Skeleton star Matt Weston wrote his name into British Olympic history by becoming the first athlete to win two gold medals at the same Winter Games
After Weston won Team GB’s first medal of this Winter Olympics with a peerless performance in the men’s skeleton, he delivered another stunning display and another track record to win gold alongside Tabitha Stoecker in the mixed event. Weston required a comeback after Stoecker’s run, but launched Team GB into gold medal position.
On Friday, Weston broke the track record in all four of his heats in Cortina d’Ampezzo and was utterly imperious, only getting better with each run, and withstood all the pressure as the overwhelming favourite to claim his first Olympic medal.
The 29-year-old is the reigning world and World Cup champion, having won five of the seven races on the World Cup circuit this season. The remaining two were won by his teammate Marcus Wyatt, another medal contender.
Weston is a two-time world champion in the individual event, having won it first in 2023 before reclaiming the title in 2025, and a three-time world silver medallist in the mixed event.
In skeleton, Weston is also a double European champion - in 2023 and 2026 - and three-time overall World Cup winner, the first British man to win it three times. But he has also competed to a high level in two other sports.
As a youngster the Tunbridge Wells native competed in taekwondo at a national and European level, winning international honours for England, before a stress fracture in his back at the age of 17 forced him to retire from the sport.
At the same time, he was also an excellent rugby player, playing for Kent and Sevenoaks RFC as well as a Saracens Academy college.
In 2017 his weightlifting coach suggest he enter a UK Sport talent identification programme called Discover Your Gold, which was the first time he encountered skeleton.
He trained with the Royal Marines during his transition into the sport and first competed in 2019, winning two Europa Cup titles - the second tier of skeleton - in his first three races.
He won his first World Cup medal, a silver, in Innsbruck in 2020, on his fifth start on the elite circuit. Gold followed in November 2021 - GB’s first World Cup gold in 14 years.
But he endured disappointment in his first Olympics, in Beijing in 2022, when he finished 15th and reportedly considered quitting the sport after GB won no skeleton medals for the first time since it featured in a Games.
However he continued to compete and was rewarded with his first world title in 2023, when he became Britain’s first skeleton world champion since Kristan Bromley in 2008, and he has since become a hugely dominant force on the World Cup circuit.
In January this year he won his second overall World Cup title and he is already Britain’s most decorated slider at world championship level.
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