Hall talks Cortina reflections
With the Olympic Games now more than a month in the rear view mirror, Brad Hall has gradually come to terms with the disappointment of results in Milan Cortina and is now able to look back on the whole Olympic cycle with an immense sense of pride.
Hall piloted the GB 4-man team to seventh spot in Italy in February, having earlier finished 12th in the 2-man event after an injury concern saw Taylor Lawrence withdrawn halfway through the race.
Those results fell short of the expectations held by the team prior to the Games, particularly in the 4-man event given that they had twice won Overall World Cup medals; been crowned the country’s first European Champions; won a first 4-man World Championship medal since the Second World War; and celebrated multiple World Cup race wins since over a four-year period.
Hall and his team of Leon Greenwood, Lawrence, Greg Cackett and Olympic reserve Alex Cartagena genuinely believed they could return from Cortina with silverware and the 35-year-old admits that missing out was tough to take.
“It’s just over a month now since the Olympics ended and I’ve had some time to process what happened and the results we came back with,” said Hall.
“It’s not been an easy time, particularly straight after the race when we knew that the dream of an Olympic medal was over for now.
“It was obviously hugely disappointing at the time to finish seventh. It definitely wasn’t what we wanted and we feel that we could have done much better.
We’d showed we were better than that on so many different occasions during the cycle but it was an incredibly tough season and we struggled to find the podium all year. We felt we were getting better again as we got closer to the Games, though, and we were confident we could produce a big performance in Cortina but, unfortunately, that didn’t happen.
“We did our best, and that’s all you can do at the end of the day. We tried everything possible and we fought until the last moment but that’s the way sport goes sometimes. It’s not what we wanted but we’ve got so much we can be proud of over the last four years and we need to remember that.”
Brad Hall piloted GB to numerous top-tier medals this cycle
Those four years featured some incredible moments for Hall and co as they won no fewer than 22 World Cup race medals and made the Overall World Cup podium in the 2-man, 4-man and combined disciplines in both the 2023 and 2025 seasons.
They secured Great Britain’s first 4-man World Championship medal for 84 years in 2023 in St Moritz, having taken home the European title on German ice in Altenberg a few weeks earlier, and they won a handful of World Cup 4-man golds, even though the country had previously only ever taken top spot once in the blue ribband event.
“If you’d have told me four years ago after the Beijing Olympics what we’d be able to achieve over this Olympic cycle, I wouldn’t have believed you,” added Hall.
“To be European Champions, win World Championship medals and do everything else in between, is something for the whole team to be very proud of.
We didn’t achieve what we wanted in February but we shouldn’t focus just on what happened in Italy - we have to remember the good things we’ve done since Beijing, too.
“We won’t allow ourselves to get bogged down too much with what happened at the Olympics. That’s gone now. We’ll review in depth and look to see exactly where we could have done better and what we can do moving forward, but we can’t dwell on the result. We know how good we are and how good we’ve been and we hope that there’s more to come.”