they are affectionately called by the British press, have just finished an ice-dancing exhibition and, as usual, have brought down the house. Bouquets of flowers have come raining down onto the rink in graceful arcs. Also as usual, the crowd seems overwrought at what it has just seen. Cool British reserve is nowhere in evidence this evening.

T & D have just presented the musical Barnum condensed into four minutes, complete with miming of clowns, tightrope walkers, tumblers and jugglers. T & D did it all so expertly that one half-expected to see bright balls and tenpins spinning in the air. Every move, even the deeply carved turns that slanted them perilously close to the ice, came off in such unison that there was no sense' of the athleticism involved. A roll-her-over-his-head move, if one looked closely, brought all the muscles across Dean's back into play; they trembled with the effort as he otherwise made the move look fluid and easy.

T & D created an illusion, as promised, but it was more than that. That something more was evident again when Torvill and Dean flowed through a soft and slow dance as the raspy voice of Robert Preston sang I Won't Send Roses from the musical Mack and Mabel. The members of the audience were perfectly still; they were identifying. It seemed that every woman in the crowd was out there skating with this handsome young hunk, and every man was lifting Torvill as easily and caressing her as sensuously as Dean was. No matter how fat or dowdy they were, or how much their feet hurt, for this brief moment they were transported away from the drab business of their lives. And that's the magic. As Dean had said earlier, "People relate to what we do because we make it look so easy and fluid. They get the feeling, 'Ahh, God, I can do that,' or they feel, 'That's really me out there.' "

As T & D's coach, Betty Callaway, puts it, "This is a couple performing, not a pair. They're interpreting a piece of music, and you don't see the incredible stamina involved. It's not like watching Scott Hamilton or Elaine Zayak doing their triples and spins, or Randy Gardner twirling Tai Babilonia high overhead. The fans understand that they can't do any of that, and so, while they appreciate the work involved in single and pairs skating, they don't truly relate to it. Pairs skaters are totally athletic and don't skate with each other as ice dancers do."