CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Austria's Janine Flock finally erased her Pyeongchang pain on Saturday when, at the age of 36, she won the Olympic women’s skeleton singles with a performance of masterful consistency and iron nerve.
Flock, who led going into the final run eight years ago but slipped to fourth to miss a medal by two hundredths of a second, made no mistake this time to win a first women's skeleton medal for her country.
Germany's Susanne Kreher took silver, three tenths adrift, ahead of compatriot Jacqueline Pfeifer. Another German Hannah Neise, who won gold in Beijing as a 21-year-old, finished fourth.
Flock is the first Austrian woman to win a skeleton medal and the country’s second skeleton medallist after Martin Rettl took a men’s silver in 2002. She is also the oldest winner of the women's event that joined the Games in the same year.
Flock had a dream start to the night as she went out first on the third run and posted the same time as on her second on Friday – 57.26 seconds – marginally behind the track record she set on her first run and a level of consistency nobody else could match.
She then sat back and watched the three Germans who had been breathing down her neck overnight all lose ground with scruffy third runs and suddenly she had a 0.21 cushion over Kreher, with Pfeifer and Neise looking out of the fight for gold.
Flock could be forgiven for being nervous as she contemplated her final run. In Pyeongchang she somehow found herself leading despite not managing a top-two finish in any of her three runs.
She had a scratchy run then, slipping to fourth, but now, a more mature athlete with three overall World Cup titles to her name, she was bang on the money with a 57.28 - making all four runs within six hundredths of a second of each other.
Her times were all the more impressive given her shocking starts, where she was regularly among the very worst of the 25-woman field this week but routinely made up the time with her calm, smooth negotiation of the technically challenging upper half of the new Cortina course.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Ken Ferris and Toby Davis)
