Brotherly love a required element for some skaters

Israeli ice dancer Roman Zaretsky knows exactly what people are thinking when they see him and his sister skating hand-in-hand or doing a seductive tango.

Double ick.

"The romance part, it's hard to show because it's programmed in your head this is your sister," he said. "So it's hard to act."

Anyone with a brother or sister knows there are times you don't even want to talk to them, let alone gaze into their eyes longingly and convince people you mean it.

For four of the 23 ice dance teams at the Vancouver Olympics, however, there's no choice.

Joining the Zaretskys - Roman and Alexandra - in Monday night's free dance are Britain's Sinead and John Kerr; Japan's Cathy and Chris Reed; and Germany's Christina and William Beier.

Brother-sister acts are nothing new in figure skating. French ice dancers Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay added the silver medal at the 1992 Albertville Games to the world title they had won a year earlier. American siblings Kitty and Peter Carruthers were silver medalists in pairs at the 1984 Olympics.

But when most fans think of pairs or dance, they like to imagine blissful love stories like 2002 Canadian pairs gold medalists Jamie Sale and David Pelletier or recent Vancouver pairs gold medalists Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo. The fact that they touch almost constantly when they're on the ice, often wear skimpy outfits that leave little to the imagination and skate to romantically themed music only adds to the illusion.

"You probably don't see so many brothers and sisters who hold hands every single day," said Cathy Reed, who has been skating with her brother for nine years.

But there is an upside for keeping it in the family.

One of the keys for a successful dance or pairs team is similar physical characteristics: body shape, lines, coloring. When you come from the same family, the odds are pretty good that's going to be there. Sinead and John Kerr hardly look like twins - she's blonde, he has dark hair. But their similar lean physiques and proportions make them a perfect fit.

As for that ick factor, the siblings all say they've learned to work around it.

For example, Sinead Kerr said she was working with her "skating partner," not her little brother, when they finished Sunday night's original dance - intertwined, opposite each other and leaning back, with him straddling her torso and sitting on her thighs while she clutched his waist.

"On the ice, we don't think of each other as brother and sister," she said.