Dancing on Ice judges and skating champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have shared their thoughts on new arrival Matt Richardson.
Matt, 29, will make his debut on the ITV show this weekend after replacing fellow comedian Rufus Hound in the competition.
But Torvill and Dean were careful to not give too much away when asked how well they think Matt will do in his first performance.
They revealed they haven’t seen him skate in a few weeks, but hope he’s made some improvements since then.
“He’s been training the same amount of time when everybody else started,” Dean confirmed during a chat with Mirror Online.
“We’ll have to see, I’m not going to predict. I have no pre-idea of what’s going to happen, it has to happen on the night,” the 62-year-old added.
(Image: ITV)
Torvill then said: “We haven’t seen him. We did see him some times before Christmas because he was training at the same rink as we were.
“But we haven’t seen him for several weeks now ,but hopefully he’s getting better!”
Dean continued: “We’re glad that we’ve got a full compliment of skaters again. So you’ll see everyone on the ice that’s going forward from this point.”
The judges admitted that they were “sad” to see 41-year-old Rufus leave the competition and would have liked to have seen his progression.
“Aww we feel sad for him because he got his golden ticket and he was so pleased about getting that and then unfortunately he had the positive test,” Torvill said.
“He’s missed another week and it’s not fair. I can imagine he’s gutted about it and we can empathise with that,” Dean added.
(Image: PA)
When asked about his skating ability, Torvill replied: “He did have his own style. Chris and I were both quite surprised at how good he had got from where he had started.
“His skating still needed a lot of work, but from when we had seen him initially at the bootcamp… also he had his own style of performance, it was a very clever performance as well.
“We would have liked to have seen if he had progressed from there with the skating but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
*Dancing On Ice returns Sunday at 6pm on ITV
Originally from https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/dancing-ices-torvill-dean-hope-23447561