Strictly's Amy Dowden vows to win this year's competition

Strictly Come Dancing's Amy Dowden has vowed to bring home this year's Glitterball trophy.

The highly-coveted reality TV prize was most recently won by Coronation Street actress Ellie Leach and her professional partner Vito Coppola, who saw off some stiff competition in Bobby Brazier and Dianne Buswell, and Layton Williams and Nikita Kuzmin in last month's grand finale.

Dowden, meanwhile, spent the entire 2023 series - save a couple of special cameos - back at home battling breast cancer after being diagnosed several months prior to Strictly's start. "After having a mastectomy, chemotherapy, fertility treatment, the lot, I am now finally looking ahead to 2024 and I've just got a good feeling it's going to be my year and hopefully, I'm going to get that Glitterball and I'm going to bring it back to Wales because a Welsh professional dancer's never won the show," she told BBC Radio Wales listeners.

"That might be because I'm the only ever Welsh professional dancer to be on the show. But, yeah, that's my aim for 2024, to get fit and healthy and to get myself back on that Strictly dancefloor."

Up until now, the closest Dowden has come to Glitterball glory was when she performed alongside CBBC presenter Karim Zeroual five years ago, finishing in second place behind Kelvin Fletcher and Oti Mabuse.

As for the dance choreographer's chemotherapy journey, close friend Sara Davies (who competed in Strictly 2021) revealed to Loose Women's Ruth Langsford how she played a big part in Dowden's decision to go ahead with the treatment. "I know you're friends with Amy Dowden, lovely beautiful Amy from Strictly, and she was rather reluctant, wasn't she, at first to have chemotherapy?" asked Langsford during a December episode.

"Do you know, I was with her when she was making that decision," replied Davies, who is one of the investors on Dragons' Den. "And I remember, because she'd had the mastectomy straight away, she kind of felt like 'well, they've taken it away, so that's finished, that's the end of it. I don't want to have chemo, I don't want to lose my hair, I won't be able to dance on Strictly this year.'

"But the doctors were saying she should, and I said, 'Amy, if the doctors are saying you should, you really need to do it. This is a life-changing thing, if this is what they're saying you really need to embrace it.' The chemotherapy was as terrifying as the other C-word she was dealing with in her life."

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