The venue, specially constructed for the Winter Olympics, was completely destroyed by Serbian shelling in 1992, during the Bosnian war. Its basements were used temporarily as a morgue, and wooden seats from the arena were made into coffins.

But Olympic Hall Zetra rose again from its foundations, partly through a $11.5 million (£7 million/€8 million) donation from the IOC, in 1999, since when its construction has been thoroughly tested by acts including Simple Minds and Deep Purple.

Torvill and Dean's latest celebration - which will take place not on Valentine's Day, as in 1984, but February 13 - is not likely to offer any significant challenge to the fabric of the venue, unless it be the thunder of applause which will follow the completion of an emotional and physical tour de force which can truly be described as iconic.

Britain's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, pictured in their triumphant free dance to the music of Ravel's Bolero at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games ©Getty Images

Whether the deep purple of their original outfits will be replicated remains to be seen. But the pair - who have just completed nine years as creative directors and coaches for the ITV's Dancing on Ice - look likely to offer a characteristically assured performance of a piece to which they have returned regularly as part of their demonstration outings on the show.

The old synchronicity was evident even as they went through some of the moves in the carpeted confines of the large room in which they were interviewed for the BBC documentary Torvill and Dean: The Perfect Day, which went out on February 8.

In this, the pair recall how they were the first competitors in the arena on the day of the free dance final - the third and most valuable of the required disciplines after the compulsory and original set-pattern dances - getting up at 5am in order to practice on the ice at 6am.

It was an opportunity only they of the leading contenders chose to take up, and for their pains they received an unexpected round of applause from cleaners in the stands who had set down their brushes to watch a piece of sports history in the making.

At the other end of the day, the necessity of having to provide urine samples for doping provided a prosaic postscript for what had been the ultimate moment of success for a couple who met as young teenagers at their local Nottingham Arena and skated together competitively since 1976.

In the documentary, Dean described how they had had to wait backstage in Sarajevo for 20 minutes before getting on to perform. "It was almost gladiatorial," he said, adding: "In the warm up I went out and scuffed the ice up a little bit. Because fresh, clean ice is slippy. I knew the spot where we would be and I skidded on it a few times."

Torvill, skating apart from Dean in the warm-up, unlike all their competitors, noticed. "I saw him scuffing the ice in the middle," she said. "It was just a little ploy. It was quite clever, I thought."

The routine began with both of them on their knees, swaying to a steady rhythm which is just starting an ever-rising progress towards the climactic moment when both skaters, enacting doomed lovers' progress up to the top of a volcano, throw themselves into the abyss. Or in their case, fling themselves onto the ice.

Torvill and Dean spend the first 18 seconds of their Bolero routine with their skates off the ice in order to fit the music into the allotted skating time period ©Getty Images

"We always believed we were in a narrative," said Dean, who is now 55, a year younger than Torvill. "It was a Romeo and Juliet scenario of two lovers that were destined not to be together in life but together eternally in death."

As Dean reaffirmed, the arresting choreography at the start had been created to solve a very practical problem.

Dance routines could be no longer than four minutes and 10 seconds, but despite the best efforts of their musical arranger, Bob Stewart, Bolero's original length of 17 minutes had only been reduced to four minutes and 28 seconds.

To get around the problem the two skaters made sure their skates didn't touch the ice as they faced each other for the first 18 seconds - the clock only started when the first blade made contact.

"It was unique for the time," Dean recalled. "We created that mood, that swirling, that intimacy right from the beginning which set the tone for the rest of the routine."

The performance received 12 perfect scores of 6.0 out of a possible 18, with sixes from all nine judges for artistic impression, something which had never been seen before. Thus the Union Flag rose, to a somewhat halting rendition of the National Anthem, flanked by Soviet flags thanks to the efforts of silver medallists Natalia Bestemianova and Andrei Bukin, who would take the 1988 Olympic title, and bronze medallists Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko, who would win gold at the Albertville 1992 Games in France.

There were around eight and a half thousand enraptured spectators in the arena. But Torvill and Dean's success was also watched by one of Britain's highest television audiences, with just short of 24 million people tuning in. Part of the enduring appeal of this partnership's artistry was that it was the sublime creation of a former insurance clerk and former police cadet who were, off ice, shy to the point of awkwardness.

Interviewed by the BBC's Barry Davies immediately after earning their gold in Sarajevo, Torvill's first response was a nervous laugh and the hasty comment: "I can't believe it." Dean, so composed and urbane these days, was actually biting his lip - just seconds after nervelessly accomplishing one of the great sporting performances of all time.

Once they got back to the Olympic Village it was late, and Torvill confessed she was thinking in terms of making herself a cup of tea and then going to bed, "as you do". Instead, a large group of athletes were waiting up for her and her victorious partner, along with Princess Anne, who had managed to rustle up some champagne and - in the absence of glasses - paper cups.

"People who do things really well, and appear to do them really easily, are good to watch," Princess Anne said on the documentary. "It was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed - that's why they won the gold medal."

Torvill and Dean pictured with their Olympic golds; by the time they had finished in doping control they were virtually the last to leave the arena ©Getty Images

Torvill confessed that, even in the moment of victory as the bouquets bounced on the ice from all directions, she experienced mixed emotions. "In some ways there is a slight sadness because you want to be doing it over again but it is over."

Over it was - for then. But ten years later Bolero was to make its return to the Olympic arena when Torvill and Dean presented it as an exhibition piece at the Hamar Arena during the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, where they eventually took the bronze medal.

As one of the press covering those Games, I was privileged to see history recreated in that homely arena. The performance was totally assured, wonderfully realised. Of course, for the British pair, the exercise was devoid of the numbing pressure which had attended them a decade earlier when they had arrived in Sarajevo as world champions and huge gold medal favourites.

For Torvill and Dean, skating Bolero in Norway was a palpable release after the tortuous - and torturous - process of the preceding six months, during which they had sought to gauge the new mood within the sport, and most critically amongst the judges, after ten years' absence on the professional circuit.

The International Skating Union (ISU), which had seen much colour, variety and interest drain from the sport following the British pair's retirement from the amateur ranks in 1984, had allowed for their return - and that of other vivid stars such as Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt - with a change of the rules ahead of the Lillehammer Games.

The professionals came back. The TV figures rose. Everyone was happy.

Except that Torvill and Dean, patently, were not happy. Despite returning in triumph to a sweep of perfect 6.0 marks at the British Championships in Sheffield, their re-introduction to international competition, at the 1994 European Championships in Copenhagen, proved a confusing experience for them both.

They won the title in Copenhagen - their fourth European success - but only after a convoluted process in the final free dance section, which they had entered in joint second position.

After their triumph in Sarajevo, there had been much grumbling within international skating circles that Torvill and Dean had innovated beyond the scope and spirit of the rules. Sour grapes or not, the emphasis changed to a more regulated approach.

It didn't matter to them, as they toured their ice dance show around the world. But when they stepped back into Olympic-style competition, they were faced with the awkward task of relearning how to pitch their routine to a new rank of judges, amid an atmosphere in which many begrudged the return of the professional razzmatazz performers to the Olympic arena.

Thus the British pair's routine in Copenhagen was technical and relatively conservative. But when the young Russian pair with whom they shared their joint-second placing, Oksana Grishuk and Evgeni Platov, won the free dance section with an exuberant, rock and roll display the 1984 Olympic champions - then in their mid-30s - were suddenly left looking out of step.

Bizarrely, although the young Russians won the final event, they were only placed second overall, with gold going to Torvill and Dean on the basis that they earned more second place votes in the free dance than the other Russian pair who had entered the final phase as leaders, Maya Usova and Alexander Zhulin.

When Dean was told by reporters that they could not fully understand the scoring, he responded with a grin: "Join the club."

Media questions about whether Torvill and Dean were or were not an item had been asked over a period of many years during their career, and the erotic intensity the couple brought to the Bolero routine in Sarajevo, performed on Valentine's Day, led to some very obvious lines of enquiry.

Asked if they now planned to get married, Dean replied - mischievously - "Not yet", which, as Torvill wryly acknowledged in the BBC documentary, got everyone into a right old tizzy, as they had no intention of doing any such thing.

But they have remained ambiguous on the matter of their personal relationship. Dean has been married twice - to the Canadian skater Isabelle Duchesnay from 1991 to 1993, and, in October 1994 - eight months after Lillehammer, to US skater Jill Trenary, with whom he has two sons although the couple are now reported to have parted amicably. Torvill, meanwhile, has two adopted children with her husband Phil Christensen.

While marriage has remained a media mirage, however, Torvill and Dean have, down the years, appeared and acted almost as a married couple might. Their habit of finishing each other's sentences was marked in 1994, although in the aftermath of their baffling Copenhagen victory I heard them chime in differently when asked if they would have altered their programme had they known how the judging would go.

They responded in unison. "Perhaps" said Torvill. "Yes" said Dean.

Less than a month later, after sweated hours at the Milton Keynes ice arena, they had transformed 80 per cent of their free dance routine - "Let's Face the Music and Dance". But the old certainty had gone. It was as if they went to the 1994 Games in a customised Bentley, with gaudy spoilers trailing from the back bumper.

A decade after being toasted by Princess Anne, cardboard cups featured at another moment in their competitive lives - but this time it was a low one as they sat in the little canteen at the Hamar Arena having finished a demoralising third in the compulsory figures which opened their Olympic ice dance event.

Torvill and Dean take stock after their disappointing performance in the opening, compulsory figures section of their Olympic return at Lillehammer in 1994 ©Getty Images

As they sat facing each other at the plastic table with their cardboard cups in front of them, they told the few journalists who had spotted them there that coming back had been a miscalculation.

"If we had known before what we know now, we would not have come back," said Dean. "We are positive about what we can do. But it's not a question of getting to the line faster than someone else. It's about impressing nine judges and sensing what their general mood is."

They sensed resistance, too, from competitors who had grown up in a sport where Torvill and Dean had been merely an Olympic legend, but who now faced them again. "I don't think it's us..." Torvill said. "It's just professionals. It's just a feeling..." "Like you shouldn't be here," Dean completed the thought.

That day, The Sun carried its cruel headline: "Torvill and Has-Been." Dean asked us, plaintively: "Do we look old out there?" No one actually answered. It put you in mind of Jay Gatsby...

This will not be the first return to Sarajevo for the pair. They revisited the city in the late nineties, after the long, bitter war had finally subsided, viewing the devastated apartments which had housed the Olympic Village and listening to stories from inhabitants about the deadly business of how life had gone on under constant sniper fire from the surrounding hills.

Sarajevo women await evacuation from the shelled city in November 1992 ©AFP/Getty Images

The performance on February 13 is intended to raise funds for Sarajevo's hosting of the 2017 European Youth Olympic Winter Festival, involving young athletes from among the 48 member nations of the European Olympic Committees (EOC).

"If we can, in some small way, attract a bit of attention for them, it will be worthwhile," Torvill said. "Plus it will be fantastic for us personally to be able to go and do that there."

So now Sarajevo, and the wider world, awaits another sublime sequence of artistry.

Dean recalls clearly his thoughts as he and Torvill took to the ice before that climactic Olympic performance of 1984:  "There is no turning back. This is the time. This is the moment .,."

Thirty years on, another showpiece moment awaits them. Important, but less critical than the first in that locale. "In our heads," said Dean, "that day will always be our perfect day."

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, covered the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics as chief feature writer for insidethegames, having covered the previous five summer Games, and four winter Games, for The Independent. He has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, The Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. His latest book Foul Play - the Dark Arts of Cheating in Sport (Bloomsbury £12.99) is available at the insidethegames.biz shop. To follow him on Twitter click here.