GB curlers suffer double defeats at Winter Paralympics

The Great Britain mixed doubles wheelchair curlers have suffered a setback in their bid to reach the Winter Paralympic semi-finals after a 10-5 defeat by unbeaten China.

However, a win for Jo Butterfield and Jason Kean in their final round-robin game against hosts Italy on Monday (13:35 GMT) will still secure a last-four spot.

A defeat would leave them having to rely on other results to progress.

The GB pair came into Sunday's match in Cortina full of confidence on the back of three consecutive wins.

And after a dream start, in which they led China 3-0 after the opening end and 5-1 after three of the eight ends, they were dreaming of a famous victory.

But China roared back, cutting the lead to 5-3 in the fourth end before taking a steal of two in the fifth end - where GB had both the powerplay and the hammer - and then showing their skill to take three in the next where GB again had the advantage of the last stone.

Butterfield and Kean were left chasing the game and slipped further behind in the sixth end and when China scored a further two in the penultimate end, they conceded with one end to play.

"Being 5-1 up against China is pretty unimaginable, but this is still a bitter pill to swallow," Kean told BBC Sport.

"We are a good team but in the second half of the match we just lost track of sticking to the basics and we decided to do something a bit different - and as soon as you change what you do, you lose track a bit.

"We have one more game against Italy and will do our best and try to grind out the win."

Butterfield added: "We lost a bit of weight control late on and they found it and it flipped the game on its head.

"We have to take the positives and the fact that we took a good game to them for four ends. We just have to work out how to keep that going if we play them again in the play-offs.

"We more than matched them in the first half and if we play them again, and play the way we did in the first four ends for eight ends, then we can beat them."

Earlier, the mixed wheelchair curling team suffered a heartbreaking 5-4 loss to 2022 Winter Paralympic bronze medallists Canada in their third round-robin match.

The team of Karen Aspey, Austin McKenzie, Stewart Pimblett and Hugh Nibloe led 4-2 going into the final end but failed to execute their last stones and Canada, who had the last-stone advantage, picked up the three they needed to secure victory.

At the Para-snowboarding, Britain's Davy Zyw was taken to hospital as a precaution after a fall during his Snowboard Cross UL (upper-limb) pre-heat.

The 38-year-old from Edinburgh is believed to be the first snowsport athlete with motor neurone disease to compete at the Games.

Team-mate James Barnes-Miller paid the price for a poor opening to his quarter-final in the same division and failed to advance.

"I messed up at the start," he told BBC Sport. "I was trying to chase back down and I messed up at another corner. It wasn't the cleanest, which was a shame because I qualified really well yesterday and it felt good in practice."

Both Zyw and Barnes-Miller will be hoping to compete in the banked slalom events on Saturday along with Ollie Hill, who missed the snowboard cross event after sustaining a concussion in a training crash.

And Scott Meenagh finished a distant 18th in the men's Para-biathlon individual seated event – over eight minutes behind Chinese gold medallist Zixu Liu.