Great Britain Hoping for More Skeleton Success in Pyeongchang 2018
Having won a medal in every Winter Olympic womens skeleton run since its inception in 2002, Team GB is aiming to once again make history in Pyeongchang.
At the forefront of a British Olympics institution that rivals the mens coxless four for consecutive successes, is Sochi gold medal winner Lizzy Yarnold.
Yarnold is hoping to become Great Britain’s first ever winter athlete to successfully defend a Winter Olympic title.
Against her, yet another British stalwart, Welsh skeleton bob athlete Laura Deas, aiming for a medal in her first Winter Olympics. The two will come face to face this week at the Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Cup in Lake Placid.
So what has made the British women’s team so successful at the Winter Olympics? The simple answer is funding and the history with the discipline.
Historically, Great Britain has not challenged the winter giants in the medal table like they have in the summer Olympics and funding for disciplines is based off the back of these successes.
Getting to the Winter Olympics is now a serious financial business. Gone are the days of possibly Britain’s best known winter athlete Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards, self-funding and self-training himself to the ski jump competition at the 1988 games. Now to qualify for the games an athlete has to have a world ranking, the correct equipment and the money to fund their trip.
Team GB’s love of the event started in Salt Lake City in 2002 where Alex Coomber took bronze in the first staging of the event at the Winter Olympics for women. An RAF pilot from Oxford, Coomber managed to use lottery funding to get herself and her £4,000 sled to the competition.
This was backed up four years later in Torino when Shelley Rudman went one better and won Team GB’s only medal of the games — a silver in the skeleton. Like Coomber, Rudman self funded her trip to the 2006 games thanks to her home town raising enough money to support her.
As a result of these successes, UK sport gave £2 million worth of funding to skeleton bob for the Vancouver 2010 games. Their faith in the sport was repaid when Amy Williams won Great Britain’s first ever gold medal in the event, a seminal moment for British sport.
By the Sochi games in 2014 the snowball effect was well and truly in full effect as funding increased exponentially and Lizzy Yarnold defended Williams’s title.
UK sport has given £6.5 million worth of funding to skeleton over the past four years, double the amount as the previous Olympic term. Unlike Williams, Yarnold wil travel to South Korea next February to attempt the defence of her title. Alongside her, thanks to UK sport’s funding, 29 year old Laura Daes is aiming for the podium.
Speaking to the BBC, Daes said: “I totally believe that if it’s my day I can win a medal. I’ve stood on a World Cup podium plenty of times and it’ll be the same field of competitors.” If she were to finish on the podium, she would be the first ever Welsh Winter Olympic medlaist.
The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea runs from the 9–25 February 2018.
