Meet Team GB at Beijing 2022

Beijing 2022 24 Jan 22

Team GB athletes know what it takes to make history - they do it practically every time they step on ice or snow at the Olympic Winter Games.

Jenny Jones delivered a maiden Olympic medal on snow in 2014, Izzy Atkin brought home Britain’s first ever on skis four years later and the current crop are poised to raise the bar once again at Beijing 2022.

The Games are still days away and they've already written their own unique chapters in British Olympic folklore.

Take sprinter turned slider Montell Douglas, the first British woman to feature at the Summer and Winter Games. Or Cornelius Kersten and Ellia Smeding, jointly Team GB's first long track speed skaters in a generation.

A number of our 50 chosen ones have recent form when it comes to rewriting record books and none more so than Charlotte Bankes.

Snowboard cross is as unpredictable an Olympic sport as they come but Bankes has been a banker for qualifying spots and major medals since changing licence from France in 2018.

The 26-year-old became Britain’s first snowboarding world champion last February and heads to Beijing in sensational form, having won back-to-back World Cup gold medals in Krasnoyarsk in January after also topping the podium in Montafon before Christmas.

Add in her season-opening silver medal in Secret Garden and her total World Cup tally stands at four for this season.

She's poised to win the Crystal Globe for overall World Cup winner but will want to get her hands on a sparkling piece of Olympic metalwork first.

Bankes wants to rewrite her Olympic history having finished 17th and seventh in 2014 and 2018 - a feeling shared by fellow snowboarder Katie Ormerod.

Ormerod fractured her heel in slopestyle training before PyeongChang 2018 and missed out on a Games debut.

She has spent the last four years making amends and lifted the World Cup overall title in that discipline in 2020, the first British woman and snowboarder to do so.

Park and pipe is expected to be productive for Team GB and slopestyle, a notoriously open event, was the stage for Jones and Atkin’s historic medal-winning feats.

Atkin senior returns alongside sister Zoe, five years younger but no less promising with world halfpipe bronze in the bag.

Gus Kenworthy is back at the Games for a second debut, this time for the country of his birth, having won slopestyle silver at Sochi 2014 while representing Team USA. He returned to the Games stage in 2018, finishing 12th and has now switched to the halfpipe.

Freeski slopestyle specialist James Woods will hope to take a final step onto the Olympic podium having finished fifth in Sochi and fourth in PyeongChang.

Katie Summerhayes is another returning for a third Games and there’s a debut for teenager Kirsty Muir, who won Youth Olympic silver in big air in 2020.

Elsewhere, Rupert Staudinger will fly the flag in luge for the second Games in a row with a unique motivation this time around.

Slalom star Dave Ryding has certainly unlocked his best form ahead of a fourth Olympic appearance, winning Great Britain's first-ever Alpine World Cup gold at Kitzbuhel.

The same goes for cross-country skier Andrew Musgrave - both stalwarts of Team GB on snow, they claimed top-ten finishes four years ago and have since registered World Cup results suggesting they can upgrade those.

Figure skaters Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson are the latest to extend Britain’s ice dance legacy while Natasha McKay joins them in the women’s individual event.

British female skeleton racers have reached the podium in five successive Games, a remarkable run stretching back to the sport’s reintroduction to the programme in 2002.

Laura Deas, herself a bronze medallist at PyeongChang 2018, is joined by debutant Brogan Crowley for Beijing 2022 and Matt Weston expects to challenge on the men's side alongside Marcus Wyatt.

Medal hopes soar highest in bobsleigh with pilot Brad Hall and his push crew colleagues putting together a fantastic World Cup campaign.

Hall is closing in on all-conquering Francesco Friedrich and his German sled and collected multiple silver medals in both two-man and four-man events across the World Cup season.

Curling has provided some of Britain's most memorable Winter Olympic moments and 20 years after Rhona Martin's 'Stone of Destiny' secured gold in Salt Lake City, a ten-strong squad are well-equipped to return Team GB to the Olympic podium.

Eve Muirhead is determined to improve on fourth place at PyeongChang and, with a newly-formed rink of Vicky Wright, Jennifer Dodds and Hailey Duff, is aiming to reach or even surpass the heights that saw her take bronze in Sochi.

Her rink reached Beijing by winning the Olympic Qualification Event, their final chance to qualify, having grabbed European gold in their first tournament together in November.

Bruce Mouat and Dodds become the first British curlers to compete in two disciplines at a Games, heading into the mixed doubles as reigning world champions.

In the men's event, Mouat and team-mates Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan have become a dominant force on the prestigious Grand Slam circuit in Canada.

They scooped silver at April’s World Championships and joined Muirhead with European gold.

Their challenge, shared with all their fellow Team GB athletes, is to find that form and hold their nerve on the biggest stage in sport.

Sportsbeat 2022