Love and the Olympic Games

Love and the Olympic Games

by Philip Barker

On Valentines Day 40 years ago, the story of two doomed lovers captivated the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.

On an electric night, Great Britain’s Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean wrote their names into Olympic lore with their interpretation of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero.

It was the greatest moment in an ice dancing partnership which had been founded on perfection.

Every judge awarded 6.0, for artistic impression the highest mark available at the time.

It was perhaps why there was not a seat to be had at the Zetra Stadium where the Princess Royal, the new British Olympic Association President was amongst those entranced.

Their performance seemed perfectly suited to the most romantic day of the year.

30 years later they returned to Sarajevo to reprise their performance in the very same rink.

By coincidence, their British compatriot Lizzy Yarnold won gold on St. Valentines Day in 2014 but in the very different sport of skeleton.

Torvill and Dean were partners only on the ice, although Dean was married to another ice dancer, 1991 World Championship gold medallist Isabelle Duschesnay, and  later figure skater Jill Trenary. He was subsequently in a relationship with his 1984 team mate Karen Barber.

There have been many others who came together under the five Olympic Rings, and ended up exchanging two.

In the first Olympic ice skating event held in London in 1908, there were two married couples.

The Johnsons, Phyllis and James won silver in the pairs, while bronze went to another couple, Florence and Edgar Syers.

Florence was known by all as “Madge” but she was the supreme female skater of her generation.

So good was she when skating against the men that the International Skating Union was prompted to introduce a women’s competition.

Edgar was an official in the National Skating Association and helped organise the skating at the Games.

There have been husband and wife combinations at the Winter Olympics since.

Figure skater Hayes Allan Jenkins won men’s singles gold at Cortina D’Ampezzo in 1956 and later wed his American team mate Carol Heiss, who won silver at the same Games and gold at Squaw Valley in 1960.

The late Oleg Protopopov and his wife Ludmilla Belousova were already married by the time they won the first of two successive gold medals in the pairs at the 1964 Innsbruck Games.

When an Olympic Village became an established part of the Games, romance at the Games sometimes blossomed.

In 1956, American Hal Connolly won hammer gold in Melbourne but also fell in love with Czechoslovakia’s discus gold medallist Olga Fitokova.

The New York Times described it as a “fairytale cold war romance.”

It was necessary to seek permission from the Czech authorities for Fitokova to marry an American, but this was granted.

The couple were married in Prague. They were greeted by a crowd of 30,000 who came to see them arrive for the wedding service.

The witnesses were legendary Czech runner Emil Zatopek who won three distance golds  at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and his wife Dana, javelin champion not only at the same Games but the same afternoon that Emil had won the 5,000m. Earlier he had won 10,000m gold and also went on to  win the marathon for what remains a unique treble.

The magic of the Olympics even worked for the Royal families of Europe.

The future King Harald V of Norway was only given permission to marry Sonja Haraldsen weeks before the 1968 Mexico Olympics.

The complication was that he was also preparing to compete in the 5.5 metre open class in sailing. His crew finished 11th.

“He was in the Olympic Village, I was in a hotel, that was my honeymoon,” Queen Sonja recalled with a rueful smile in 2016 as she opened Lillehammer’s Olympic Museum.

Another Scandinavian Royal found romance four years later at the Munich Olympics.

Sweden’s future monarch Carl Gustaf met his future wife Silvia Renate Sommerlath, a Brazilian who was working as a hostess at the Games.

American Kristi Yamaguchi won figure skating gold at the 1992 Albertville Winter Games and met her future husband Brett Hedican the day after taking the gold medal.

“He was clean cut and soft spoken,” Yamaguchi told People Magazine though it was not until 1998 that the couple became engaged. They were married in 2000.

It was at the Sydney Olympics where Roger Federer met Slovakian tennis player Mirka Vavrenic.

The Olympic Village weaved its magic and they married in 2009, though Federer later admitted that had both continued their tennis careers, the relationship that began at the Olympic Village might not have lasted.

Olympic disappointment for American shooter Matthew Emmons in the three position small bore rifle had its compensations when he was consoled by Czech Republic shooter Katerina Kurkova.

The pair married three years later.

British cyclists Laura and Jason Kenny have swept all before them at three Olympics.

They were already a couple by the time they competed together at London 2012.

The relationship blossomed and so did their performances on track. Laura has now won five golds over three Games.

Jason had won seven in four Olympics.

At Pyeongchang 2018, a hooded figure on the sidelines could be seen shouting encouragement for four-time Olympic gold medallist Dariya Domracheva of Belarus in the biathlon.

It was none other than Domracheva’s husband Ole Einar Bjørndalen who won eight gold medals in an Olympic career which spanned 20 years.

They had met at a biathlon World Cup event and were married in 2016.

Snowboarders Red Gerard and Hailey Langland met when they were both 12 and started dating when they were 17, only weeks before the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics where Gerard even won gold.

In 2008 the Beijing Olympics opened on the eighth day of August.

This was considered an auspicious day and 314,224 couples were married in China.

Rio 2016 also proved an inspiring place for romance.

Double Olympic diving gold medallist Qin Kai proposed to his Chinese team mate and fellow Olympic champion He Zi after her silver medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics.

The question was popped at poolside.

“We’ve been dating for six years, but I didn’t expect him to propose today,” she said.

Elsewhere in the city, Brazilian rugby player Isadora Cerullo, was surprised when her partner of two years, Marjorie Enya proposed to her on the field.

In all there were at least five marriage proposals during Rio 2016 alone.

The pandemic made such interactions much more difficult during the Tokyo Olympics and the Beijing Winter Games but it seems almost certain that there will be further chapters to the story in Paris, for many the most romantic city in the world.