While some still hold the superstition that Friday 13th is an unlucky day, Matt Weston wholeheartedly disagrees, winning Team GB their first medal of the Milano Cortino Winter Olympics, after nearly a week of competition.
Weston, 28 years old, won gold in the Men’s Skeleton, making him the first British man to win gold since 1984, when Christopher Dean and Jayne Torvill won with their bolero in ice skating and the first individual gold-winning British man since Robin Cousins in 1980.
Producing four nearly faultless runs, with the exception of a brush to the wall in-between turns two and three in Heat 1, Weston proved to be dominant in this competition.
Never leaving the top of the table over the two days of competition and setting new track records with each run, Weston finished with a time of 3:43.33, more than 0.88s quicker than Germany’s Axel Jungk, who finished in second. Doubling the advantage he had going into the last run over Jungk, Weston proved his class, setting the new track record of 55.61s.
Filling out the podium was Germany’s Christopher Grotheer in third.
After previous medal hopes diminishing in the forms of Kirsty Muir, who finished just outside of the podium in free-ski slopestyle, Lilah Feahr and Lewis Gibson’s hopes for bronze slipping with a small mistake on a spin sequence in their free dance routine and Jen Dodds and Bruce Mouat losing against the Italian mixed-doubles team in a bronze medal fight, Weston finally gave Team GB their first medal of the games.
Weston is now the reigning Olympic, World and European champion in the Men’s Skeleton.
Looking to the Mixed Team Skeleton event on Sunday 15th, he instilled Team GB with hopes for another medal.
Making its debut at the Olympics, Mixed Team Skeleton stirred much excitement. Team GB had two teams in this competition, one comprising of Marcus Wyatt and Freya Tarbit, and the other of Matt Weston and Tabitha Stoecker.
The different start procedure from the usual 30s window to start, which allows the athletes to push the sled back and forth to create a counter movement to begin their sprint, was changed to a beep, which made reaction time crucial and proved to be a stickler for some.
Among the two false starts of the competition was Janine Flock, this year’s Women’s Skeleton gold-medallist, which took Austria out of the running for the medals. Tarbit and Wyatt had great runs between them, with Tarbit putting down the fastest run, 1:00.47, of all the women competing.
While a podium position looked on the verge, they narrowly missed out, finishing fourth with a time of 1:59.65, 0.11s behind Jacqueline Pfeifer and Grotheer in bronze medal position.
Both the bronze and silver medallist for the men’s event and the silver medallist for the women’s in Susanne Kreher laid down the gauntlet to Tarbit and Weston. Stoecker had a conservative reaction time of 0.3s, one of the slower of the competition, and ended her run 0.3s behind the leading pair of Jungk and Kreher, leaving Weston with it all to do.
Weston took this challenge head on, producing the fastest reaction time of the competition of 0.12s, and already at the first checkpoint, he had closed the gap from 0.3s to 0.05s.
The next posted a time of –0.06s, and the third and fourth –0.l1s, and the fifth at –0.16s. When he crossed the line, he was 0.17s quicker than Jungk and Kreher, setting a new track record for the mixed skeleton of 1:59.36s.
Winning his second gold medal, and Stoecker her first, they became the first champions of this event.
This made Weston the first British person to win two gold medals in the same Winter Olympics, making history and solidifying his dominance over such a talented field.
Image credit: Unsplash
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