Weird world of
Fans take obsession with stars to an extreme level, writing borderline X-rated stories about them, says Jane Bradley
The Winter Olympics is over, the new series of Dancing on Ice is heading into the final stretch and Britain’s ice rinks can breathe a sigh of relief and stand down their staff from the overtime they have had to put in to handle the influx of fairweather skaters.
Ice rinks, which witness a surge in popularity while the Winter Games is on TV, usually see demand for the sport die down in the subsequent weeks as newly-keen skaters’ enthusiasm freezes faster than Scotland’s train tracks on a cold day.
Gossip, however, does not ever seem to wane at the same speed as actual participation in the sport. Skating manages to attract an awful lot of intrigue. Ice-dancing couples pair up in more than one sense of the word – with even 59-year-old skating hero Christopher Dean still hitting the headlines for his relationship with fellow Dancing on Ice judge Karen Barber, who he has known on the rink circuit since the pair were teenagers.
His fairly recent pairing with Barber – the third ice skater he has been linked with following marriages to Isabelle Duchesnay and Jill Trenary – finally seems to have deflected some of the attention away from the perennial “will-the-won’t-they” intrigue which has surrounded Dean and his partner Jayne Torvill since the early 1980s.
Mixed-doubles tennis partners might get a bit of this, but not the same kind of obsessive following. And there’s not gay fan fiction written about the men’s bobsled teams (as far as I know). Even skating pairs competitors – the more technical side of couples ice action – do not attract the same romantic fan attention as the ice dancers. It is claimed that the infatuation comes from the intimate partnership ice dancers create on the ice, a connection without which, many skating observers have insisted, competing couples struggle to succeed. It probably does not help that a large number of ice dancers seem to end up marrying, if not their competition partner, then other figure skaters.
Scottish ice dance couple Sinead and John Kerr, however, who hovered around the medal places in