Meet Britain’s gold medal Winter Olympics hero: Matt Weston talks 90mph skeleton racing – and having to share a bed with his closest rival!

Matt Weston won Britain’s first gold medal at the Winter Olympics on Friday night. Riath Al-Samarrai met him last month.

The British’s best hope for a gold medal at the Winter Olympics is talking about the struggle between art and science as they race down an ice chute at 90 miles per hour. According to Matt Weston, there is only one winner.

‘Art’ he says. ‘Definitely.’

He’ll soon be talking about a man who took a different approach to skeleton racing. The science one. He has the best chance of beating him in Cortina, northern Italy, in the coming weeks.

And this is his teammate Marcus Wyatt. They are so close that they often share a bed, but that’s a story about resources and can wait. For now, Weston wants to pursue art. With feeling. With his poetic approach to life on top of a speeding sled.

‘I stand at the starting line and it’s both exciting and scary,’ he says. ‘I’ve been doing this for nine years and I’ve done a lot of work with psychologists on how to best prepare myself, because you really have to prepare your brain.

The British player dominated the field in the men’s skeleton race in Italy by more than 0.8 seconds to claim victory

‘I had an accident in St Moritz a few weeks ago and it was probably the worst accident I’ve had in years. There’s a famous corner called the Horseshoe and I flew out of there and landed on my side and it was so hard that the steel parts of the sled bent. I still have some pain in my hip right now.

‘But when everything goes well, it’s a beautiful thing, man. How can I describe this for you? It’s like this, it feels like you’re flying, floating in the air.

‘What we tell each other is about being at the very edge of holding on. Just enough grip to make you fast, but not too much to make you slow. When you’re in that sweet spot everything feels so natural.

‘It’s a feeling you live for, and I think I get to experience that once a season. Maybe twice. You’re going so fast, effortlessly, and you’ve got so much adrenaline in your body. My heart rate can go up to 180s and I try to stay calm, feeling the ice beneath me.

‘That’s the art part. Vibrations. There are right lines to go on a track, and if you get it wrong, even if it’s just a little bit, you’re correcting at the next corner, and then the next corner.

‘The thing about ice is that it can change throughout the day and the straight line can change with it. You can methodically figure out how to deal with this, or you can do it by feeling the rhythms and bumps. You know, feeling the sled and knowing what’s right. A little artistic. ‘I love it that way.’

It’s a rare and wonderful thing to hear an athlete talk about his craft this way. And it’s even rarer to speak to a British Winter Olympian with such a good chance of success.

But the skeleton has always found a way to level the playing field against nations that take advantage of the natural ingredients of winter sports.

In many respects it is a discipline adopted by the British – Team GB has taken at least one medal in seven of the eight editions in which skeleton has been included. They aim for this by investing in finding technical superiorities, and so there is a golden lineage running through Amy Williams and Lizzy Yarnold.

Now it’s Weston and Wyatt. Weston, 28, has won two world championships in three years, two European championships in the same span, and recently won his third World Cup series with five wins from seven races. Wyatt won the other two and took the overall bronze medal. So there was a limit to the level of internal anxiety felt over a development in Italy on Wednesday when the new helmets they planned to launch were judged to be non-compatible – a shame, of course, but the team’s belief is that this is unlikely to negatively impact their chances at gold. It may be wishful thinking on their part, but the results on older equipment show that confidence is well-founded.

‘Honestly, I thought about nothing but the Olympic gold medal,’ says Weston.

‘Silver didn’t even get into my brain. Everything I’ve worked on for the last four years is gold. All the world champions, European champions, Crystal Globes, they are all stepping stones to this point.’

It’s a fascinating oddity that Weston’s closest rival is his teammate and is six years older than Wyatt. The details of their relationship may seem unusual compared to what goes on in other sports; This is where sleep comes into play.

‘We end up sharing the same bed most of the time,’ says Weston. ‘The last time it happened was in Sigulda (in Latvia) just before Christmas.

‘We don’t have a lot of money, so for us it’s usually a twin bed bedroom, and in Europe this usually means two single rooms pushed together and difficult to separate.

Skeleton is an adrenaline-filled sport and athletes can reach speeds of up to 90 miles per hour

‘We’re pretty used to each other now, we know each other like routines; There’s his side of the bed, my side, and this whole arrangement. We’re like an old married couple sometimes, to be honest, but we kind of have an unwritten agreement that the races stay on the track.

‘We get along very well. It really is. If Marcus beats me, I’ll be the first to congratulate him, and vice versa.’

It may seem remarkable that these two have climbed so high, given they spent most of their summer and autumn training on a dry track in Bath. “I think athletes from other nations who grew up on ice and snow are a little jealous of our results,” says Weston. ‘We quite liked this.’

However, it would be wrong to portray this as an underdog’s story. Shared beds mark a limit on luxuries, but UK Sport has pumped £5.7 million of lottery funds into the skeleton for this Olympic cycle, and that goes a long way towards buying the best technology for sleds, skinsuits and wind tunnel testing.

Often these factors are very large. But this backfired spectacularly in Beijing 2022. Weston and Wyatt introduced sleds that were game-changing but too slow; They finished 15th and 16th respectively.

Weston, who took up the sport by chance in 2017, suddenly wanted to quit when he was told at UK Sport ‘talent ID’ day that he had the perfect physical attributes to try out. He almost did it.

‘This is 100 percent true,’ he says. ‘It took a pretty big emotional toll as the Olympics were such a disappointment. It was hard to swallow but then I changed my mindset. I just thought, ‘OK, enough wallowing – it’s 2026, let’s go fix this thing’.’

The results show that this artist has found a way to do just that. The results show that it flew with enough grip to maintain control without losing speed during a thrilling descent towards Italy.

Everything is fine, the only person who has a chance of catching her is the man on the other side of her bed.