As they put the finishing touches to a farewell tour that will bring to an end the longest partnership in British sporting history, there is only one question to ask Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean: now they are hanging up their skates having spent almost every waking moment in the last 50 years together on the ice, what on earth are they going to do with their time?
“Beekeeping,” says Dean, as the two of them sit in the green room of Aberdeen’s P&J arena where they have been rehearsing their spectacular goodbye bonanza for the past month.
“Beekeeping?” says Torvill, sounding incredulous. “You’ve never been near a bee.”
“I have no bees,” admits Dean. “But in my head it sounds like a nice thing to do. And that’s my point. Basically I now will have the time to do anything I fancy.”
It will be some change, putting on a beekeeper’s mask instead of a pair of skates. So adapted have they become to life on the ice over the years that Torvill says when she is out and about away from the rink, she is now physically incapable of walking in anything other than the flattest of shoes.
“I hate wearing heels,” she says. “I’m forever falling off them.”
Yet here they are, willingly stepping away from what has long been their domain.
“We always said we knew when it would be over,” says Dean. “And we both realised this was it. It doesn’t get easier, you know, the pains, the aches.”
Not that anyone watching them in rehearsal would suggest there is any apparent physical decline. On the ice the pair still glide with the smooth accomplishment we have always associated with them.
When they ease their way through the Bolero routine that made their name, in truth it may not be quite as athletic as it was in Sarajevo 41 years ago (at 66 Dean is no longer as adept at doing the splits, for instance). But the pair are still mesmerising in their co-ordination. For four minutes, the show’s supporting cast of 16 professional skaters, many of them former Olympians, stand at the side of the rink watching on in awe, before bursting into a spontaneous round of applause as the two collapse to the ice at the routine’s conclusion.
And no wonder. Four decades on, Bolero remains the stand-out moment in competitive ice dancing history, its grace and ...
