Freya Tarbit already has her sights set on French Alps 2030 after a fortnight to remember at Milano Cortina 2026.
Tarbit finished seventh in the women’s skeleton, before wrapping up her debut Olympics with fourth in the mixed team event alongside Marcus Wyatt.
The pair missed out on a medal by 0.01 seconds, with Tarbit the fastest woman in the push-start used for the mixed event.
Those performances, where she matched up against the world’s best, has given Tarbit plenty of confidence to attack the next four years and return to the Olympic stage as one of the favourites for medals.
I am just really proud of myself,” she said. “This Olympic Games I laid down some of the best performances I have done in my life.
“I feel proud that I can give myself under pressure when it matters. That is something I will carry with me for a very long time.
“It fuels me to keep going. It makes me really excited for the next four years.
“These last four years, I have shown myself and everybody else that I have potential and I can do it, the thing that I have been lacking is maybe a bit of consistency.
“The confidence that I have gained from this season and these Games, and bouncing back from my injury, it just fuels that fire and makes me so excited for these next four years to just keep building and achieve that consistency of hopefully fastest runs more often.”
Tarbit is part of a highly successful skeleton programme, which saw Matt Weston win individual and mixed team gold at Milano Cortina - the latter alongside Tabby Stoecker.
It has catapulted the sport into the mainstream consciousness, with thousands of applications flooding in to join the British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association’s talent ID programme.
Tarbit’s own Instagram following has quadrupled and while the 25-year-old is still adjusting to her new profile, she hopes the extra eyes on the sport can help build a new generation of fans and athletes.
“It has been crazy, no one prepares you for this side of it,” she said.
“The nicest thing has been my mum and dad telling me all of the people back home; I used to work in a pub and apparently they were all arguing about who knew me the best. Little things like that are really special.
“I just feel really happy that there is such an interest in it. We want to showcase the sport that we love to the world. It is great that people are enjoying it.
“If anything has come from this Games, hopefully people have seen how exciting it is and how genuinely cool a sport it is.
“The Winter Olympics shows that when it is out there, people love it and people become really interested in these weird and wonderful sports. When the coverage is there, people want to see it.”
While there were lots of new eyes on skeleton, Tarbit made sure to spend her time in Milano Cortina taking in all the other sports the Winter Olympics has to offer.
“I have really been trying to take everything in my stride. Skeleton, where it was placed in the schedule was amazing, it really allowed us to enjoy all of it.
“We had a week training, full focus competing, and then a week to enjoy it and appreciate other sports.
“We went to watch curling and biathlon and be spectators as well as athletes.
“It has been such an incredible experience, I have got so many amazing memories.”
Sportsbeat 2026