Team gold seals super skeleton start
British Skeleton are celebrating a second gold medal of the day after Tabby Stoecker and Marcus Wyatt triumphed in the team race in the World Cup competition in Cortina.
Stoecker and Wyatt took top spot in the combined event on Friday evening just a few hours after Matt Weston kicked off his World Cup campaign by winning the men’s race.
The British pair clocked a combined time of 2 minutes 1.23 seconds to finish five hundredths of a second clear of Germany’s Jacqueline Pfeifer and Axel Jungk and two tenths ahead of Austria’s Janine Flock and Samuel Maier at the venue that will host February’s season showpiece, the Olympic Winter Games.
Stoecker, who was fifth in the women’s event just prior to the team competition, was the fastest woman in the race in a time of 1 minute 1.31 seconds, while Wyatt was just ninth hundredths from the fastest men’s time of the night in 59.92 seconds.
“It was really exciting to get to do the team race in Cortina given that it’s going to be in the Olympics for the first time in February and it was great to get such an good result,” said Stoecker.
Me and Marcus both laid down really good runs and it felt really good to get some more practice down the Olympic track.
"I feel like I improved from the individual into the team race. You sometimes leave the individual competition with things you want to work on so to get the opportunity to do that in the team race felt really good personally.
“I’ve been working on my reaction start all summer and we saw some improvements there as well so it seems like everything is going in the right direction. I’ve come away with a first place in the first team race of the season and I couldn’t be more proud.”
The GB2 team of Amelia Coltman and Jacob Salisbury placed 10th in the 20-team field in a time of 2 minutes 2.48 seconds.
The team event makes its Olympic debut in 12 weeks’ time and today’s result reaffirms the belief that Team GB can challenge for multiple skeleton medals at the Milan Cortina Games.
GB have won medals in this discipline at each of the three World Championships during this Olympic cycle and will be aiming for more of the same back in Cortina next year.
Attention in Cortina now turns to bobsleigh, with the monobob and 2-man competitions scheduled for Saturday and the women’s and 4-man events taking place on the Sunday.
The World Cup circuit moves to Igls in Austria next week, with races following in Lillehammer and Sigulda prior to Christmas, before Winterberg, St Moritz and Altenberg take us up to the return trip to Cortina in February.
What is the skeleton Team Event?
The team event features male and female sliders from the same country completing single, consecutive runs, with the combined time deciding the finish positions.
Unlike the individual event, the team competition involves a traffic light reaction start that is perhaps best described as a cross between the systems employed by Formula 1 and the sprint events in athletics.
The event will be featured at the Olympics for the very first time in 2026 and, with the top performing nations able to enter two teams, it gives Great Britain a great chance of adding to their Olympic medal tally.
