Swansea’s Role in Winter Olympics Gold 🥇

Good morning, Swansea!

While Team GB athletes were hurtling down the ice at the 2026 Winter Olympics, part of their success story had already begun here in Swansea.

Over the past decade, Swansea University researchers have worked with Britain’s skeleton programme, helping deliver the marginal gains that can make the difference between a place on the podium or the agony of just missing out.

This week, we take a look at how Swansea became part of Britain’s most successful Winter Olympic sport.

Catch you Sunday!

Andrew.

In skeleton, races are decided by hundredths of a second. At 80mph, there's no margin for error and very little room to improve.

For the past decade, Swansea University has been working with Britain's skeleton programme on the push start - the explosive first 20–30 metres where athletes sprint while driving the sled forward before jumping on. A strong start builds early speed that carries down the entire course, but a slow one is nearly impossible to recover from.

Professor Liam Kilduff and his team at Swansea's A-STEM (Applied Sports, Technology, Exercise and Medicine) Research Centre work with Danny Holdcroft, British Skeleton's Head of Performance Innovation. Their focus is on what happens in the crucial hours and minutes before competition - keeping muscles primed to generate maximum power, finding the ideal warm-up sequence, and making sure an athlete is physically ready at the exact moment they need to sprint.

Over the past three Winter Olympics, the partnership has produced some clever innovations, with one of the most interesting being smart garments - clothing with built-in graphene-based heaters that keep muscle temperature constant between warm-up and competition. Preventing muscles from cooling down in the freezing trackside air can mean arriving at the line ready to fire at full power, rather than having to rebuild heat from scratch. The suits also been used by athletes in the Commonwealth Games, Olympic Games, and in the Rugby Union World Cup.

The smart garments are part of a wider investment in cutting-edge technology by UK Sport, which has invested some £5.8m into the skeleton programme during this Olympic cycle, funding everything from advanced sleds and suits to bringing in Martins Dukurs, a Latvian six-time world champion, as a technical consultant. All this by a country without a single Olympic-standard ice track.

At this year’s Winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina, Britain's skeleton team delivered one of the standout performances of the Games.

The races took place at the Cortina Sliding Centre, a rebuilt version of the historic track first used in the 1956 Winter Olympics. The modern track runs just over 1.5km with 16 curves and speeds approaching 80mph, where small errors compound quickly.

Matt Weston won gold in the men's individual event, finishing 0.88 seconds ahead of Germany's Axel Jung. Two days later, he returned to the same track for the debut mixed team event and, partnered with Tabitha "Tabby" Stoecker, won gold again by 0.17 seconds over Germany. Two gold medals at a single Winter Olympics - the first British man ever to achieve that in skeleton.

For Stoecker (whose background is in acrobatics and trapeze), her journey to gold started when she saw a British Skeleton talent-identification advert on Instagram. She'd never even heard of the sport, but applied anyway. The selection process tested sprint speed, power output and how well her body could handle explosive movement. She passed, entered the national programme, and spent the next five years learning to slide.

Also competing for Great Britain at the 2026 Winter Olympics was Marcus Wyatt, a psychology graduate of Swansea University who previously played American football for the Swansea Titans. He transitioned into skeleton through the Power2Podium scheme and arrived at the Games as a former European Champion and 2025 World Championship silver medallist. Wyatt finished ninth in the men’s individual event and then teamed up with Freya Tarbit in the mixed team competition, where they placed fourth - missing out on bronze by a razor-thin 0.01 seconds.

The impact of Britain’s success in skeleton at this year’s Winter Olympics has been immediate. In the three days after Weston and Stoecker's gold medals, 3,500 people signed up to audition for British Skeleton's Talent ID programme - and now you know that Swansea University had a significant part to play in it 🙂

Catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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