Thanet’s Taylor Lawrence missed out on an Olympic medal after Team GB’s four-man bobsleigh crew finished seventh at the Cortina Sliding Centre.
Brakeman Lawrence, along with pilot Brad Hall, Greg Cackett and Leon Greenwood, went into Sunday’s gold-medal run joint sixth after a heat-three effort of 54.66 – 1.23sec off pacesetter Johannes Lochner of Germany and three-tenths from bronze.
But they couldn’t climb the standings with sights set on an improvement on their sixth-place finish – featuring Lawrence – from Beijing 2022.
With the pressure on for their final attempt Team GB needed the best of starts and they once again hit 4.78sec – doing so in all four runs – but Lawrence got his foot caught during the loading phase and it needed quick reactions from Cackett to pull it in.
Once up and running the British crew had a faster first four split times than Cedrec Follador of Switzerland, who was quickest so far of the final runners. But improvements of 0.10sec, 0.12, 0.10 and 0.04 were as good as it got and the last two split zones were in the red for a run of 55.03 totalling 3min39.12sec.
Team GB’s time was 0.48 slower than Switzerland’s Michael Vogt and crew in bronze and 1.55sec off winners Lochner, Thorsten Margis, Jorn Wenzel and Georg Fleischhauer.
Another German line-up, Francesco Friedrich, Matthias Sommer, Alexander Schuller and Felix Straub, were second.
