BY NISAR KHAN
Team GB brought back a few medals for their efforts in the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. With Curling one of the major break outs, another great performance sees expectations exceeded and a vast increase of interest in winter sports.
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| Team GB won gold in Women’s skeleton. IMAGE COURTESY: BritishSkeleton.co.uk |
Team GB won the equivalent amount of medals that they did in the inaugural Winter Games way back in 1924, ninety years ago. Great Britain took back four medals for their efforts, two in curling, Gold in Skeleton and their first ever medal on snow.
The Sochi games were almost a breakout and resurgence for the Winter Sports, and one profound example of it was Curling. Although their performance was lackadaisical in the Curling Final that saw them miss out on Gold, they still picked up an all important silver medal, while Team GB’s Women Athletes captured Bronze.
Curling’s rapid growth in popularity was helped heavily by the BBC, with “#LoveCurling” hashtags encouraging people to show their love for curling through Tweets and photos. Initially, many seemed skeptical to get into the sport due to the results that seem complicated at a first look. However, the flow of rule explanations among the web showed that Curling wasn’t a complicated nor boring sport, and was arguably the biggest break out sport in the Olympics.
Funding for the Curling will definitely be encouraged following Team GB’s success in Sochi. With two medals taken home, they’ll no doubt be enthusiastic to encourage more into curling and breed the next athletes for Winter Olympics, with new funding announced from the National Lottery fund that could see fit with Curling.
Women’s Skeleton has went from strength-to-strength in the Olympics. In the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, Shelly Rudman took home a silver medal, and that was bettered on four years later by Amy Williams winning Gold – before Lizzy Yarnold’s Sochi triumphs. Despite not having a specific ice track to train for the sport, it looks like the dry tracks in England have been enough to make a big mark on the sport. And it shows how much it is valued, with those three bearing the Union Jack in the three respective closing ceremonies.
Another breakthrough for Team GB would come for the first time, on snow. Jenny Jones had a fairytale win in the Snowboard Women’s Slopestyle after overcoming adversity in her career. With the slopestyle discipline being introduced in these games, Team GB got off to the mark in emphatic fashion with the Bronze.
It’s more than possible that Team GB could go on to break their medal record in South Korea in four years’ time. There was many more athletes featured in Sochi that opened up opportunities, Team GB really took off for Winter Games.
Going forward, the idea is to propel Winter Games into the spotlight where it is more accessible, something of which could be achieved with the funding that has been set following a successful Winter Olympics.
Team GB have exceeded expectations in Sochi, and now in 2018, look to catapult Winter sports into the frame, building a significant foundation for more success to follow.
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