Which Winter Olympics introduced ice dance as a medal event in figure skating?

The 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck introduced ice dance as an Olympic medal event in figure skating.

Held in Austria from 4 to 15 February 1976, the Games marked the first Olympic competition for ice dance. The discipline differs from pairs skating because it emphasizes rhythm, musical interpretation, close footwork, and dance holds rather than jumps and lifts. Its roots lie in ballroom and social dance on ice.

The first Olympic ice-dance champions were the Soviet pair Ludmila Pakhomova and Aleksandr Gorshkov. They had already won major world titles and helped establish the technical and artistic style that shaped the event. Ice dance later became one of figure skating's four Olympic disciplines, alongside men's singles, women's singles, and pairs.

The frequent confusion is between 1976 and 1984. Ice dance debuted as a medal event in 1976; the 1984 Sarajevo Games are remembered for the British champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean and their famous perfect-scoring Boléro routine.