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2 weeks ago
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And on the seventh day, Great Britain finally won their first medal of the Olympics. At nine o’clock on Friday night Matt Weston, the man his teammates call “Captain 110%”, won the gold in the men’s skeleton after four faultless races across the two days of competition.
The 28-year-old broke the track record at the Cortina Sliding Centre four times in the space of four races, and won in a final combined time of 3min 43.33sec, almost a full second ahead of the runner-up, Germany’s Axel Jungk. Weston is the first British man ever to win the Olympic skeleton title. And he did it all despite starting the year with a four-inch tear in his right quad that meant he had to miss pre-season training.
“It means everything. It means a hell of a lot to me personally, I’ve worked so hard for this,” Weston told the BBC before the medal ceremony. “But everyone back home – my fiancee, my family, my friends, everyone who has sacrificed everything for this. I’ve missed funerals, birthdays, everything for this moment. It feels amazing.
“Even if you’re not part of my close circle, if you play the national lottery you are supporting me as well so thank you so much. Hopefully I did you proud!”
Weston, who is the first British man since Robin Cousins in 1980 to win an individual gold, has now won the European title twice, the world title twice, and the World Cup title three times. His gold is the fourth in skeleton for Britain after Lizzy Yarnold (2014 and 2018) and Amy Williams (2010).
This win means Great Britain are now the most successful Olympic nation in this curious sport, which was invented by Englishmen looking for something new to do on their holidays in St Moritz in the 1920s. The country has now won a total of four gold, one silver and five bronze medals altogether.
Eight of those 10 medals have been won this century, after the UK started pumping money into the sport back in the early 2000s, when they built a practice track at the University of Bath. Weston and his teammate Marcus Wyatt, who finished ninth, have had the benefit of the best coaching and technical support in the sport.
It shows, even if it’s hard to see on TV. “If it looks like I am lying there doing nothing it means I am doing everything right,” Weston said before coming out to these Olympics. His body may be moving at 80mph, but his mind is working in slow motion as he shifts his weight to make the minuscule adjustments he needs to stay on the right line around every bend.
He is moving so fast that a lot of this is done subconsciously. He has a map of the track in his mind, but he relies on his proprioception, the body’s innate ability to sense its own position and movement, to feel his way down around it.
Weston says it’s a skill he first learned competing in martial arts. “You have to make sure your reactions are good for that, otherwise you get punched in the face.”
When he was a kid, Weston was ranked second in the world in taekwondo. He won a silver at the Under- 17 World Cup in 2012. If you’d asked him then, he would have told you he saw himself competing in taekwondo at the Grand Palais during the Summer Olympics in Paris two years ago. But he had to give the sport up when he fractured his back in a training accident.
He played county level rugby for a few years on the wing. He is, you guess, one of those people who was always going to be an athlete of one sort or another. But it was only when he found skeleton racing through a talent ID programme that he found his calling.
“I distinctly remember the first time I tried it,” Weston said, “and for the first 10 metres I was thinking, ‘I’ve got no brakes so I’m going to the bottom whether I like it or not’. It was terrifying but as soon as I finished I wanted to go back and do it over again. I had the bug.”
Weston has spent a decade chasing after the perfect race. “It’s so hard to describe,” he said. “We work on such fine margins that it is so hard to be perfect, it’s like floating, it’s so smooth it’s almost calming, everything fits, everything clicks, like doing a jigsaw puzzle and picking up the right piece every single time. Everything floats, nothing is rushed, it’s an amazing feeling, and hunting for it is what keeps me going. I’ve been doing this nine years and I’ve had one or two runs that have been close, but never perfect yet. No one knows if it is possible or not.” It’s hard to believe he will ever come closer to it than he did here in Cortina.
Weston will race again in the mixed team event on Sunday, in which he will be paired with the fastest of the three British athletes competing in the final races of the women’s event on Saturday. That looks likely to be Tabby Stoecker, who was in fifth place after the first two heats of the competition.
She had been third after the first run, but made a bad mistake coming into the second half of the course. It left her half a second behind the leader. “I think I just need a good meal, a good sleep, some analysing with my coaches, and then to come back tomorrow,” said Stoecker, “because it’s definitely not over.”
