{"id":11616,"date":"2025-04-11T19:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T19:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/11616\/"},"modified":"2025-04-11T19:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T19:14:09","slug":"im-sure-it-will-be-emotional-olympic-ice-skaters-torvill-and-dean-coming-to-birmingham-for-farewell-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/11616\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;I&#8217;m sure it will be emotional&#8221; &#8211; Olympic ice skaters Torvill and Dean coming to Birmingham for farewell tour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Olympic skaters are approaching their final UK performances, taking in the West Midlands before a last date in their home city of Nottingham .\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The duo wrote their names in British sporting history at the 1984 Winter Games following their routine to Ravel&#8217;s Bolero at the Zetra Olympic Hall in Sarajevo .\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They are now set to embark on their final UK tour, after announcing their retirement from skating together in 2024, 40 years on from their Olympic gold success.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The tour kicked off at the weekend and will be at Birmingham\u2019s BP Pulse Live from April 25-27, with an extra date now put on for the Sunday at 6.30pm. They wioll also be at Manchester\u2019s AO Arena on May 2-4 and Liverpool\u2019s M&amp;S Bank Arena on May 8-9.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/54a99e14-f124-45f3-bc70-c2cee604eee8.jpg\"   alt=\"Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (Yui Mok\/PA)\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"w-full max-w-none\"\/>Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean <\/p>\n<p>Torvill, 67, said: &#8220;I&#8217;m sure it will be emotional. At the moment, we&#8217;re just kind of excited and eager to get going.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But I think as time goes on, we realise that, &#8216;Oh, actually, we&#8217;re heading towards the last couple of dates in Nottingham &#8216;, it will become quite emotional.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>She added: &#8220;I think we knew we couldn&#8217;t keep going forever, and we&#8217;re lucky that we&#8217;ve been able to keep going this long, really.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We thought about retiring this year and it was poignant, because it&#8217;s 50 years since we started skating together.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It felt like the right time, but we wanted to sort of mark it with doing one last final tour while we&#8217;re still able to perform in a way that we&#8217;re happy with.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Reflecting on her friendship with Dean, Torvill added: &#8220;Outside of work we&#8217;re the best of friends, anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think, we&#8217;ll still do other things, just not performing on the ice. You know, we might do speaking, any other things that come up.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We always like doing something a little different, but we realise it&#8217;s time to not be doing performances anymore.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We will always see each other and always be connected in some way&#8221;, Dean told PA.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The 66-year-old described the show as &#8220;a retrospective storytelling of our career from the very beginning until modern day&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/10a7d0c3-f04f-4c75-a287-7d5f4a58e5b5.jpg\"   loading=\"lazy\" class=\"w-full max-w-none\"\/>Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean (Ian West\/PA)<\/p>\n<p>The UK leg of Torvill And Dean: Our Last Dance culminates with three performances at the Motorpoint Arena Nottingham in July.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Dean said: &#8220;The arena is on the same site that the ice stadium used to be when Jayne and I started out all those years ago, so it feels like the perfect way to bring everything to a close.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As well as securing an Olympic gold, the pair had success at the World, European and British Championships during the early part of the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They also competed in the 1994 Winter Olympics, where they won bronze before retiring from competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>They later branched out into touring, coaching and choreographing before becoming the faces of ITV&#8217;s Dancing On Ice, which ran from 2006 until 2014, and later becoming head judges on the show when it was revived in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>ITV recently announced the show had been &#8220;rested&#8221;, and this year&#8217;s final saw Torvill and Dean take to the ice rink for what was described as &#8220;their last ever TV performance&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Vanessa Bauer , Andy Buchanan and Mark Hanretty are among the stars of the reality show who will feature as part of the tour&#8217;s skating team.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Torvill And Dean: Our Last Dance includes dates in London , Belfast , Newcastle and Glasgow and will celebrate 50 years since they formed their skating partnership in 1975.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The tour kicks off on Friday at the OVO Arena Wembley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Olympic skaters are approaching their final UK performances, taking in the West Midlands before a last date&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7820],"tags":[855,748,393,126,4884,379,12,693,93,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-11616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-birmingham","8":"tag-birmingham","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-features","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-local-hubs","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-showbiz","16":"tag-sport","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114320930606009594","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}