Bankes the banker blows it
Another flop for GB at Games
SHE held it together for a brief moment but, just like her pursuit of a gold medal at the Winter Olympics, that didn’t last long for Charlotte Bankes. It soon ended in tears.
What a soul-crushing experience for her, a world champion of snowboard cross who saved one of her worst results in years for the quarter-final of her big day.
‘I cannot understand what has happened,’ she said, and after failing to make the semi-finals of a discipline she dominates, that just about summed it up.
It wasn’t meant to go like this — not for her, a serial champion, and not for the wider delegation of Team GB. They haven’t so much as left a footprint in the snow at Beijing 2022 and Bankes’ collapse will sting more than any.
She was, if you pardon the obvious pun, their banker. That and their get-out-of-jail-free card.
After five days of these Games, the British performances are very much looking like a trigger for an inquisition about £28million of lottery funding.
But back to Bankes. She found consistency in the wacky-races of a mad sport — in 11 races this season prior to arriving in China, only once was the 26-year-old off the podium. Seven times she came first. And so to her doomed quarter-final, which she led at halfway, with 10 metres between her and third and the top two of four going through.
Then, with her turn on bank five a little wide, she was passed by Tess Critchlow of Canada, and crucially by Australia’s Belle Brockhoff. Things happen fast in snowboard cross; success by any metric is moving like a glacier for the British team.
Bankes, who finished third, and therefore nowhere, was distraught. ‘It’s disbelief,’ she said. ‘It’s frustrating to have the worst race of my season here at the Olympics. There has been a lot of pressure, but we handled it well.
‘Unfortunately I didn’t do the race I wanted.’
She soon disappeared around a corner and cried on the shoulders of support staff. It was almost jolting to see emotion, when a few too many of Britain’s other athletes have seemed happy to make up the numbers.
If there was a flipside to Bankes’ trauma, it was in the identity of the gold medal winner in the final — Lindsey Jacobellis of the USA. The 36year-old had led the final of this event in 2006 and showboated off the final jump while leading. She fell and came second, so as ever with the Olympics, misery and joy seem to live in close confines.
For Bankes, who raced for France at the past two Games before switching to the nation of her birth, there will be a redemption shot in the mixed event on Saturday with Huw Nightingale.
Later, Farrell Treacy reached the 1500m short track speed skating final, where he finished ninth.