Is this the last time we skate as a couple?
SECRET FEAR OF THE DANCING ON ICE LEGENDS
When Olympic legends Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skate together on Dancing on Ice, they share the same troubling thought... is this it?
Thirty-five years ago, their unsurpassed Bolero routine at the Sarajevo games cemented their place in sporting history and the nation’s hearts.
Chris, now 60, admits: “Do we feel those 35 years in our bodies? Yes! You reach a certain age and that downward slope. Nowadays every time we perform we feel like we don’t know if that’s our last performance.
“So each time we skate it feels like a little added bonus. It’s quite sentimental. We like performing together, but there is an emotion each time we skate now.”
Jayne wistfully says there are some moves her body stops her perfecting. And it’s been a couple of years since Chris has held her high above his head while gliding across the ice.
“I could still do it,” he says. “But there are age-appropriate things and I don’t think I should be throwing a 60-year-old lady around the ice.
“We still feel in our 20s. In our mind we can do everything but our body doesn’t allow it. We’re the best we can be at the moment.” He adds: “I hope we’ll realise when it’s time to stop skating before other people realise it.”
Adoring audiences are unlikely ever to feel Jayne and Chris should stop. But if their dancing ends, it’s doubtful their amazingly close relationship ever will.
In the early 1980s Jayne, with her Princess Diana hairdo, shyness and flushed cheeks on the ice, was as much of a pin-up as Chris, with his blond quiff and John Travolta dimpled chin.
They were clean-cut, modest, hardworking, thrilling to watch and world beaters. But were they in love?
“It was what it was at the time,” says Jayne, mysteriously. “We were, and still are, very close,” says Chris.
After decades of batting away the question of romance, Chris confessed in a TV interview that they “dabbled” in romance and told of a teenage kiss on the back seat of a bus. Jayne’s memory was more hazy and she refers to Chris’s revelation as “dabblegate”.
Perhaps we will never know if they were secretly in love. But clearly their friendship, spanning almost 50 years, is something very special.
“Our friendship is unique and unshakeable,” says Chris. “We’ve been together so long we’re like Morecambe and Wise. We’re just Chris and Jayne.”
Tiny signs of their immense bond are heard in the way they finish each other’s sentences on screen and, even when interviewed separately, give astonishingly similar answers. And it’s seen in the way Jayne wears Cartier earrings, gifted by Chris, daily for over 30 years. “I bought those earrings with our first pay packet,” says Chris. “Jayne wears them every time she skates. That’s symbolic of our friendship.” They have been by each other’s
We still feel we’re in our 20s. In our mind we can still do everything CHRISTOPHER DEAN ON DANCING WITH JAYNE
side through the highs of winning Olympic gold and the lows of Chris losing his dad, who brought him up after his mum abandoned him when he was six. Chris was there for Jayne, married to sound engineer Phil Christensen for 28 years, throughout her painful IVF attempts.
Jayne – who has a 12-year-old daughter Jessica and son Kieran, 16 – was Chris’s confidante throughout the breakdowns of his two marriages.
His first wife, French-Canadian ice dance champion Isabelle Duchesnay, said she felt there were three in their two-year marriage. But he remains on good terms with his second wife, US skater Jill Ternary, with whom he shares two sons, Jack, 20, and Sam, 18.
Chris and Jill separated in 2010 and the following year his affair with fellow Dancing on Ice star judge Karen Barber was exposed. The couple are still happily together. Will they marry? “You never know,” says Chris.
No matter which celebs take to the rink, Jayne and Chris are the real stars of the ITV show. This series was the most dramatic yet thanks to all the antics of Towie’s Gemma Collins.
“It’s definitely calmer since Gemma left,” says Jayne. “She was always very outgoing and funny talking about herself.” Chris, who lives in Colorado, adds: “Gemma’s quite outrageous and outspoken, people like to hear that. But nobody’s bigger than the show.”
The hit series, hosted by Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield, has won Jayne and Chris a new generation of fans. And a social media campaign in their home city of Nottingham, aims them to get a knighthood. “We’d be very humbled to receive any kind of recognition,” says Chris, adding: “We’d never turn it down.”
Dancing on Ice is on ITV tomorrow, at 6pm.