Dean, 25, was dressed in a pinstripe team blazer, argyle sweater, stiff shirt, and cravat. Beside him, Torvill, 26, wore a coat with fur trimmings, a hat that matched, a silk scarf, and a bashful smile. Their recently earned MBEs were somewhere back in Nottingham, not on show.
A group of photographers were taking pictures of them as they obediently posed on the Sarajevo station platform.
Nine days from now, there would be a daring and sensual wager: an attempt to win gold in the Olympic ice dance competition, contingent on a performance that defied convention and broke rules—a free dance routine that could catch fire like chiffon.
Dean remarks, “We felt strongly about what we were doing,” after forty years. “It was only other people who felt it was a gamble.”
“We always had to be one step ahead with where our ideas were creatively,” says Torvill. “We tried to tell a story – so it had a meaning.”
However, narratives were fighting to topple each other in 1984.
With American and Soviet nukes brittlely arranged in silos, false alarms, and frighteningly realistic military drills, Cold War nerves were frazzled.
There was also strife at home.
A few weeks after Torvill and Dean arrived in Sarajevo, the year-long miners’ strike broke out, dividing the county in which they were from as well as families and towns.
