Great Britain’s most successful Winter Olympics in history reached new heights on Sunday as skeleton racers Matt Weston and Tabby Stoecker clinched gold in the mixed team event.
The result meant that day nine of Milano-Cortina was Team GB’s most successful ever at a Winter Games, with two gold medals won in the space of around five hours, having never previously won more than one gold on a single day.
29-year-old Weston has made history twice at these Games, winning Britain’s first men’s skeleton Olympic gold on Friday before becoming the first Briton to win two medals at the same Winter Olympics today.
Stoecker is an Olympic champion on her first appearance, improving on her fifth-place finish in the women’s event.
Weston and Stoecker were the last team to set off in the inaugural mixed competition on a freezing night at the Cortina Sliding Centre. Stoecker was in the green for the first half of the track but lost time further down, leaving Weston with a 0.3 second deficit to overhaul.
And claw it back he did, with the pair setting a new track record time of 1:59.36, 0.17 seconds ahead of the German pair of Susanne Kreher and Axel Jungk, who added team silver to both their individual silvers.
After a slow start to this year’s Games GB enjoyed a ‘Super Sunday’ with Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale winning the country’s first ever gold medal on snow earlier in the mixed snowboard cross.
Britain’s second pair, Marcus Wyatt and Freya Tarbit, finished fourth in Cortina. Tarbit slid superby to shave 0.3 seconds off the previous leading time, set by China, with Wyatt maintaining their lead to shoot to the top of the standings.
The pair set a then-track record time of 1:59.65 and watched on nervously as Kreher and Jungk set off.
Kreher finished a mere 0.12 seconds down on Tarbit and Wyatt crossed his fingers in the leader’s area as Jungk pushed off. The German clawed back precious milliseconds over the second half of the track, where he has been particularly strong this year, to push the British pair down the order by 0.12 seconds and guarantee a medal.
Germany’s Jacqueline Pfeifer and Christopher Grotheer – who both took bronze in their individual events – claimed another bronze, finishing 0.01 seconds down on their compatriots.
The mixed skeleton event sees the female athlete race down the track with the male athlete following immediately afterwards and their times added together, with the lowest aggregate time determining the winning team. Unlike in individual events made up of four heats, every team only gets one run, with time penalties imposed for false starts.
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