Torvil dean biography john independent artist

Sign up for notifications to the latest Insight features via the BBC Sport app and find the latest in the series here. Stepping off the early-morning train from West Germany, Christopher Dean and Jayne Torvill were unlikely-looking revolutionaries. Dean, 25, wore a stiff shirt, cravat, argyle jumper and pinstripe team blazer.

Next to him, Torvill, 26, sported a fur-trimmed coat, matching hat, silk scarf and a shy smile. Not on display, but somewhere back in Nottingham, were their recently awarded MBEs. In front of them, as they posed obligingly on the platform of Sarajevo station, stood a clutch of photographers snapping away.

Torvil dean biography john independent artist: Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean

Nine days hence lay a risky, risque gamble: a shot at Olympic ice dance gold which depended on a routine that bent the rules and challenged convention - a free dance number that could burn up like chiffon to a spark. Torvill and Dean arrived at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo on the back of three successive world title victories. But was a time when narratives competed to crush one another.

Cold War nerves were frayed thin with American and Soviet warheads bristling in silos, amid false alarms and dangerously realistic military exercises. A few weeks after Torvill and Dean's arrival in Sarajevo, the miners' strike - a year-long dispute that divided families, communities and their home county - began.