“It wasn’t a straightforward process.”
Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean attend the photocall for "Dancing On Ice 2025"

Ice skating champion Jayne Torvill has opened up about her decision to delay starting a family and the heartbreak that came along with that choice.

She is best known for being one-half of one of the most famous ice skating couples in the world but Jayne Torvill is also a mum of two, something that she wasn’t sure would ever become after putting starting a family on hold.

Being a world champion takes a lot of time and dedication and Jayne wasn’t prepared to put this on hold to start a family.

But when she hung up her skates and decided it was time to have children with her husband Phil Christensen, whom she has been married to since 1990. However it wasn’t a straightforward process and there was sadly some heartbreak and “trauma” along the way.

Initially, Jayne fell pregnant quickly but it was discovered an ectopic pregnancy which required surgery.

Speaking about her journey to parenthood on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, the skater opened up about her ectopic pregnancy, and enduring 12 months of IVF.

“I got pregnant quite quickly and I thought, ‘Oh this is fine’. And when I went to have a scan they said I had an ectopic pregnancy, and I didn’t know what that meant,” she said. “They said, ‘The embryo’s growing in one of the tubes’. And I said, ‘Oh, ok, so how do you get it out then?’. And they said, ‘We don’t. We can’t’.

“That’s when it hit me. So I went through the surgery and then it was obvious it was going to be more difficult. So we tried IVF for about a year. That, as a lot of women know, is traumatic in itself,” the 66-year-old added.

Next, Jayne and her husband considered adoption, something that she was unsure about at first. She wasn’t sure that she was ready to consider this step until she met with a friend who had adopted a son.

She recalled her friend telling her to “come and see” her little boy. But she admitted that at that point she still thought that she was going to fall pregnant. But meeting this little boy completely changed her mind.

“And I went to see this little boy, and I wanted to bring him home.”

Jayne and Phil went on to adopt two children, a son, Kieran, 22, and a daughter, Jessica, 28. While she is very private about her marriage and her family life she does share some snippets on social media from time to time.