Winter Olympics: Team GB miss out on medal in four-man bobsleigh

Team GB's four-man bobsleigh team

Great Britain's four-man bobsleigh team feel their sixth-place finish in Beijing is "like a medal" after having to self-fund their Olympic dream.

UK Sport cut the funding for bobsleigh after Brad Hall's men finished 17th in Pyeongchang four years ago but the team are now hoping for a re-think.

"I really hope UK Sport take a long, hard look at us," said Nick Gleeson, who was also in the 2018 sled.

"We've beaten a whole host of nations with a significantly bigger budget."

The 25-year-old added: "And we've done the last three years on a personal budget that is less than 10% of what these guys spend in a year."

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Hall, Gleeson, Greg Cackett and Taylor Lawrence had sat sixth overnight after Saturday's opening two runs but could not close the gap on the podium places.

Germany won gold and silver as the country continued its dominance of the sliding events on the closing day of these Winter Olympics. German teams have won gold in all but one of the 10 sliding events.

It meant a double-double for Germany's Francesco Friedrich, who has repeated his 2018 feat of winning the two and four-man events and becomes the first person to achieve this in successive Games.

Canada took the bronze at the Yanqing sliding centre.

Great Britain's aggregate time over four runs of three minutes, 55.72 seconds was 1.42 seconds behind the winning time.

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After sacrifices 'this is like a medal'

Hall had to use crowdfunding to boost his campaigns in the past three years after UK Sport decided not to fund bobsleigh for this Olympic cycle.

He and his team have devoted themselves to raising the money and improving their results, even moving in together during the first lockdown of the pandemic to strengthen their team spirit. Hall later spent time in Germany to learn from their coaches.

And it has paid dividends on the track this season, with Hall's team taking three World Cup silvers in the four-man and a bronze and two silvers in the two-man to finish fourth and fifth respectively in the overall standings.

"Obviously, we would have absolutely loved to have come away with a medal, who wouldn't, but realistically looking through everything we have gone through, everything we have had to do, everything we've had to sacrifice, top six is like a medal for us," said Gleeson.

GB Bobsleigh received more that £5m funding from UK Sport before Pyeongchang 2018. In this Olympic cycle it got £120,000.

By comparison, fellow sliding sport skeleton, which has delivered three golds, one silver and three bronze medals since the sport returned to the Olympic programme in 2002, received £6.425m in this cycle. However, the British skeleton athletes finished 15th, 16th, 19th and 22nd at the Beijing Games.