The fine margins of a magical Winter Olympics leaves Team GB with a huge question

At the end of Milano-Cortina, the Olympic magic is back for Team GB, writes Flo Clifford in Italy, but a series of near-misses will only fuel the fire ahead of the French Alps 2030

Balancing at the top of a chute of snow and ice, high in the Italian Alps, Zoe Atkin plugged in her tunes and dropped. The 23-year-old was beaming before she even slowed to a halt at the bottom of the half-pipe, a bronze medal already in the bag. She jumped for joy before the tears began in earnest on the podium, a lifetime dream fulfilled.

A little over 12 hours earlier, GB’s quartet of curlers tried to hold back their own tears, collecting medals 200km away in Cortina. They had been the better team for much of an edgy final against Canada, but walked away feeling like they had lost gold rather than won silver. It remains to be seen whether the four will reunite for one more go in the French Alps, the next bonanza of winter sport, in four years.

Those medals contributed equally to GB’s tally at what can safely be described as the nation’s best-ever Winter Olympics, but also encapsulate the feeling of what might have been.

From a purely statistical point of view, both those realities coexist. A 15th-place finish in the medal table is GB’s best-ever at a Winter Games. The five-medal total matches the record haul from Sochi 2014 and Pyeongchang 2018, but the three golds won marked a breakthrough, with GB having never won more than one at a single Games.

Matt Weston was the driving force behind Team GB’s best-ever Winter Games (AP)

Those golds in themselves encompassed the full sporting spectrum. Matt Weston went into the men’s skeleton as the overwhelming favourite, and withstood the peculiar weight of Olympic pressure that caused other favourites at the Games, from Ilia Malinin to Mikaela Shiffrin (in the Alpine combined), to combust. He then went on to replicate that success in the mixed event with Tabby Stoecker, turning a 0.3 seconds deficit into a 0.17 winning margin, his formidable self-belief probably as big a factor as his unmatched skill at sliding downhill.

On the flip side, Charlotte Bankes recovered from crushing disappointment at two Games in a row in the individual event, and all the pressure she piled on herself, to win mixed gold with Huw Nightingale, turning around her Olympics after a couple of consolation pints.

Dr Kate Baker, UK Sport’s performance director, described Milano-Cortina as “far and away our most successful Games ever, both in terms of total medals achieved but also the number of Olympic champions”.

She said: “We are absolutely delighted with that. But we’re also really delighted about the amount of talent that is showing behind them, ready for the French Alps.”

Some of that talent is youngsters competing at their first Games, like ice dancers Phebe Bekker and James Hernandez, who produced career-best performances this time around and are expected to rise through the ranks over the next four years.

Zoe Atkin won bronze on the final day of the Games (Getty Images)

But there are others who came close but narrowly missed out in Italy, who go away with scar tissue as well as nothing around their necks. As well as a record three golds, GB also picked up a record five fourth places.

Freeskier Kirsty Muir, at 21, has already been to four Olympic finals but finished an agonising fourth in both the Big Air and slopestyle in Livigno, and was in floods of tears after being just 0.41 points off bronze in the latter.

Her teammate and close friend Mia Brookes was a bit more chipper after achieving the same result in snowboard Big Air, having gone for broke with a huge jump that had never been landed before in Olympic competition.

But the result still represents an unfortunate gap between how well GB’s snowsport stars in particular have performed in recent seasons, and between how things have panned out on the day, once every four years. GB’s men’s curling squad, of Bruce Mouat, Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan will feel that pain intensely, having been the best team in the world for the past two years but second-best when it mattered most.

GB's curlers were left fighting back tears after losing out on gold (Getty)

Team GB’s chef de mission Eve Muirhead, herself no stranger to Olympic heartbreak having taken four goes to win gold, said: “We always speak about jeopardy in sport and I can relate to it, and it is incredibly hard to win Olympic medals. It really is. I think if you look at that team during the week, I think mid-week they would have grabbed the silver medal with both hands, but when you get to the final unfortunately just those last few ends kind of slipped away from them.

“Not getting your Olympic dream is really difficult. It will hurt for a while and I think that’s just natural. But I do hope they take some time and then actually realise how far they have come as a team and what an incredible season they’ve had.”

While several Brits have simply fallen the wrong side of winter sports’ infamously fine margins, in other cases questions can, and should be asked, over how effectively UK Sport’s £25m-worth of funding is used; £3m of that was pumped into bobsleigh over the past four-year cycle and GB’s sleds failed to be competitive. Less than £2m went into all of figure skating, short track, and speed skating, the latter two sports which the Netherlands and Italy heavily targeted and hoovered up medals in. Australia invested £17m into their Olympic programme, £8m less than GB, and came away with six medals – one more.

Baker said: “There’s a finite envelope of money, so we have to make some really difficult choices about where we invest and where we don’t. But of course you can’t get overnight success in any sport and I think the days of there being low-hanging fruit as medals are completely gone. That just doesn’t exist anymore.

Bankes and Nightingale won Britain's first ever Olympic gold on snow (David Davies/PA)

“So when we invest, we invest for the long term. We currently invest in speed skating. Like with every other sport, we will go through a review process with them and look at the signs of potential. And if we think there’s potential there to go forward with any sport then we’ll absolutely support them to do that, assuming that we can afford to do so.”

UK Sport’s review of funding for the next Olympic cycle won’t take place until the summer. But beyond questions of funding and statistics and cold, hard numbers, this Olympics recaptured some of the magic that was missing in previous Winter Games, held in the sterile, cold vacuum of Covid-19, and in unfriendly time zones for a huge European and North American audience.

The sweeping, dazzling white slopes of the Italian Alps and jagged peaks of the Dolomites provided a dreamy landscape to feats of almost incomprehensible athleticism and fearlessness.

Even more so than the Summer Games, the Winter Olympics are an astonishing show of mental and physical strength: the belief and sheer bloody-mindedness needed to dedicate years to the most niche of sporting pursuits, with very little of the glamour or money or exposure that summer athletes earn.

And the fact that 3,500 people have already signed up for UK Sport’s Talent ID days, inspired by GB’s success on the sliding track, indicates that some of that magic will linger long after the athletes fly home.