Kirsty Chick and Darren Dyke competing at the World Games in Taiwan. (0837595)

DARREN DYKE and Kirsty Chick did the island and Great Britain proud when they came fourth in the World Games 2009 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

It was a great honour for the Guernsey couple to represent GB as, like the Olympics, this event is only staged every four years.

Dyke and Chick qualified for this event at the World Championships in 2008, which were also held in Kaohsiung.

After training hard both on the rink and at King’s leisure centre, the Sarnians were well prepared for the competition ahead.

‘The event was well organised and we had official translators from the local university who are studying English and two security guards who checked transport safety and made sure we were on the right coach for our event,’ Dyke said.

‘Amazingly they seemed to pop up whenever we had a little wander outside the rink.’

On the first day of competition Dyke and Chick performed a very strong and authentic original dance to tango and flamenco rhythms.

They were last to skate this discipline and their top mark awarded was 8.6.

Highly delighted with their marks, this placed them in fourth position, with the Italian world champions in first place at this stage.

The second day of competition was the couples’ freedance routines, which as the name suggests is the skater’s choice of music.

Dyke and Chick performed to the latin rhythms of samba and rumba. A very lively samba was followed by an expressive and flowing rumba, which gave them a top mark of 8.7 from the Italian judge.

With this the Sarnians maintained their highly creditable fourth place.