July 27, 1958 — Ice skater Christopher Dean was born on this day. With his partner Jayne Torvill the pair created a sensation at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo when they performed their dance routine to the music of Ravel’s Boléro.
At the end of their stunning performance they were showered with flowers by the rapt 8,500-strong audience at the Zetra Olympic Ice Hall. Turning to look at the screen, the pair saw a row of “perfect” sixes, a record score that will never be repeated.
The gold medal-winning feat was watched by a worldwide TV audience including 24 million spellbound viewers back home in the UK.
Under the Olympic scoring system at the time routines were judged in two parts: presentation (artistry) and technical merit, both on a scale of 0.0 to 6.0, with 6.0 meaning perfection – the ultimate performance.
Torvill and Dean scored twelve perfect 6.0s and six 5.9s from the judges, as well as a clean sweep of 6.0s for artistic impression – the highest possible score and the only time in Olympic history that an all-perfect score has been achieved.
Christopher Dean was born in 1958 at the English village of Calverton, Nottinghamshire. When he was 10 years old he was given a life-changing Christmas gift – a pair of ice skates. By the age of 14 he was dancing on ice with his first partner, Sandra Elson. The duo became the British Junior Dance champions.
He left school at 16 to train as a police officer but quit the force in 1980 to become a full-time ice skater.
Jayne Torvill was born in 1957 at Clifton, Nottingham, not far from Dean’s birthplace. When she was eight years old she went to the local ice rink on a school trip and became hooked on ice skating. By the age of 14 she was the British National Pairs Champion with her partner of the time, Michael Hutchinson.
After the Dean-Elson partnership broke up and Torvill parted from Hutchinson, Torvill and Dean came together under the tutelage of coach Betty Callaway who was to guide them on their triumphant career. Dean was 16, and training to be a policeman; Torvill at 17 was a clerk in an insurance firm.
But both had enduring work of a much different kind ahead of them – practising on the ice rink. Amongst many relatively minor awards and titles, they would go on to become British Champions, European Champions, World Champions and Olympic Champions.
The scoring system all changed after the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002, which brought a scandal involving fixed scores and corrupt judging. As a result, the International Skating Union introduced the International Judging System, or IJS for short.
Under this complicated procedure the six system was abandoned in favour of percentage scores with two sets of officials evaluating the competitors. The first is a “technical panel,” made up of five specialists. The second is a nine-member judging panel.
The system was designed to standardise scoring and reduce the possibility of corruption. But it also meant there was no longer a “perfect six”, so even if skaters were to emerge with the formidable talent of Torvill and Dean, they could not emulate the historic scores that the British pair achieved.
Throughout Torvill and Dean's career excited journalists would pursue the notion of a romance, especially given the sultry and almost intimate nature of the Boléro routine.
But it was not to be. Dean married French-Canadian ice skater Isabelle Duchesnay in 1991. They were divorced two years later and in 1994 he wed American skater Jill Trenary. By 2014 that marriage was also reported to have broken down.
Torvill was happily married to American sound engineer Phil Christensen in 1990.
But the Torvill and Dean ice-skating relationship was purely professional – she employing her dancing skills to enhance the creativity of his brilliant choreography. In a non-romantic sense it was a perfect match.
Published: July 19, 2022
Updated: July 26, 2024
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