December 4 - The news that Kelly Holmes has topped a poll to find the favourite British sportswoman of the last 25 years is grand - but not surprising.

 

Five years after she effectively concluded her athletics career by winning the Olympic 800 and 1500 metres titles in Athens, that transforming achievement, and perhaps the look of demented disbelief as she crossed the line for the first of those victories, clearly remain vivid in popular memory.
 

But what was most interesting about the research conducted by the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation (WSFF) from a sample of over 2,000 UK people was that Holmes's triumphs, although earning her the individual vote, had to give best in the second category of Iconic Moments in the last 25 years of British women’s sport to the one which secured Winter Olympic gold a full quarter of a century ago.
 

Strictly speaking the credit for top billing must be shared - Jayne Torvill was one hell of a competitor, but even she could not have won her Olympic ice dance title at the 1984 Sarajevo Games without her partner Christopher Dean.

Their distant, extended flourish to the slowly unwinding music of Ravel's Bolero, in a city doomed to the ravage of civil war, has an enduring appeal in the national consciousness.
 

Not, of course, that it is the only relatively distant sporting achievement by a British sportswoman to be recognised here.
 

Sally Gunnell earns third place in the individual list, and ninth in the performances, with her 400m hurdles victory at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
 

That disciplined, technical performance, which took her clear of the straggling challenge of America’s gaudily-attired favourite, Sandra Farmer-Patrick, was the start of a two-year period in which the farmer's daughter from Essex was unbeatable.
 

A personal memory of Gunnell is from 1994 as she sat beneath the statue of Lasse Viren that stands close to the Olympic stadium in Helsinki where she had just completed a grand slam of titles by adding the final element of the European title. She was world record holder too.
 

For two solid years, the sight of her upright form arriving at the first set of hurdles in the final straight meant just one thing: imminent victory. Gunnell’s high hurdles background meant no one had a more economical technique. And the work she did with coach, Bruce Longden, combined with her own stubborn nature, meant no one was going to out run her. The woman was unbeatable.
 

Inevitably the sequence had to end, and by the time she arrived in Atlanta to defend her title her challenge had been undermined by an injury that eventually saw her carried tearfully from the Olympic track.
 

There were tears at the Olympics too for another performer who obviously has a lasting place in the public psyche. Tessa Sanderson's emotion upon winning the javelin title at the 1984 Los Angeles Games was tangibly evident as she stood on top of the rostrum, and that image must surely have played a big part in her inclusion as an individual at number nine, and in the iconic moments list as number ten.

 

Again, though I did not witness her golden Olympic flourish, my favourite memory of Sanderson came six years later when, after winning her third Commonwealth title in Auckland, she returned to the mixed zone trailing clouds of righteous glory and laid into the Australian silver medallist, Sue Howland, who she believed should not have returned to the sport after serving a ban for steroid abuse. Sanderson was comfortably in the gold medal zone after, as well as during, her scheduled event.
 

Coincidentally, Sanderson and Gunnell retired on the same day in August 1997 during the World Championships in Athens. Thus, in the space of three hours, British athletics said goodbye to two of its greatest female competitors.
 

 

But what is it, you wonder, that makes those moments on ice in Sarajevo so truly iconic?
 

It helped, I suppose, that it was perfection – at least, it earned a perfect round of maximum marks from the judges.
 

The routine and the music proved to be a sublime match. And the romance of the dance was supplemented by wishful thinking on a countrywide basis about a corresponding romance between the two competitors.
 

Again, I wasn’t there. Like millions of Britons, I experienced the Bolero performance – again and again – on television.
 

But ten years later, when Torvill and Dean came out of retirement to have another crack at the Olympics, I was there. The effect of their re-emergence was enormous. Imagine if Eric Cantona were to stage a comeback at Old Trafford, or Seb Coe and Steve Ovett were to return to the track.
 

The public impact their return engendered was a measure of the impact they had made back in 1984. As it turned out, having cruised perfectly through the national championships to a background of swooning noises, T&D found inevitably, that the world had moved on in their absence as they warmed-up for the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics by entering the European Championships in Copenhagen a month earlier.
 

Although they won in Copenhagen, they did so almost on a technicality ahead of the exuberant Russian pair of Oksana Gritschuk and Evgeny Platov, who won the free dance section, and - as the British pair probably knew in their bones before they left Denmark for Norway - went on to take the Olympic gold, with the Britons, resembling a beautiful vintage car, having to settle for bronze.

Before they left Copenhagen, the still, just, golden pair were asked if they would have altered their comeback routine had they known how the judging nuances had changed in their absence. They responded in unison, but for once they were at cross-purposes. "Perhaps" said Torvill. "Yes" said Dean.
 

It was too late. But, as this poll indicates, it didn't matter. Sarajevo was enough for history.

 

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames.