Curlers keep GB gold run going but team falls short of 2022 Winter medals target

Curling saved an otherwise disappointing Winter Olympics for Great Britain as Eve Muirhead and Bruce Mouat led their rinks to gold and silver medals respectively.

Those were the only British medals in Beijing, a step back from five-medal hauls at each of the last two winter Games and short of UK Sport’s target of between three and seven.

Here the PA news agency looks at some of the key data behind Great Britain’s performances in Beijing.

UK Sport’s world class programme, aimed at supporting athletes with podium potential, allocated £5.25million to curling which was rewarded handsomely.

Mouat and Jennifer Dodds were edged out in the mixed doubles, finishing fourth, but Mouat returned to lead his side to the men’s final before a tense defeat to Sweden left them with silver medals.

Dodds was then part of Muirhead’s team who hammered Japan 10-3 in Sunday’s women’s final to finish on top of the podium.

That gold and silver return is enough to rank Beijing among the top five performances at the Winter Games – behind Sochi in 2014, early stagings at Chamonix and Garmisch-Partenkirchen and arguably PyeongChang 2018, where a solitary gold was supplemented by four bronze medals.

Gold medals at four successive Winter Olympics is a new British record, with female athletes responsible for all of those and every British gold since Christopher Dean partnered Jayne Torvill to skating success in 1984.

The overall feeling, though, was of frustration – nowhere more so than in skeleton after British medals at five straight Winter Olympics including two golds for Lizzy Yarnold and one for Amy Williams.

Shelley Rudman won silver in 2006 and Alex Coomber’s 2002 floodgate-opening bronze was matched in 2018 by Laura Deas, sharing the podium with