Memories of Ice Dancing and 100 Days Left before the Winter Olympics

My first recollection of watching ice dancing and enjoying it was in 1984. The above video of Torvill and Dean of UK was a gold-medal winning performance and I believe was instrumental in making this winter sport popular all over the world. Torvill and Dean (Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean) are British ice dancers and former British, European, Olympic and World champions. At the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics the pair became the highest scoring figure skaters of all time (for a single program) receiving twelve perfect 6.0s and six 5.9's which included artistic impression scores of 6.0 from every judge. In a UK poll conducted by Channel 4 in 2002, the British public voted Torvill and Dean's historic gold-medal-winning performance(video above) at the 1984 Winter Olympics as Number 8 in the list of the 100 Greatest Sporting Moments.

As of yesterday, there are just 100 days left until the 2014 Winter Olympics kicks off live from Sochi, Russia, with all the action coming to you via NBC's broadcasts plus the terrific NBC Olympics website that live streams every event.

To start the 100-days countdown until the Sochi games, "Today" had an Olympics-heavy show yesterday Tuesday (Oct. 29), with a segment on the American-made U.S. uniforms and a showcase from ice dancing pair Meryl Davis and Charlie White, who took silver in the 2010 Vancouver games (below). I hope they get a gold medal this coming February, 2014.

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So what is ice dancing? Here's what Wikipedia has written. Ice dancing is a discipline of figure skating which draws from the world of ballroom dancing. It joined the World Figure Skating Championships in 1952 and became a Winter Olympic Games medal sport in 1976. As in pair skating, dancers compete as a couple consisting of a man and a woman. Ice dance differs from pair skating by having different requirements for lifts, requiring spins to be performed as a team in a dance hold, and by disallowing throws and jumps. Typically, partners are not supposed to separate by more than two arm lengths; originally, partners were supposed to be in a dance hold the entire program, though this restriction has been lifted somewhat in modern ice dancing. Another distinction between ice dance and other disciplines of skating is the usage of music in the performances; in ice dancing, dancers must always skate to music that has a definite beat or rhythm. Singles and pair skaters more often skate to the melody and phrasing of their music, rather than its beat; this is severely penalized in ice dance.

I also enjoy watching the Pairs Figure Skating competition besides Ice Dancing in the Winter Olympic Games.