OLYMPICS2018 Wizard Dom up run out of
WINTER
DOM PARSONS enhanced skeleton’s status as Britain’s national winter sport with an Olympic bronze that defied the odds.
Team GB have made the medals at five straight Games – some achievement considering the closest track is in Germany.
And today defending champion Lizzy Yarnold and Laura Deas, third and fourth after two runs in the women’s event, will look to continue that improbable sporting record.
Parsons, 30, did not feature heavily in the list of Team GB medal hopefuls, having not made the podium at world level in five years.
His results from the start of this season hardly inspired confidence – 20th, 13th, ninth, 18th and 18th before a fourth place in St Moritz gave him a boost of confidence in a sport in which timing is everything.
“In the last Olympic season I did it the wrong way around – I got a podium in the first race and my results declined,” said Parsons.
“This year it’s been the other way around. In the last couple of races things have been improving and I was starting to gel with my set-up.
“It’s just incredible. Four years of work has gone into this, right from after Sochi when I started working with [coach] Kristan Bromley, this has been the goal. Sometimes it seemed like it wasn’t that close in coming and it’s just amazing that it’s all come together this time.
“It’s been great, all the work we’ve put in has paid off. Right now it’s just very hard to process and doesn’t seem real.”
The 100-1 shot arrived in Korea nursing an abductor muscle injury. And yet a slider nicknamed ‘the Wizard’ conjured up the goods when it mattered to win Britain’s first men’s skeleton medal in 70 years.
Every British skeleton slider has a story of how they suddenly found themselves swept up in this crazy event, but Parsons’ probably beats the lot.
He was several drinks in at a student barbecue when a friend persuaded him to come to team trials at the University of Bath’s push-start facility the following morning. Sliding, it seems, is the perfect hangover cure.
“I was obsessed from the first moment. I loved doing it, I just didn’t know how good I was going to be,” he said.
“It’s not been easy. I’ve been dropped from the programme a couple of times when they were struggling for money, so I paid for myself.
“I remember the first time I was on ice, it was absolutely terrifying. You’re flying down this track and it’s so alien – steering the sled by flexing your muscles is not something that comes intuitively.”
Parsons was third coming into the final run but was overtaken by Nikita Tregubov with two sliders left on the track.
Parsons looked dejected. With the hugely experienced Martins Dukurs and World Cup winner Yungbin Sun to come, he did not need his PhD in mechanical engineering to know the numbers were stacked against him.
But Dukurs, a silver medallist four years ago and multiple World Cup winner, made a series of errors and bronze was secure.
Parsons’ time was just twohundredths of a second off silver. “I thought I’d lost it after that fourth