Weston and Stoecker win GB’s second Olympic gold of day

Team GB made history by winning two Winter Olympic titles on one day for the first time as Matt Weston and Tabitha Stoecker clinched mixed team skeleton gold.

It came after Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale won the snowboard cross mixed team event earlier on Sunday.

Weston produced a stunning race to make more of his own history in Cortina – he is the first Briton to win two gold medals at a Winter Olympics having claimed individual gold just two days ago.

Stoecker, 25, had given Weston a tough task with her run of 1:00.77, 0.30 seconds off the pace of the Germans, with the British pair – ranked top seeds – the last to run.

But 28-year-old Weston, who won Team GB’s first medal at the Games, showed why he is the best skeleton racer in the world with a sublime 58.59secs run to clinch a second medal with a final time of 1:59:36.

It is also the first time Great Britain have won three gold medals at a single Winter Olympics.

“The individual event is amazing but doing it as a team when we’re normally an individual sport is amazing,” said Weston.

“To have my team-mate by my side as Olympic champions, two-time for me which is crazy. I’m looking forward to the celebrations!”

The mixed event, making its debut at Milan-Cortina, sees the sliders hurtle down the track one after the other with a quick reaction time crucial as five red lights going out prompts them to set off.

Pushing off before the lights go out results in heavy penalties or even disqualification and that led to many of the sliders erring on the side of caution with some hesitant starts.

Janine Flock, who won gold on Saturday in the women’s event, blew the Austrian team’s chances when she incurred a one-second penalty for reacting too soon at the start, opening the door for both British teams to get on the podium.

Two-time world champion Weston came into this Games stating that only gold would be good enough and he will now walk away as the most decorated man in British Winter Olympics history.

After finishing 15th in Beijing four years ago, Weston’s rise in the sport has been meteoric and his two Olympic golds add to the three Crystal Globes – overall World Cup titles – he won consecutively from 2024.

Former bobsledder John Jackson, Olympic bronze medallist in 2014, said: “Weston has been the cream of the crop of anybody on this track. We are witnessing history right here.

“He just keeps raising the bar to new standards, and that was absolutely nail-biting stuff when Tabby didn’t quite have the run she wanted to give him a chance. Weston absolutely destroyed the field.”

As Sunday’s competition got increasingly exciting, building to a gripping finale, it was Weston who once again stepped up, having broken the track record in all four runs of the individual event, he produced another immaculate run to turn it into a Super Sunday for GB.

“Luckily I felt like I knew what I needed to do,” Weston told BBC Sport.

It took Team GB a week of action in Italy to get their first medal on the board after a series of fourth-place finishes and near misses from the nation’s other medal contenders.

But securing two gold medals in one day – with Bankes and Nightingale’s a first ever on snow – certainly goes a long way to improving the landscape.

While the one in Livigno came as a surprise, Weston and Stoecker’s in Cortina marks a return to the norm for Team GB on the skeleton track.

The British team have a long history of Olympic skeleton success but a disastrous Games in 2022, where they failed to win a medal for the first time since the sport was reinstated at the Olympics in 2002, is now proving to be an anomaly.

Weston was the heavy favourite coming into the men’s event on Friday and he clinched gold with a winning margin of 0.88secs – the second-biggest in skeleton history.

Then, although the British trio of women – Stoecker, Tarbit and Amelia Coltman – did not finish on the podium, they all ended inside the top 10 at their debut Games.

Wyatt, who finished ninth in the men’s event, said: “Me and Matt were there in Beijing [2022] and it was good to come and prove that that was a blip and not a trend.