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Newcomers, on the other hand, must wait their turn with a patience that tries both talent and dreams. The top rank is tough to crack, for the edge always goes to the headliners. Tiffany Chin, who at 16 was competing brilliantly in her first Olympics, could bask in a strong showing while cheerfully accepting the virtual impossibility of a medal. She had finished twelfth in the compulsory figures, and even with a runaway victory in the free skating while others faltered badly, a silver medal was the best she could have won. Said Chin: "I skated good figures, but the other skaters ahead of me were all established with the judges. This is the first time they've seen me skate, and it takes a while to show them what you can do."
From all this came one performance above the fray, almost beyond belief.
Torvill, 26, and Dean, 25, have carried ice dancing singlehanded from the amiable charms of the ballroom to the aesthetic splendor of ballet. Never was their vision of the sport's potential as clear as it was in this Olympian performance. Twice before in competition they had received nine 6.0 scores on their second marks for artistic impression, but at Sarajevo they added three 6.0s in the scores for composition or technical merit. They did it despite choosing music, Ravel's Bolero, that does not contain a change of tempo, supposedly a requirement. But to Torvill and Dean, ice dancing is much more than a Roseland medley of a dash of tango, a pinch of waltz, then up and out with some fancy polka footwork. In place of the rules, they offered an idea: music as movement, not scaffolding; skating as expression, not simply virtuosic display.
Not since the great Soviet pair of the '60s, Ludmila and Oleg Protopopov, has anyone in skating so melded music, blades and bodies into a unified whole. Torvill and Dean performed an extended pas de deux in which difficult athletic feats are made to appear effortless, though the beat is so slow that the skaters can never build momentum. Like the music, the movements are eerily erotic and mesmerizing, and even for favorites, the program was a gamble. In winning, Torvill and Dean elevated an entire sport. Afterward, Dean brushed aside the mutters about single-tempo selection: "Maybe it's something that hasn't been done before," he said, "but that's what we're all about, trying to be inventive and to do different things. We didn't know how the music would be received, but we felt very strongly about it, and we stayed with that commitment." As the principal choreographer in the partnership, Dean was asked the source of his inspiration. With that glorious moment still glistening in the mind's eye, his reply was as simple as it was self-evident: "I'm inspired by the music. We spend a lot of time on the ice listening to the music. Simply listening."
Balanchine himself could not have said it better.