Skeleton at the 2018 Winter Olympics

For the 2018 Olympic Winter Games the Korean authorities built the Olympic Sliding Centre at the Alpensia Resort to host the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events. The track for the Skeleton events measured 1376.38 metres, with 16 curves, and an average gradient of 9.48% and was seen as a technically challenging track. Tae-Hee Choi, the project director for Daerim Industrial Corporation, the company who designed the track, said it wanted to design new and challenging curves that had not been seen previously.

The men’s race was set to be a three-way showdown between reigning champion Aleksandr Tretyakov of Russia, Latvia’s five-time world champion Martins Dukurs and the home favourite Yun Seong-Bin, who had just been crowned champion of the World Cup Series. In the event Tretyakov didn’t even make the start line in PyeongChang. On 22 November 2017 the IOC disqualified him from the 2014 Winter Games, stripped him of his title and imposed on him a lifetime ban from ever competing again at the Olympic Games for his part in the doping scandal that engulfed the Sochi Games. A week before the PyeongChang Games were due to begin the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned this decision, returned his Olympic gold to him and removed his ban only for him to be refused a chance to defend his title as he didn’t comply with the regulations needed to perform as an “Olympic Athlete from Russia”. To further ruin the expected narrative Dukurs bookended his Olympics with a pair of below par runs as Yun proved unbeatable on home ice. The Korean won by over one and three-quarter seconds with Junior World Champion Nikita Tregubov (OAR) and Dom Parsons of Great Britain edging out brothers Martins and Tomass Dukurs on the fourth and final run.

On the women’s side the German pair of Jacqueline Lölling and Tina Hermann had been the stars of the World Cup circuit since 2015 but neither seemed quite as home on the Olympic track as Austria’s brilliant but occasionally erratic Janine Flock and the 2014 champion Lizzy Yarnold of Great Britain. Yarnold led after the first run, Lölling after the second then Flock edged into the lead with one run to go. A superb final run by Yarnold piled pressure on Flock and the Austrian could not respond. A skid in the middle of her run dropped Flock out of the medals.

Great Britain, without a track of their own, won three of the six medals available as Yarnold became the first Briton to win two gold medals at the Winter Games and the first from any country to win two golds in skeleton. Korea’s gold was their first ever medal in the sport. There were also first Olympic competitors from more unlikely skeleton nations such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria.