CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 16 (Reuters) - The Olympic skeleton programme produced three historic racing moments as Matt Weston became the first British man to win gold, women’s champion Laura Flock claimed a first female medal for Austria and Britain - with Weston - won the first team relay.
It also provided one of the most controversial stories of the Games as Ukraine's Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified for refusing to not race in his "helmet of remembrance".
Weston’s singles victory made Britain the most successful nation in the sport at the Olympics – some achievement for a country without a sliding track – but most of the previous medals, including three golds, had come on the women’s side.
He arrived in Cortina as the three-times World Cup champion expected and expecting to shift that balance sheet, and he did not disappoint.
Weston said he had taken important lessons from 2022 in Beijing, where he finished 15th in the only Games that Britain has failed to medal at, and by the time he lined up at the start this year he had learned to embrace the favourite’s tag.
The pressure had been ramped up even more by Britain’s failure to find a medal anywhere else in the Games before his race, but he delivered a superlative performance, setting the track record four times in a row.
In one of the quotes of the Games, Weston said that if it looks as if he is doing nothing then things were going well, and that was exactly the image he projected with a series of silky-smooth runs where there was barely a twitch from any part of his body – all at 80mph.
That serenity disappeared in an instant as he climbed off his sled and collapsed to the floor in relief. "I just saw green and I just started crying straight away," he said. "The emotions just hit me like a flood."
Germany’s Axel Jungk took silver for the second successive Games, ahead of compatriot and defending champion Christopher Grotheer.
Flock was also consistency personified as she provided one of the great redemption stories of the Games at the age of 36.
Eight years ago she led going into the final run but slipped to fourth to miss a medal by two hundredths of a second.
With ninth and 10th-placed finishes in 2014 and 2022, this felt like her last realistic chance of an Olympic medal, and she grasped it with both hands.
Starting with a track record of 57.22 seconds, she followed up with 57.26, 57.26 and, in a nerveless final run, 57.28 for a commanding victory.
"I felt incredibly comfortable from the very beginning and never doubted that I could win here," she said after holding off German duo Susanne Kreher and Jacqueline Pfeifer.
The action ended with the inaugural running of the two-person mixed relay, when Weston somehow dragged Britain back from fourth place after Tabitha Stoecker's run to claim an incredible second gold and make him the first Briton to win two medals at a single Winter Games.
Remarkably, the pairings of Jungk and Kreher and Grotheer and Pfeifer all reprised their individual medal positions with only one-hundredth of a second separating them.
Although Weston, Stoecker and Flock will no doubt feel otherwise, in years to come the Cortina skeleton programme is nevertheless likely to be remembered more for Heraskevych's disqualification for breaking the rules on athlete expression despite a late intervention by a tearful IOC president Kirsty Coventry to try to change his mind.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Hugh Lawson)
