Dom Parsons has secured Britain’s first medal of the 2018 Winter Olympics after claiming bronze in a dramatic finish to the men’s skeleton.
After recording a combined time of three minutes 22.20 seconds, the 30-year-old finished just 0.11 seconds ahead of Latvia’s Martins Dukurs. South Korea’s Yun Sungbin won the gold medal ahead of Nikita Tregubov, an Olympic athlete from Russia.
Parsons is the first British man to win an Olympic skeleton medal since John Crammond in 1948. In his interview after the event, he said it was an “incredible” feeling to finish third at PyeongChang 2018 and a “bit of a rollercoaster.”
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He added: “It hasn’t really sunk in yet. I thought I’d lost it after that fourth run, it felt like it had gone, I thought I’d binned it.
“But Martins Dukurs has made some more mistakes and he’s the last person I’d expect that from – he’s been dominant for so many years. It’s just those little hundredths making a difference, it’s so close at the top. I’m just grateful that I got lucky.”
Winning a bronze was no easy feat. “Four years of work has gone into this, right from after Sochi [2014] when I started working with Kristan Bromley, this has been the goal from that point,” he said. “Sometimes it seemed like it wasn’t that close in coming and it’s just amazing that it’s all come together this time.”
Parsons’s bronze means it’s the fifth successive Winter Games where a British slider has secured a podium place.
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