The best British hope for gold at the Winter Olympics is talking about the fight between art and science when descending head-first down an ice chute at 90mph. In Matt Weston’s mind, there’s only one winner.
‘Art,’ he says. ‘Definitely.’
Before long he will talk about a guy who takes the other approach to skeleton racing. The science one. The one who might just have the best chance of beating him in Cortina, northern Italy in the coming weeks.
And that happens to be his team-mate, Marcus Wyatt. They are so close, they often share a bed, but that’s a tale about resources and it can wait. For now, Weston wants to stick with the art. With the feel. With his poetic take on life atop a speeding sled.
‘I stand on that start line and it’s exhilarating and terrifying,’ he says. ‘I’ve been doing this for nine years and I’ve done loads with psychologists on how to best prepare myself, because you really need to get your brain ready.
‘I had a crash a few weeks ago, in St Moritz, and it was probably my worst in years. There’s a famous corner called Horseshoe and I flew out of it, landed on my side and it was so hard it bent the steel parts in the sled. I still have a bit of pain in my hip now.
‘But when everything goes right, it’s a beautiful thing, mate. How can I describe it for you? It’s like this, it almost feels like you’re flying, floating on air.
‘What we say to each other is that’s about being on the very edge of grip. Just enough grip to be fast but not too much that you’re slow. When you’re in that sweet spot, it all feels so natural.
‘That’s a feeling you live for and I reckon I get it once a season. Maybe twice. You’re going so fast it’s just effortless, and there is so much adrenaline in your body. My heart rate can hit the high 180s and I’m trying to stay calm, just feeling the ice beneath me.
‘That’s the art bit. The vibes. There are right lines to take on a track and if you get it wrong, even by a fraction, you are correcting at the next turn and then the next one.
‘The thing with ice is it can change through the day and the right line can change with it. You can be methodical in working out how to handle that, or you can do it by feeling the rhythms and the bumps. You know, feeling the sled and just knowing what feels right. A bit of artistry. I love it that way.’
It’s a rare and wonderful thing to hear an athlete talk about their craft in such a way. And it’s rarer still to speak to a British Winter Olympian with such a high chance of success.
But the skeleton has always had a way of levelling the playing field against nations that benefit from the natural ingredients of winter sports.
In many ways, it is a discipline that has been appropriated by the Brits – Team GB has taken at least one medal in seven of the eight editions where skeleton has been included. They target it with investment to find technical edges, and as such there is a golden lineage that has run through Amy Williams and Lizzy Yarnold
Now there’s Weston and Wyatt. Aged 28, Weston has won two world titles in three years, two European golds in the same span, and has recently won his third World Cup series with five wins from seven races. Wyatt won the other two and claimed the overall bronze.
As it happens, they both have a score to settle after tanking on their Olympic debuts in Beijing four years ago.
‘I’ve not thought of anything apart from the Olympic gold, to be honest,’ says Weston.
‘The silver hasn’t even come into my brain. Everything I’ve been working for the past four years is gold. All the world champs, European champs, Crystal Globes, they are all stepping stones up to this point.’
It is a fascinating quirk that Weston’s nearest rival happens to be his team-mate, with Wyatt the elder by six years. Details of their relationship might seem unconventional compared to the goings-on in other sports, which is where the sleeping situation comes into it.
‘We end up sharing a bed quite a lot,’ says Weston. ‘The last time was in Sigulda (in Latvia) just before Christmas.
‘We don’t have an abundance of money, so it’s often a twin bedroom for us and in Europe that usually means two singles pushed together and difficult to separate.
‘We’re pretty used to each other by now, we know each other’s like routines – he has his side of the bed, I have mine, and there’s this whole arrangement. We’re like an old married couple sometimes, to be honest, but we’ve kind of got this unwritten agreement that the racing stays on the track.
‘We get on great. Really, we do. If Marcus beats me, I’ll be the first one to congratulate him and vice versa.’
It might seem remarkable that these two have risen so high, given they spend much of summer and autumn training on a dry push-track in Bath. ‘I think athletes from other nations who have grown up on ice and snow are a little jealous of our results,’ says Weston. ‘We quite like that.’
But it would be incorrect to paint this as a story of the underdog. Shared beds indicate a limit to their luxuries, but UK Sport has pumped £5.7million of lottery funding into skeleton for this Olympic cycle and that goes a long way towards buying the best technology for sleds, skinsuits and wind-tunnel testing.
Usually, those factors are huge. But at Beijing 2022 it backfired spectacularly. Weston and Wyatt unveiled sleds that were meant to be game-changers but were dog slow – they finished 15th and 16th respectively.
Having taken up the sport by chance in 2017, when he was told at a UK Sport ‘talent ID’ day that he had the perfect physical characteristics to give it a try, Weston suddenly wanted to quit. He almost did.
‘That’s right, 100 per cent,’ he says. ‘It took a pretty big emotional toll, the Olympics being such a disappointment. It was tough to swallow, but then I changed my mentality. I just thought, “Right, enough wallowing – 2026, let’s go put this thing right”.’
Results would suggest this artist has found a way to do so. Results would suggest he is flying, with just enough grip to be in control and not so much that he has lost any speed on an exhilarating descent into Italy.
All being well, the only man who has a chance of catching him is the fella on the other side of his bed.
