Winter Olympics: What is skeleton and how does it work?

Everything you need to know about Britain’s most successful winter sport

Team GB have multiple medal hopes in skeleton at this Winter Olympics (Getty)

Flying face-first down an icy chute at speeds of up to 150km/h: skeleton certainly isn’t for the faint of heart.

The death-defying Olympic sport also happens to be Team GB’s most successful, with Britain having won at least one skeleton medal at every Olympic Games the sport has featured in, bar Beijing in 2022.

Skeleton originated over 100 years ago, when a few Swiss dare-devils started racing down icy mountain slopes on toboggans.

While the sport has evolved over the years, the basic premise has remained the same: get down the track as quickly as possible. And the stakes have only got higher as speeds have increased and technology has improved.

How does skeleton work?

A skeleton race begins with an athlete making a running start, pushing their small sled - essentially a metal tray on two steel runners - with either one or two hands towards the first timing wand, 15m from the starting block.

They must then jump onto the moving sled and speed down the track, steering it down ‘straight aways’ and through high-speed, hair-raising turns.

Athletes wear a full-face fibreglass helmet, aerodynamic race suit, gloves and special shoes with spikes on the bottom to allow for grip at the start, when they sprint before jumping onto the sled.

Speed and power are of the essence: the best athletes can run 50m in five seconds, and many - including 2010 Olympic champion Amy Williams - were runners before transitioning into winter sport.

The athletes also pull around 5G of force - five time the force of gravity - on the steeply sloping, fast track.

Skeleton world champion Matt Weston and teammate Marcus Wyatt both have potential to win in Milan-Cortina (Getty)

How do athletes steer?

Athletes lie prone, head first, with their arms by their sides and their chin barely above the ice, and use their shoulders, knees and toes to manoeuvre the sled down towards the bottom. There is no mechanical steering.

A sled has no brakes, so the athletes come to a halt at the bottom due to gravity as the track levels out, and there are sometimes foam pads or fresh snow to bring them to a complete halt.

What skeleton events are in the Olympics?

Athletes compete in separate men’s and women’s categories and there is an additional mixed event which is making its debut at this Games, featuring one male and one female athlete.

In the mixed event the women start first and the men second, with their times added together to determine their place in the overall standings. The team with the lowest combined time is the winner.

At World Cup level there are two heats per competition, both on the same day, but at the Olympics and World Championships there are four heats in every discipline over two days.

The athlete with the lowest combined time in all four heats is the winner.

GB’s Matt Weston in action at the world championships (Getty)

Pressure, angles, and split-second decisions

Former gold medallist Williams, who is also covering the Milano-Cortina skeleton and other sliding events for broadcaster TNT Sports, broke down skeleton to its basics for The Independent.

She said: “Skeleton has a powerful start where the sled is on the ice. You are sprinting next to the sled, normally holding on with one hand, sprinting as powerfully as you can, then very gracefully loading onto the sled because you can pop out of a groove there. Get into that perfect body position, as aerodynamic as you can, and then you are steering that sled down the corners.

“You steer by using your shoulders, pushing into the sled, and that will change the direction. Just a tiny little head movement, or you might see someone drop a toe or their leg come out a bit for more of an emergency steer - all those fine movements change the angle of the sled.

“You've got pressures in the corner, G-Force pressures up to four or five Gs of pressure, and you are trying to get the perfect angle of the sled when the pressure hits you to be able to get a perfect line out of a corner.

“It's all about angles, pressures, staying aerodynamic and thinking very quickly, because within a split second you've already come into the next corner. You've got to do that consistently on an Olympic race day, two days of racing over four runs, and all those four runs get added up, so you need to be the most consistent slider, and fast, to be a winner.”