How British skeleton came back fighting after 2022

Matt Weston was lost.

His maiden Olympics, at Beijing 2022, hadn't gone the way it was supposed to. Just months earlier, he had won a first skeleton World Cup gold and was a genuine medal contender.

The latest in a long line, too. British sliders - including two-time champion Lizzy Yarnold - had won a medal at every Winter Olympics since the sport was reinstated to the programme in 2002.

But 20 years later, that run had come to a disastrous end. Weston's 15th-place finish was the highest of the four British athletes competing on the Yanqing track.

Blame was laid firmly on their equipment - a risk was taken with their sleds and "it didn't pay off".

"In this sport the fine margins are everything and you have to take risks to be the best, but sometimes that will come back to bite you and it came back to bite us at the biggest event of my career," Weston, 28, told BBC Sport.

"I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. As a child you think 'I want to be an Olympian' and that it's going to be the best experience of my life, but I came back and felt it wasn't how it was meant to be."

Four years on, Weston is back at his second Olympics and things are very different - 'helmet-gate' aside.

He is a two-time world champion, a multiple World Cup gold medallist - and will have one of the sport's greats on his side when competition gets under way on Thursday.

Because when Weston was pondering his future, conversations were happening behind the scenes.

Martins Dukurs - widely regarded as the greatest slider to ever take to the ice - became Great Britain's new coach.

A six-time world champion with more than 60 World Cup victories to his name, Dukurs retired after the Beijing Games and his capture as a coach - alongside that of his own coach and sled designer Matthias Guggenberger - by the British team was a major coup.

"This is just a massive bonus to a good package that we already had, this is the icing on the cake," said Weston.

"Martins is the best ever at what he's done. His experience is invaluable."

Team-mate Marcus Wyatt added: "[Dukurs] is almost bigger than skeleton.

"He is the GOAT [greatest of all time]. He's won more World Cups than some people have taken part in, he's really special and just to have him happy enough to coach us, it gives you so much more confidence in yourself."

So what was it about the British challenge that attracted Dukurs to the role?

"I saw that there was potential," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.

"We needed fast results because we saw the athletes had lost a bit of confidence, and in professional sport confidence it is really important."

In the aftermath of Beijing, the skeleton programme had a drop in UK Sport funding - from the £6.5m they received for the 2022 cycle, to an initial £4.8m for 2026 - though this later rose to £5.8m.

It was a blow after such huge success in the sport. No nation has won more Olympic skeleton medals than Great Britain's nine, an astounding feat given the country's lack of ice track - a push track at the University of Bath, shared with the bobsleigh team, their only practice space on home soil.

"This is what they've achieved without a track, it's actually amazing," said Dukurs.

"Any time I needed I was jumping on a sled, I was testing equipment, and unfortunately they don't have such opportunity."

The British squad have not let that count against them, though.

In addition to his two world titles, Weston also has three Crystal Globes - overall World Cup titles - to his name.

Wyatt has won four individual World Cups, while this season both he and Tabby Stoecker won overall bronze medals.

And together Weston and Stoecker have won two World Championship silvers in the mixed team event, which will make its Olympic debut on the Cortina track.

The team's build-up to the Games has been overshadowed by a debate over new helmets they had been hoping to wear. They eventually lost their appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas).

But they have not let it affect them, with Weston and Stoecker both topping multiple training runs.

So why are Great Britain so good at skeleton?

The athletes all point to one specific weapon in their armoury - each other.

With no ice track, the British squad have had to find their advantage elsewhere and that has largely come in their camaraderie.

"We only get to slide down an ice track about 120-150 times a year. Each run is less than a minute, so you're looking at less than two hours actually doing the sport every year," said Wyatt.

"But if you talk to other athletes, learn from their experiences and share what you're doing, suddenly you've doubled, tripled, quadrupled your knowledge.

"The day before a race, I might be struggling on a corner, so I ask Matt: 'What are you doing on corner four?' He tells me, I try that, it works for me, and lo and behold when the race comes, I might beat him.

"That's fine, because he knows that next week when he's struggling somewhere else, I'll help him out and he might beat me."

Weston added: "On the track, [Wyatt's] the first person I want to beat, I'm the first person he wants to beat.

"But when we're training, when we're working stuff out, we work together so well, and I think that's what separates us apart [from the rest]."

Between them, Weston and Wyatt won every men's World Cup this season - the first time one nation has done so.

It bodes well for the Winter Olympics, with the skeleton action getting under way on Thursday, and there is only one potential outcome in Weston's mind.

"My sights are set on gold. That's the only colour I want to come home with," he said.

"It sounds funny saying this as a two-time world champion, but I don't really feel like I've been able to put down what I really feel like I can.

"There's more in there."