Five to follow for the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics

Monday September 26th is exactly 500 days until the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang in South Korea.

In Sochi Team GB won four medals - their best performance since 1924 - with Lizzy Yarnold winning skeleton gold and snowboarder Jennie Jones winning a first ever medal on snow.

With the countdown on for 2018, here’s five to follow:

No woman skeleton slider has ever defended an Olympic title but Lizzy Yarnold likes making history.

Team GB have won a women’s skeleton medal in every Games since 2002, when the discipline was introduced.

Yarnold followed up her Olympic success by completing the career grand slam, winning the World Cup, European and world title in the 2014/2015 season.

She took a year out last season but is back in the training with the World Cup campaign beginning in Whistler in November.

In his sled nicknamed 'The Meatwagon', John Jackson piloted Team GB to an impressive fifth place in the four-man bobsleigh in Sochi, missing a medal by just over a tenth of a second.

Grenadier Guardsman Lamin Deen, who drove Britain’s second string sled in Russia, is now the number one choice and finished fifth at last year’s World Championships in Winterberg.

Team Deen includes sprinter Joel Fearon, who clocked 9.96 seconds over 100m this season to became the joint-third fastest Briton of all-time.

One of Britain’s ‘Fridge Kids’, Katie Ormerod just missed out on selection for Sochi, despite being only 16.

After learning to ski as a four-year old, Ormerod - who stands just 4ft 9in in her ski boots - took delivery of her first snowboard one year later and has been careering downhill quickly since.

In 2014 she became first woman ever to land a backside double cork 1080 and has already started to collect regular World Cup podiums.

Billy Morgan finished tenth on his Olympic debut in Sochi but has been a podium regular since.

The former gymnast was the first to land a quad cork jump in 2015 and won his first X Games medal this year - a bronze in the Big Air competition, a discipline which will make its debut in PyeongChang.

Dave Ryding has quickly established himself as Britain’s leading alpine skier on the World Cup circuit. Last year he achieved a new World Cup personal best with a 12th place finish in Val-d’Isere.  He went on to qualify for the second run in every World Cup slalom up to the penultimate round in Kranjska Gora and became the fourth British skier in the history of the World Cup to qualify for the World Cup Finals, after Alain Baxter, Finlay Mickel and Chemmy Alcott.

Sportsbeat 2016