Wyatt & Weston add two more to tally
Great Britain’s sensational start to the World Cup Skeleton season saw the team claim two more medals in the final race of the weekend.
Marcus Wyatt and Matt Weston won silver and bronze in PyeongChang on Sunday afternoon to take the team’s tally to six in four races across two days. GB won 50 per cent of the available medals across the weekend on their first top tier return to the home of their historic Olympic hat trick in 2018.
Wyatt and Weston matched their results from Saturday’s season opener, with Freya Tarbit taking gold in Sunday’s women’s race just 24 hours after Amelia Coltman had achieved the same feat.
GB have now hit two thirds of their World Cup medal tally from last season with just two of the eight competitions completed. It puts the team on target to surpass their historic mark of 13 set two seasons ago and comes as somewhat of a surprise given that Coltman was the only one of the four medalists to have competed in South Korea previously.
“It’s been a fantastic weekend for the whole team,” said the BBSA’s Executive Performance Director, Natalie Dunman.
“We came here with a focus on performance over results but we have managed to achieve both.
Winning any medal at this level is incredibly difficult so to come away with six from four races when there were more than 30 sliders in each field is really pleasing.
“All six of our athletes have performed well here (Tabby Stoecker and Craig Thompson were fifth and sixth today respectively) and this weekend has shown that we have real strength across the whole team.
“Huge thanks to our coaching team, too - they’ve been outstanding this week and the strategies they’ve implemented on a track where we’ve got minimal experience have really paid dividends.
“It bodes well for the rest of the season.”
Wyatt missed gold today by just six hundredths of a second as he clocked a two-run time of 1 minute 42.87 seconds.
Weston finished 0.44 seconds further back as he did exactly what he did on Saturday in jumping from 10th after Run 1 to third after Run 2.
Germany’s Christopher Grotheer - the man Weston pipped to the Overall World Cup title in Lake Placid in the final race of last season - took gold for the second successive day. The reigning Olympic Champion therefore leads the standings heading into next week’s competition in China, with Wyatt second and Weston third.
Craig Thompson made it three Brits on the wider podium as he finished sixth in a time of 1.43.49.
Race 3 of the World Cup season takes place in Beijing next Saturday before the circuit moves to Europe for races in Germany and Latvia prior to Christmas.
