Just as Team GB was beginning to fret about these Winter Olympics, the brilliant blue and white blur of Matt Weston passed head-first through a chute of ice at close to 80mph. By the time he stopped sliding, he was a gold medallist.
Has anything sweeter ever been delivered on a tea tray? Or with better timing?
For one long week, the skidders and skaters of Britain have missed their targets here in Italy, and for four years longer Weston has sought redress for the difficulties he faced on the skeleton track at Beijing 2022.
He had thought about quitting after that grimmest of Olympic debuts, when he was 15th and his sled was dog slow. But sporting redemptions can come in many forms and none is finer than that which glows gold.
And so, when he was done, with his fourth track record from four runs in Cortina, he lay flat on the ice a while before he removed the second most-discussed helmet of the Games and cried his eyes out.
‘It means everything,’ he said, once he had composed himself somewhat. ‘I’ve worked so hard for this but everyone back at home, my fiance, family and friends have sacrificed for me to be here. I’ve missed funerals, birthdays, everything for this moment and it feels amazing.’
Matt Weston dominated the skeleton event, beating his rivals by a huge margin to take gold
Weston, 28, kissed and embraced fiancée Alex Howard-Jones after the race
Weston is the first Team GB athlete to win a medal at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics
The 28-year-old appeared emotional as he celebrated a dominant victory on Friday night
Weston blew the rest of the field out of the water, winning gold by a huge margin of 0.88sec
To the two world titles and three World Cup series wins Weston has collected since 2023, he had added the grandest bauble in his sport.
And to the lineage of Lizzy Yarnold and Amy Williams, we can add a 28-year-old from Redhill, who never once contemplated this strange line of work until 2017, when he chanced upon a talent ID day hosted by UK Sport and they felt he had the speed, height and power metrics to fit their need.
Through the sliding doors of that moment walked a champion-in-waiting, secured across three minutes, 43 seconds and 33 tenths in Italy. Each of his four runs was quicker than the last, culminating in the descent of 55.61sec that sent him to the top of a podium. Marcus Wyatt, his team-mate with whom he has had to share a bed on some trips, was ninth.
Together they have dominated the sport in the past year and, Beijing aside, that’s fairly typical for Britain. Within the winter garden, the skeleton is seen as low hanging fruit and, in truth, that is fair – how many skiers and snowboarders are there worldwide for every one of these pilots?
But you still have to win and Weston has upheld his side of the bargain, which will be a relief to those who signed over £5.7million of lottery funding in this cycle. We should take that sentiment and double given one of the challenges that surfaced here, given the embarrassment caused when the Team GB cohort were told on the eve of the Games that their expensive new helmet design did not comply with the rules.
Not the only helmet story here, of course. And certainly nothing compared to the dramas of Vladyslav Heraskevych. But a word on Weston: he said he’d feel pretty good about his chances with the older one.
And a word on pressure. He faced plenty of it and encouraged it, too. When we spoke last month, he said the only thought on his mind was gold.
After day one, he was in position for it after going fastest on each the first two runs, but still he had to sleep on it. Funny things can happen to a mind when it has time to wander. Not Weston, evidently.
He returned to the chute with a 0.3sec lead over Germany’s Axel Jungk, the silver medallist from 2022, and a shade clearer of Jungk’s team-mate Christopher Grotheer, the defending champion, but the question was how would he react to their presence?
The answer was to break his own track record and increase his lead over Jungk to 0.39sec. Climbing off the ice, he screamed: ‘Yes!’
He was almost there. Just one more sprint of 30metres into his launch, like all those thousands he had rehearsed on a dry push-start in Bath, and just one more trip through those first three turns, which have stumped him a little all week.
Deal with those and he could feel his way through the rest. So he did. By the end, the clock showed a winning margin over Jungk of 0.88sec. In our world, that’s the blink of an eye. In his, it was gold by a snowy mile.
Weston was supported by his fiancee Alex Howard-Jones in Milan. The pair are due to wed in the summer, and she insisted she never lost faith in Britain’s new hero.
She said: ‘It feels amazing to be honest. I’d told you that he’d get a gold and he did. We couldn’t be prouder.’
Weston celebrated with his fiancée and his family, who were in Cortina to support the star
The star shared an emotional hug with Howard-Jones, and parents Alison and Tom
Weston stood atop the podium on a chilly Cortina night as he made history in dominant style
The British star on the podium along with silver medallist Axel Jungk (left) and bronze medallist Christopher Grotheer
Weston dropped to the track at the Cortina Sliding Centre after his superb victory
Dad Tom Weston added: ‘He’s definitely that good. I knew he’d be very close, at least second. Absolutely proud of him.’
Double Olympic champion Lizzy Yarnold, a pundit in the BBC studio, broke down in tears while discussing Weston’s superb victory.
Weston came into the second day of the men’s event with a healthy 0.30 lead over the rest of the field, after clocking 56.21 on run one before improving to 55.88 in his second.
He extended his advantage to 0.39 following his third run of 55.63 and ended 0.88 ahead of Axel Jungk of Germany, who took silver, while Jungk’s compatriot and Beijing 2022 champion Christopher Grotheer claimed bronze.
Weston’s triumph comes after days of agonising heartbreak for Team GB, who were backed with £25million worth of funding for this Olympic cycle.
Freestyle skier Kirsty Muir, snowboarder Mia Brookes, and curlers Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds had all finished fourth in their respective events, before ice dancers Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson also blew a chance to win a medal.
But Weston had no such problems as he became just the 13th British athlete to ever win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. Team-mate Marcus Wyatt finished ninth.
The build-up to the event for Weston and Wyatt had been dominated by a row over the British team’s helmets, which were ruled illegal.
The British pair instead reverted to the helmets they used to dominate the 2025-26 World Cup season – Weston won five of seven races and Wyatt the other two.
The skeleton competition itself was overshadowed by the controversial disqualification of Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych, who was sensationally thrown out of the event for trying to wear a helmet depicting athletes killed in the war with Russia.
Heraskevych appealed the decision but the Court of Arbitration for Sport on Friday rejected his claim.
Weston is engaged to Howard-Jones, chief operating officer and founding member of pltfrm search, a specialised executive search firm based in London.
The pair are set to get married in July and both share a ten-year-old cocker spaniel named Logan.
The Team GB star is the first man to ever win the men’s Olympic skeleton title
Weston with his gold medal at the ceremony after his win in the men’s skeleton event
He finished first after each of the four runs, breaking the track record in every one of his slides
Weston started his sporting career in a completely different field. Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, he used to take part in competitive taekwondo.
He won gold and silver medals at the European Cup in 2012 and silver and bronze medals at the International Taekwondo Federation World Cup in 2014.
However, he retired from the sport at just 17 years old due to a fracture in his back.
Instead, he focused his attention on rugby representing Kent, Sevenoaks RFC and Saracens Academy College.
He was eventually introduced to skeleton in 2017 by his weightlifting coach Chris Dear through the British Skeleton Discover Your Gold talent identification scheme.
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To prepare for the sport he completed a training period with the Royal Marines to test his physical and mental fitness.
He made his competitive debut in 2019 at the Europa Cup in Winterberg, Germany, placing 15th, before winning a silver medal in Igls, Austria, and a bronze in Altenberg, Germany.
In 2021, he won a gold for Great Britain at the men’s World Cup – the first win in the sport for almost 14 years.
After nearly quitting following a disappointing Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and with a new coach, he won the European title in 2023 and a week later became world champion, before retaining his title in 2025.
