Team silver for Weston & Stoecker
Matt Weston added World Championship team silver with Tabby Stoecker to individual gold in the United States in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Weston came within a whisker of a double gold in Lake Placid as he and Stoecker missed top spot by just a tenth of a second.
The GB1 team clocked a combined time of 1 minute 54.53 seconds, with Stoecker coming down fourth fastest of the 17 women in 58.31 seconds off a 0.24 reaction start and Weston registering 56.32 from a 0.19 reaction as the third fastest of the men.
Weston and Stoecker, who also won silver in this event at last year’s World Championships in Winterberg, were only beaten by home favourites Ro Mystique, the silver medalist in yesterday’s women’s race, and Austin Florian, who was sixth in the men’s competition.
Fellow Brits Marcus Wyatt and Amelia Coltman initially appeared to have finished fourth in a time of 1 minute 54.92 seconds but they were later disqualified for a weight infringement.
Coltman came down in 58.51 from a 0.16 reaction and Wyatt in 56.41 from the same reaction time as Weston. The GB2 pair, who won gold in the team event in the last World Cup race of the campaign a month ago and were fourth at last year’s World Championships, were just 0.11 seconds from the podium prior to the DSQ.
China’s Dan Zhao and Qinwei Lin took bronze, finishing 0.18 seconds behind Weston and Stoecker after Zhao produced the fastest individual time of the day.
Having won all four team titles since the event’s inception in 2020, Germany had to settle for fourth and joint fifth this time around. Reigning Olympic Champion and 2024 World Champion Christopher Grotheer and his compatriot Jacqueline Pfeifer, herself a former World Champion in both the women’s and team events and an Olympic silver medalist, were 13 hundredths shy of the medals, with Axel Jungk, who won bronze behind Weston and Wyatt in the men’s race on Friday, and Susanne Kreher, who won individual and team gold at the World Championships in 2023, a further 0.22 back.
The team event, which makes its Olympic debut in Milan Cortina next year, sees one male and one female slider get one run a piece, one after another. That’s in stark contrast to the individual events at a World Championships where medals are decided over four runs across two days of racing.
The other major difference is at the start of the race, with athletes reacting to a timing system similar to sprinting and Formula One rather than beginning whenever they want within a set timeframe.
GB finish the skeleton section of the biggest event outside the Olympics with a total of three medals - gold and silver for Weston and Wyatt in the men’s event and today’s silver for Weston and Stoecker in the team competition.
World Championship schedule
All times are GMT
Thurs 6 & Fri 7 Mar
Men's Skeleton: Weston 1st; Wyatt 2nd; Bostock 18th
Women's Skeleton: Stoecker 8th; Coltman 14th; Tarbit 18th
Sat 8 Mar
2-man Bobsleigh Runs 1&2 2pm
Women's Monobob Runs 1&2 7pm
Sun 9 Mar
Skeleton Team Event: Stoecker & Weston 2nd; Coltman & Wyatt DSQ
2-man Bobsleigh Runs 3&4 2.30pm
Women's Monobob Runs 3&4 7.30pm
Sat 15 Mar
4-man Bobsleigh Runs 1&2 1pm
Women's Bobsleigh Runs 1&2 6pm
Sun 16 Mar
4-man Bobsleigh Runs 3&4 1pm
Women's Bobsleigh Runs 3&4 6pm
