Team GB’s Matt Weston broke the track record in Cortina d’Ampezzo twice as he made a winning start to his Olympic skeleton campaign.
The Brit is in pole position to bring home the country’s first medal of this Games, leading by 0.3 seconds after the first two heats.
The remaining two heats on Friday will decide the medals – and it looks like it’ll be gold for Weston.
The 29-year-old is the reigning world and World Cup champion, having won five of the seven races on the World Cup circuit this season. The remaining two were won by his teammate Marcus Wyatt, another medal contender.
Weston is a two-time world champion in the individual event, having won it first in 2023 before reclaiming the title in 2025, and a three-time world silver medallist in the mixed event, in which he could also win a medal in Cortina.
He is also a double European champion – in 2023 and 2026 – and three-time overall World Cup winner, the first British man to win it three times.
He is arguably the most overwhelming Team GB favourite for gold over this entire Games, but he has also competed to a high level in two other sports.
As a youngster the Tunbridge Wells native competed in taekwondo at a national and European level, winning international honours for England, before a stress fracture in his back at the age of 17 forced him to retire from the sport.
At the same time he was also an excellent rugby player, playing for Kent and Sevenoaks RFC as well as a Saracens Academy college.
In 2017 his weightlifting coach suggest he enter a UK Sport talent identification programme called Discover Your Gold, which was the first time he encountered skeleton.
He trained with the Royal Marines during his transition into the sport and first competed in 2019, winning two Europa Cup titles – the second tier of skeleton – in his first three races.
He won his first World Cup medal, a silver, in Innsbruck in 2020, on his fifth start on the elite circuit. Gold followed in November 2021 – GB’s first World Cup gold in 14 years.
But he endured disappointment in his first Olympics, in Beijing in 2022, when he finished 15th and reportedly considered quitting the sport after GB won no skeleton medals for the first time since it featured in a Games.
However he continued to compete and was rewarded with his first world title in 2023, when he became Britain’s first skeleton world champion since Kristan Bromley in 2008, and he has since become a hugely dominant force on the World Cup circuit.
In January this year he won his second overall World Cup title and he is already Britain’s most decorated slider at world championship level; all that is missing is Olympic glory.
