When Matt Weston came 15th in the skeleton at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, he asked himself whether he should continue competing at the sport.
Instead, he used his failure to fuel his route to victory at the Milano Cortina Games on Friday evening.
Speaking to Sky after he won a gold medal, the British athlete said the journey “hadn’t been easy”.
He said: “After Beijing it was really, really tough. I had a few weeks off after it where I was like, ‘why am I doing this? I don’t want to put myself through this anymore’ because it was so emotionally hard.
“But I kind of used that to really set the fire and get the motivation to come here and do what I’ve done over the last few days. So that was pretty insane.”
The 28-year-old, a world and European champion, had been the favourite for gold after leading at the halfway stage of the men’s singles skeleton on Thursday, with track records in the first two heats.
On Friday, the British athlete posted another track record on his third run – recording a 0.39-second advantage at the top of the leader board.
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He then set a fourth track record to win gold with a final margin of victory of 0.88 seconds – a significant margin in the sport.
Weston, who has previously won the world and European championships, said that an Olympic gold was the high point of his career.
He told Sky: “Winning this blows them all out the water. You probably saw it yesterday on the footage, I kind of couldn’t control my emotions at the bottom. It meant absolutely everything to me.”
Weston said he had improved his performance by working on the psychological aspect of his game.
“For me, a lot of the difference is mentality,” he said. “I do a lot of work with psychologists, like sport psychologists as well as clinical psychologists so they’ve made a massive difference in how I approach races, in how consistent I can be.”
Until he finished the race and checked his time, however, he did not know that he had taken first place.
He said: “The last couple of corners I knew I’d done a good job but you can never tell – it’s racing. You don’t know. I had no idea what anyone else had done.
“I kind of keep my helmet just low enough I can’t see any of the times when I’m at the block and as soon as I just came up in the outrun all I was looking for was green numbers and I saw them and then the tears hit.”
After retiring from a successful teenage taekwondo career due to injury, Weston made his debut in skeleton in 2019.
He said the journey from starting the sport nine years ago to becoming world champion was “pretty mad”.
In March 2025, Weston took his second world champion crown and last month he clinched his third successive overall World Cup title.
His Olympic win marks the first-ever gold in the men’s skeleton for Team GB.
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Weston is also the first individual male British competitor to win gold at a Winter Olympics since figure skater Robin Cousins in 1980.
Sir Keir Starmer celebrated the victory, with the prime minister saying in a post on X: “History-making. Congratulations Matt Weston!”
