Matt Weston has ended Team GB’s wait for a medal at the Winter Olympics with a record-breaking run in the men’s skeleton – and made history, too.
Tunbridge Wells’ Weston, the pre-event favourite for gold, and ahead after day one, put down a marker of 53.63sec as he opened Friday’s session and, in his final run – the last of the competition – he clocked 55.61 for an overall time of 3min43.33sec in Milano Cortina to take his maiden Olympic title in style.
He is the first man to win skeleton gold for Great Britain, with bronzes for Dominic Parsons (2018), John Crammond (1948) and David Carnegie (1928) the previous bests, and joins fellow Kent slider Lizzy Yarnold, who won back-to-back skeleton titles in 2014 and 2018, as an Olympic champion.
Last week’s ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that Team GB’s new helmet design was illegal was a distraction most athletes could do without. But Weston, coming into the Games after another red-hot World Cup campaign where he secured his third title in a row last month, was in a class of his own.
After a track-record 55.88 on his second run on Thursday, Weston began day two with a 0.3sec lead over Germany’s Axel Jungk, with fellow Briton Marcus Wyatt down in seventh and defending Olympic champion Christopher Grotheer third. But he still had to deal with the pressure of getting the job done on the biggest stage of all – and made it look easy – unlike four years ago in Beijing when he finished 15th.
Going first on the penultimate run, Weston flew around the track in another track-record time and then watched on as his rivals tried – and failed – to overhaul him before closing the event in champion fashion.
Team GB’s mixed skeleton campaign will take place on Sunday, while Thanet’s Taylor Lawrence begins his bid for bobsleigh success in the two-man on Monday.
