Interviews by Nancy Groves 

Christopher Dean and Jayne Torvill: how we made Boléro

'It was a volcano erupting – we had to climb to the very top before throwing ourselves into eternity'
  
  

Dean and Torvill perform their dance at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo,
Four minutes, 28 seconds of perfection … Dean and Torvill perform their dance at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo Photograph: George Konig/Rex Features Photograph: George Konig/Rex Features

Christopher Dean

We had won three world championships by the time the 1984 Winter Olympics came around, so we were in a position to take a real risk. Even though it is a piece of classical music, Jayne and I knew our choice of Ravel's Boléro would be seen as radical. Most skating music goes fast-slow-fast, building to a finish with a big hurrah. But Boléro was different: we had often used it as a warmup and realised it would be perfect for where we wanted to go. Some people find a style and stick with it. We wanted to shake things up.

The piece lasts 18 minutes, but we were only allowed four. Our arranger got it to 4.28, but couldn't shorten it further without changing the tempo and crescendo. Hence our opening balletics: at the time, the stopwatch only started when you began to skate. Watch carefully: we kick off on our knees, and our blades don't hit the ice for several bars.

Was our Boléro art or sport? Somewhere in between. We came from sport, but as we became more aware of movement, of our bodies, skating grew into an art form for us. It wasn't just a physical feat: it was about narrative, a Romeo and Juliet-style story, two lives destined to be together in death. It was a volcano erupting and we had to climb to the very top before throwing ourselves into eternity. The whole routine leans towards that point: sometimes it's very intimate, sometimes we're reaching upwards to the sky. This required closeness, and Jayne and I did of course have arguments. But when we were competing, we would always find ways to get over them. If we stopped skating, other contestants would be practising when we weren't. We had to keep at it.

The guy who made our costumes, Courtney Jones, was a champion skater himself. I loved the iris flower and romantic colours were unusual in competition at the time. The pleating, zipping and braids were all added by hand. Details mattered. Courtney painted the ripple effect on to my shirt as I was wearing it.

I don't think we actually saw the crowd till it was all over. We were so close, in the bubble we'd created. The fact that we were being watched by 24 million people – well, you had to put that out of your mind. We couldn't let anything get to us, not the audience, not the occasion. We'd practised every day for months. It was all about repetition. The body knew what to do.

Marking has changed since then: the six system went out in favour of percentage scores. Back then, sixes meant complete perfection. As the music finished, there was a sense that we had reached the top of our mountain, our volcano. Only afterwards do you appreciate how much four minutes on one day in one place can change your life. My tummy slide at the end wasn't planned: there was just so much passion involved, I overcooked it.

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Jayne Torvill

Chris and I had hidden ourselves away in a high-altitude centre in Germany to train, so when we finally arrived at the athlete's village in Sarajevo there was a lot of media attention. But to be honest, you barely know what country you're in when you're that focused. All we knew was our training times. And this wasn't like Sochi: if you wanted to call someone, there was only one phone and it always had a queue.

On the morning of our performance – Valentine's Day – we went down to the stadium for a very early practice, before the other teams arrived. So there we were at 6.30am, performing Boléro to what we thought was an empty stadium – and then afterwards we heard applause. It was the cleaners!

Later, when we were lying on the ice exhausted after our proper performance, there was this sense of relief: we'd done it, we couldn't have skated any better. It was only when we picked ourselves up to collect our flowers that we realised the enormity of what had happened. There was a big roar. And then an even bigger one. It went on and on. I felt bad for whoever was on next.

It's funny: we were the first into the stadium that day and the last to leave. All our team had stayed up for us with a bottle of champagne, even though alcohol wasn't allowed in the village. Princess Anne joined us to toast our gold – with plastic cups.

• Torvill and Dean appear in Dancing on Ice: The Final Tour at Wembley Arena, London HA9, Wednesday and Thursday (dancingonicetour.co.uk).

 

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