They ain’t no Torvill and Dean

Next in our con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age of the Olympics: ice danc­ing. Last night (Tues­day) we man­aged to watch the already tape-delayed Mon­day show­ing of the final ice danc­ing com­pe­ti­tion from Torino 2006.

I liked the skat­ing done by two of the cou­ples, the Bul­gar­i­ans (Albena Denkova and Maxim Staviyski) and the Amer­i­cans (Tanith Bel­bin and Ben Agosto). The Bul­gar­i­ans espe­cially had a pretty skate. Well, and then the frosty-but-I-love-you-I’m-so-sorry-I-will-cry-now Ital­ians were enter­tain­ing too, though not for their ice dancing.

But they really can’t hold a can­dle to Torvill and Dean’s per­for­mance from the 1984 Win­ter Olympics in Sara­jevo. A video of that per­for­mance is out there on the Inter­nets (though not on the Web, if you know what I’m talk­ing about), and it still holds up, even twenty-two years later. Don’t get hood­winked by their per­for­mances in 1996, when pro­fes­sion­als were allowed back into the Olympics. You’re look­ing for the 1984 video, com­plete with 80’s-era tele­vi­sion graphics.

Well worth the hunt, to see what real ice danc­ing was, and prob­a­bly won’t ever be again.