Today at the Winter Olympics: Skeleton woe for GB and mixed fortunes for curlers

Great Britain suffered skeleton misery on day seven of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Laura Deas and Brogan Crowley were both outside the top 20 after the first two runs of an event which concludes on Saturday, meaning Britain’s 20-year-old streak of Olympic medals in the women’s skeleton is over.

Britain’s men’s curlers bounced back from defeat to the United States to boost their semi-final hopes by beating Norway.

The women’s quartet were beaten 9-7 by South Korea and have now lost two of their three round-robin matches.

But the headlines were dominated by 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva testing positive for a banned heart medication and her uncertain future at the Games.

Star of the day

Japan’s Ayumu Hirano is no ordinary athlete. Six months ago he was competing as a skateboarder at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Hirano missed out on a medal that time after winning winter Games silvers in 2014 and 2018 in the halfpipe event. Hirano went one better in Beijing as he became the first boarder to land the triple cork at the Olympics. This is a 1,440 degree spin on the horizontal axis whilst corkscrewing the rotation, meaning the head dips under the board three times. Hirano’s heroics denied three-time gold medallist Shaun White a trumphant end to his glittering snowboard career.

Fail of the day

Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva could be thrown out of the Winter Olympics after the International Testing Agency confirmed she tested positive for a banned heart medication in December. The 15-year-old Valieva’s team successfully challenged a provisional suspension, and she was practising again on Friday. Both the ITA, on behalf of the International Olympic Association, and the World Anti-Doping Agency