Silver for 4-man team in Igls
Great Britain made it three medals in their last three World Cup races as they won 4-man silver in Igls on Sunday.
Brad Hall, Taylor Lawrence, Leon Greenwood and Arran Gulliver backed up the team’s gold in Winterberg a fortnight ago and bronze in St Moritz last week as they clocked a two-run time of 1 minute 40.73 seconds in Austria.
Only back-to-back Olympic Champion Francesco Friedrich finished above the Brits as Hall and his team stayed second in the overall world rankings at the halfway mark of the eight-race season.
With Greg Cackett suffering an injury in training that ruled him out of the race, GB fielded a crew that had never competed together but they still recorded the third fastest start time in Run 1 and the fourth quickest in Run 2.
Hall, Lawrence, Greenwood and Gulliver clocked 5.07 and 5.05 seconds off the top, with Hall showing incredible consistency in driving his team to runs of 50.37 and 50.36 seconds at one of the shortest tracks on the circuit.
GB beat the two other German sleds, with Johannes Lochner taking bronze and Adam Ammour finishing fourth ahead of Italy’s Patrick Baumgartner in a 25-strong field.
It means Hall and co are 23 points ahead of Lochner and 51 clear of Ammour on 819 points, with Friedrich the front runner on 885 with two races in St Moritz and two more Lillehammer left of the World Cup campaign.
“We’re really pleased with silver here today, to be fair. We had to make changes to the crew with Greg being injured so to pull out two really good starts & two really solid drives when this team have never raced together is a big plus,” said Hall.
We’ve said that we want to win every race we take part in (and that’s genuinely how high are standards are now) but we’ve got to be happy with another medal. We went one better than last week and we’re showing the kind of consistency that we want ahead of next year’s Olympics.
The GB2 crew of Adam Baird, Luka Williams, Olly Butterworth and Alex Cartagena were 12th at halfway but dropped to 18th after the second run.
Baird and his crew came down in 1 minute 41.79 seconds, with the four sleds directly ahead of them no more than six hundredths of a second quicker than the British team.
Hall and Lawrence also made the wider podium in Saturday’s 2-man race when they finished fifth at the same venue.
The British pair sat sixth after the first run having clocked 51.2 seconds and they jumped a spot in Run 2 after coming down in 51.26.
Baird and Austin Milward finished 22nd in a time of 51.88 seconds off the 24th fastest start of 5.33 seconds.
German sleds swept the medals just as they did in the 2-man in Moritz as Lochner took gold ahead of Friedrich and Ammour. America’s Frank Del Duca was fourth.
Adele Nicoll and Kya Placide are competing for GB in the women’s race on Sunday afternoon, with Nicoll having placed 15th in the monobob in a time of 1 minute 49.71.
