The Times - UK (2022-02-21)

the times | Monday February 21 2022 63

Sport

Muirhead found

redemption after

the agony of 2018.

Inset, with her

team-mates (from

left) Wright, Dodds,

the reserve Mili

Smith and Duff

cruelty – and frozen private parts

came to feel like the soundtrack of these
Olympic Games, Kirill Richter’s haunt-
ing “In Memoriam”, an obituary to — to
what? — to clean sport? To innocence?

johannes bo
The Norwegian won four golds and a
bronze in the highly compelling, and
little known in these parts, sport of
biathlon. Biathlon is the one where you
do cross-country skiing and, on occa-
sions, stop for a spot of rifle shooting. In
other words, it is James Bond meets the
five rings. Bo, 28, was Beijing’s 007.

lindsey jacobellis
Particular admiration goes to the old
dame of snowboard cross, which is
really a sport for kids. Jacobellis, the
36-year-old
American,
should
have won
gold in
2006
but fell
over
when showing off
with the finish line in
sight and she has had to live
with that ever since. Redemp-
tion arrived here, 16 years later,
when she kicked the backsides of
the children and won not just the
one gold but two.

The flame was put out at the Beijing

Winter Olympics yesterday evening,

bringing to an end a trying fortnight for

an underperforming British team.

However, despite coming up short of

expectations on the medal table,

pledges were made by the British team

leaders yesterday to keep on funding

winter sports and, if anything, to

increase the size of the investment.

The medal range projected for this

team had been between three and

seven. Yet they were still empty-handed

until the final weekend when the men’s

curlers won silver followed by the

gold-medal performance from the

women’s team yesterday.

However, no one here was pretend-

ing that, overall, these two medals

represent anything other than a poor

return for the £23 million spent on this

team. “We feel disappointed,” Sally

Munday, the chief executive of UK

Sport, said. “We recognise, though, that

no one will be more disappointed than

the athletes themselves.”

She also said that the team were like

“a wounded lion. We will go away, we

will lick our wounds.”

However, before UK Sport confirms

this apparent commitment to roar back

stronger and more successful, the

evidence of the past fortnight suggests

that maybe Team GB would actually be

better served if they returned with

scaled-back ambitions that reflect the

reality of the status quo at home.

Day after day, here in Beijing, we

have seen repeated evidence of how

hard it is to do battle with nations who

have the basic advantage of mountains,

snow and ice. How else would Norway

have found their way, again, to the top

of the medal table? And is it really such

a surprise that the only sport in which

Team GB were competitive here —

curling — is the only one that is a

community sport with community

facilities and a large number of players

in Britain?

Curling shows that proper funding

(£5.26 million) can create a high-

performance environment that enables

talented athletes to go toe to toe with

the rest of the world. But you need that

pool of athletes. The curling pool is

almost entirely from Scotland, where

children grow up playing, competing,

learning, putting in the hours — all the

basic ingredients for talent to surface

and then be transformed into success.

Curling can prepare properly this

way. There are 70 ice rinks in the

country, so in theory, the skating

sports — figure skating and short-

track — could do the same. How-

ever, there are few ambitious

clubs in either sport and a

limited high-perform-

ance culture. Yes, it

might be doable but that

would require a grass-

roots transformation;

maybe in a decade’s time

those sports could interest the elite-

funding end of the spectrum, but that is

irrelevant for now.

Where we do not have those pools of

athletes, it feels like Team GB are on to

a loser — and an expensive one. It has

seemed here, from day one, that expec-

tations were set too high. Gold medals

and “medal hauls” have become

familiar over recent winter Games, but

that has been largely built upon — and

thus distorted by — the success of the

skeleton project.

Skeleton has done amazing things,

providing Britain with a gold medal at

each of the previous three Games. It has

shown how, if you spot an opportunity

where an Olympic sport has little com-

petitive depth, then some smart

investment can pay off. But here in

Beijing, the skeleton project — which

cost £6.425 million over four years —

achieved nothing: 15th, 16th, 19th and

22nd-placed finishes. It is surely now

time to say congrats to skeleton and

thank you, and then close that chapter.

Munday said yesterday that there

would now be “an emphasis on invest-

ing in sports with an existing domestic

footprint”. This is a policy that should

be applauded. Yet it means that

skeleton’s funding must come to an end.

It is impossible for young people to take

up skeleton in the UK because there is

not a single ice-track facility. The

domestic footprint does not exist.

The argument does not run quite so

clearly with snow sports. There are six

snowdomes in the UK, 53 dry-ski

venues and some occasional proper

skiing in Scotland, which isn’t quite

Norway or the Alps, but these are facili-

ties that have produced the likes of the

inspiring 17-year-old freestyle skier,

Kirsty Muir, and generate a lot of public

uptake. So there is some potential here.

Still, though, £9.5 million remains a

huge spend when the odds are so heavi-

ly stacked against success.

The numbers overall demonstrate

how far so many British athletes were

from the podium. From a team of 50,

there were only 15 top ten finishes;

there were 17 who finished outside the

top 25.

That doesn’t mean that Team GB are

sending out to the Games anyone and

everyone they can; quite the opposite.

Every Olympic sport has its own

athlete eligibility criteria, but Team GB

set tougher standards because they

don’t want no-hopers, or “Olympic

tourists”, as they have become known.

Indeed, ten British athletes were denied

spots in this Olympic team purely

because of these more stringent selec-

tion criteria.

The questions

that need to be

asked are not

about those

who get to go

to the Games

but about the

public money

that gets invest-

ed in the ath-

letes before

they ever

get to the

point of selection.

This “domestic

footprint”

has to be key.

Spend only

on winter sports that can be done

properly in the UK — and that

really isn’t very many.

We leave Beijing feeling that two

British medals was not enough.

Really, for a non-winter sports

nation, why should we be expecting

any more?

Sport

Time to end expensive

fixation with skeleton

Britain has little chance

of glory at these Games

so why not pump cash

into accessible winter

sports, says Owen Slot

vance to show that they do not run

Uyghur labour camps. Transparent;

shameful.

peng shuai

The Chinese tennis player, 36, was

paraded around the Olympics like an

exhibit — to show a disbelieving world

that she is happy and healthy. Few

believed it. It’s hard to believe, too, that

even the tone-deaf Thomas Bach, the

president of the International Olym-

pics Committee, thought it a smart

move.

zoe atkin

There were a number of lame perform-

ances from the British team. Making

mistakes is one thing; not actually,

really, properly going for it is another.

Atkin, 19, had two falls in the halfpipe

and then, for her third, choked com-

pletely and laid down a run so conserv-

ative that she never gave herself a

chance of getting near the medals.

remi lindholm

The winter Olympics is supposed to be

cold, but this was dangerously so — the

men’s 50km cross-country was short-

ened to 30km, and the Finnish skier, 24,

required a heat pack after the race to

thaw out a frozen penis. “When the

body part started to warm up, the pain

was unbearable,” he said.

WORST MOMENTS

kamila valieva

The pressure finally came to bear in

the young Russian’s free skating

programme. We once recognised

Bolero as the soundtrack to Torvil and

Dean — but today it is the music to

which Valieva fell twice, when we saw

the product of all the misplaced

ambition and cruelty that put this girl

on the international stage. Absolutely

heartbreaking.

dinigeer yilamujiang

This young Chinese cross-country

skier was chosen to light the Olympic

flame. The 20-year-old did so even

though she was competing the next day,

which would never, ever

happen — unless

you are a

Uyghur

and your

national

leaders

happen to

believe

that you

can be a

contri-

-old

an,

won

in

showing off

he finish line in

nd she has had to live

at ever since. Redemp-

ived here, 16 years later,

he kicked the backsides of

dren and won not just the

d but two.

though she was competing the

which would nev

happen —

you

U

an

nation

lead

ha

b

t

Valieva became a household

name during Beijing 2022

Scottish freestyle

skier Kirsty Muir

has rare promise

ENRICO CALDERONI/AFLO SPORT/ALAMY