A moment that defies being defined
Hyper-modern broadcast technology, the new scoring rules, the depth and strength of the Canadian team, and the upward-spiralling evolution of the athletes themselves, has made TV viewing of Pyeongchang’s figure skating events an incredible experience.
But, I can guarantee you, not as incredible as being in the arena itself.
There are some perks for the TV viewers that might elude the live audience but if you’re there and aware, you benefit from the fourth and fifth dimensions of figure skating, dimensions that are essential to the fullest, and longest-lasting grasp of the best of the sport: music and the effect on, and of, the audience.
Arena music used to be poor, way back in 1984, but at the big events now it’s great, and fully encasing, whereas even on the best TV systems it still flattens out, losing some of its wholeness. It’s the opposite live: the wholeness is even more whole.
Capturing the effect of the audience on the skater, and the effect of the skater on that audience, is still a weakness of figure skating broadcasting. It just can’t convey the holistic effect: a skater grabbing the audience and the positive return vibes of the audi-
ence on that skater that are both audible and deeply felt.
Which brings us around to Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in Sarajevo on, appropriately, Valentine’s Day 1984, eight years before the Bosnian Wars which tore the Bosnian capital apart brick by brick, soul by soul.
The Zetra Olympic Hall, where figure skating was held, was also torn mostly apart, with the remnants turned into a rudimentary morgue.
Videos of Torvill and Dean’s Bolero free dance do it only surface justice. This was probably the most revolutionary, evocative and, frankly, shocking ice dance program of all time.
I don’t mean shocking in its salacious sense, but in its ‘astonishingly surprising’ sense. And by 1984, it had become pretty difficult to be surprised by the greatest ice dancers of all time (although Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are now living in that general territory, too).
Torvill and Dean had changed the course of the sport forever in 1982 with a single-themed program to the musical Mack and Mabel, amplified it the following year with Barnum, so I expected something great for the farewell to their amateur careers.
But I didn’t expect something that great.
Remember, in 1984, there was no internet, so no trans-Atlantic tweeting, texting, blogging nor anything else, to prepare you with words or video. In short, no real advance warning for a Canadian, even one who knew them (sort of: in those days they were essentially British Royalty and had the same no-access, regal remoteness as the House of Windsor; I got to know them, especially Chris, only after they turned pro).
You got a hint of the Outlier brilliance to come during their short dance (then the Original Set Pattern) Paso Doble, when Torvill played a limp cape to Dean’s strutting matador. But only a hint.
In Bolero, dressed in cascading hues of purple, they started on their knees hypnotically swaying and lifting without a skating motion, for 18 seconds at the start of the single-movement piece.
The tension-building delay had a spectacular dramatic effect but it was also done partly for legal reasons.
Ravel’s Bolero is 17 minutes long and even with the best studio help of the day, the shortest it could be reduced to while still maintaining its deceptively complex musical integrity, was four minutes and 28 seconds. Regulations dictated that the longest a program could be was 4:10. But parsing the rules, Dean found that formal timing actually began only when a true skating movement started: hence, the 18 abstract seconds.
It was hypnotic, and even before a blade edge hit the ice, everyone in the arena was in complete thrall.
Bolero is a single-movement work that swells and swells to a massive, stunning, conclusion and, in hindsight, that arc was a metaphor for Torvill and Dean’s amateur career. When they finished, dramatically collapsing to the ice, they got the only standing ovation of the dance competition. The applause, which had been sporadic throughout — it’s hard to clap when you’re semi-paralyzed by awe — was thunderous.
And when the marks came up the roof almost lifted off. It was the old 6.0 system and Torvill and Dean received six 5.9s and three perfect 6.0s for technical merit (you almost didn’t notice the brilliance of their technical elements, they were so seamlessly woven into the music).
For artistic merit: a string of 6.0s across the board, the first time that had ever had happened in the Olympics, and only the second (Barnum) in international competition.
As a journalist, I couldn’t, wouldn’t, applaud, but my innards were exploding. I had never seen nor, more importantly, felt anything like it. Around me, many people were crying. It was a singular experience that defied definition. I was there, really there, and still cannot portray it accurately. You cannot describe the indescribable.
For much of their careers, Torvill and Dean practised in a public rink in Nottingham at midnight after full days of work, she as an insurance clerk, he as a
police cadet. Years later, I asked Dean what the world would have lost had he stayed in his original professional.
“I like to think,” he said with a smile, “That there would have been some very creative arrests.”
Veteran Spectator columnist Steve Milton has pretty much seen it all in his 40 years covering sports around the world, and, in Being There, he will relive special moments from those stories, from the inside out, every Friday. If there’s a memorable sporting event you would like Steve to write about, let him know at smilton@thespec.com. Chances are, he was there.