Matt Weston produced a stunning run to make more history in Cortina as he became the first Briton to win two gold medals at a Winter Olympics with a thrilling victory in the mixed team skeleton event alongside Tabitha Stoecker.
Stoecker had given Weston a tough task with her run of 1:00.77, 0.30 seconds off the pace of the Germans with the British pair, ranked top seeds, the last to run.
But Weston, who stormed to gold on Friday – Team GB’s first medal at the Games – showed why he is the best skeleton racer in the world with a sublime 58.59secs run to clinch his second triumph of the Games.
It is the first time Great Britain have won three gold medals at a single Winter Olympics after Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale won snowboard cross mixed team gold earlier on Sunday.
A second British team, Marcus Wyatt and Freya Tarbit, missed out on a medal by an agonising 0.01secs as the two German teams of Christopher Grotheer and Jacqueline Pfeifer and Axel Jungk and Susanne Kreher took silver and bronze, respectively.
In fact, Kellie Delka stands just 5-foot-3 and weighs about 120 pounds. That’s it; that’s Puerto Rico’s entire team.
Her only event is skeleton, in which athletes travel at about 80 mph down an icy mile-long track with 16 turns. And she won’t be in the hunt for a medal in Saturday’s final rounds after finishing 24th of 25 athletes in Friday’s two heats.
Yet her presence is important just the same because it means Puerto Rico has a team here, even if it was just one person. For most of the century, that wasn’t the case.
“I was approached by the federation. They’re like, ‘hey, they’re trying to grow their winter federation. Maybe that would be something you’d be interested in helping,” she said. “So in 2018, I dropped everything, and I’ve been living on the island ever since.”
That was the first step of what Puerto Rico hopes will be a rebirth of a Winter Olympics program that had been razed to the ground.
In 2002, the island was set to send a bobsled team to the Winter Games in Salt Lake City but one of its sledders couldn’t prove he met Puerto Rico’s residency requirement. Embarrassed, the local Olympic committee didn’t just withdraw its two-man team, it ended recognition for all of the island’s winter sports.
No athlete would represent the territory in the Winter Games for another 16 years, until Charles Flaherty, a teenage American-born skier who moved to Puerto Rico when he was nine, competed in the 2018 Winter Games. A year later an ice hockey federation was established and in 2023 a curling federation.
In between those two things Delka, 38, made her Olympic debut, carrying the Puerto Rican flag with William Flaherty, Charles’ younger brother, in the opening ceremony in Beijing.
She carried it by herself in Italy.
Kellie Delka waves the flag of Puerto Rico during the Winter Olympic opening ceremony on Feb. 6.
(Misper Apawu / Associated Press)
Because Puerto Rico is an unincorporated U.S. territory, its residents are citizens of the U.S., but to represent the island in the Olympics, you must be born in Puerto Rico, have a parent or grandparent who was born there or live there for at least two years.
It was that final requirement that Delka, a native Texas, was seeking to fulfill when she moved to the island.
“I love the island, I love the people,” she said. “I’ll probably live there forever.”
A pole vaulter and cheerleader at the University of North Texas, Delka was introduced to skeleton by Johnny Quinn, a fellow North Texas alum who competed in the bobsled. She made her international debut in 2013 and was competing for the U.S. through the end of 2017, when Puerto Rico’s federation called.
Leaving a team to go it alone was more difficult than she expected.
“That was the hardest part,” she said. “When you go by yourself, like, it’s a pretty lonely journey. And then not having a coach the whole time, because you have to pay for that as well.
“I love the sport. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love it, because you definitely don’t make money from it.”
Eight years later, Delka speaks no Spanish but says she feels intensely Puerto Rican. She gets some financial support from an International Olympic Committee scholarship fund and small, intermittent assistance from the federation. But mostly she supports herself in the sport, in part by selling bikinis she designed on the beach in Luquillo, the tiny community on the northeast tip of the island where she lives.
Puerto Rico’s Kellie Delka hopes she can inspire other athletes to represent the island in the Winter Olympics.
(Alessandra Tarantino / Associated Press)
“I love to sew, I like to make jewelry. I like to make bikinis, and I like to be involved in the community,” she said. “That’s how you meet people.”
Next she wants to inspire them. Because there’s no use in starting an Olympic team if no one else wants to join.
“I would love a teammate,” she said. “I don’t want it to just be me forever, like right now it is.
“I want to start mentoring younger people because I want kids to know that you don’t have to have everything to make it. I don’t have anything. I’m doing this by myself. I’m going to the gym by myself, I’m going to the track by myself, I’m traveling by myself.
“You can do it too, and I can help you do it.”
Sometimes all you need is one person to get started.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Kirsty Coventry gets tearful as she explains the conversation she had with Ukrainian skeleton pilot Vladyslav Heraskevych.
Heraskevych was banned from participating in the race for continuing to wear a helmet featuring images of athletes killed during Russia’s invasion of his home country, which the IOC says breaks its rules.
British skeleton racer Tabby Stoecker is aiming to follow in the sled path of Lizzy Yarnold and Amy Williams by winning an Olympic gold medal in one of the fastest sports in Milan-Cortina.
The 25-year old is already a double world silver medallist in the mixed team event, with Matt Weston. She credits her time at circus school, learning juggling and the flying trapeze, for giving her the confidence to take on the challenge of skeleton.
Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych says he will wear his helmet of remembrance on race days “because these athletes deserve to be on the track” – despite the International Olympic Committee banning him from doing so.
Heraskevych wore the helmet, which features images of athletes killed during Russia’s invasion of his home country, during a training session on Thursday after being told it was not allowed.
The IOC says the helmet breaks the rules laid down in the Olympic Charter and suggests he could instead wear a black armband to pay tribute.
Heraskevych says he does not believe the IOC will impose sanctions on him for continuing to wear it, adding: “I believe we have all the rights to wear this helmet in competition because it is fully compliant with the rules.
“I believe the IOC doesn’t have enough black bands to honour all of the athletes.”
The IOC has not confirmed whether it would disqualify Heraskevych for continuing to wear the helmet, saying it is “not helpful to look at hypotheticals”.
Rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter states “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.
Mark Adams, a spokesperson for the IOC, said they will contact Heraskevych on Thursday to “reiterate his many opportunities to express his grief”.
The men’s skeleton heats begin on Thursday with the final runs on Friday and Adams says he can show the helmet in mixed zones and on social media but “the field of play is sacrosanct”.
“We really want him to compete, we want all athletes to have their moment,” Adams said.
“[It’s] not helpful to look at hypotheticals. It’s not helpful to speculate now, but there are rules and regulations the athletes want us to enforce. In the end it would be an IOC matter.
“We don’t want to prosecute this issue in public – the way we hope we can deal with this is on a human level. It is in everyone’s interest for him to compete.”
Heraskevych said that many of those pictured on his helmet were athletes, including teenage weightlifter Alina Peregudova, boxer Pavlo Ishchenko and ice hockey player Oleksiy Loginov, and some of them were his friends.
“With this helmet we keep memories about these athletes,” he said.
“Some of them were part of the Olympic movement – they were part of the Olympic family. I believe they deserve to be here.”
The IOC has previously disqualified athletes for displaying political messages.
Afghan breakdancer Manizha Talash, who represented the Refugee Olympic Team at the 2024 Paris Games, was disqualified for displaying a ‘Free Afghan Women’ slogan on her cape during a pre-qualifier dance battle.
Ukranian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych claims the International Olympic Committee has banned his helmet featuring images of people killed in the war in his home country, in a decision that “breaks my heart”.
The 26-year-old wore the helmet during a Winter Olympics training session in Cortina, and had promised before the Games to use the event as a platform to keep attention on the conflict.
The IOC is yet to confirm publicly if it has banned the helmet.
“The IOC has banned the use of my helmet at official training sessions and competitions,” said Heraskevych, who was a Ukraine flagbearer in Friday’s opening ceremony, on Instagram, external.
“A decision that simply breaks my heart. The feeling that the IOC is betraying those athletes who were part of the Olympic movement, not allowing them to be honoured on the sports arena where these athletes will never be able to step again.
“Despite precedents in modern times and in the past when the IOC allowed such tributes, this time they decided to set special rules just for Ukraine.”
Heraskevych told Reuters that many of those pictured on his helmet were athletes including teenage weightlifter Alina Peregudova, boxer Pavlo Ishchenko and ice hockey player Oleksiy Loginov, and stated some of them were his friends.
Heraskevych said Toshio Tsurunaga, the IOC representative in charge of communications between athletes, national Olympic committees and the IOC, had been to the athletes’ village to tell him.
“He said it’s because of rule 50,” Heraskevych told Reuters.
Rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter states that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.
He said earlier on Monday that the IOC had contacted Ukraine’s Olympic Committee over the helmet.
The IOC said it had not received any official request to use the helmet in competition, which starts on 12 February.
Meanwhile, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Heraskevych “for reminding the world of the price of our struggle” in a post on X, external.
The post continued: “This truth cannot be inconvenient, inappropriate, or called a ‘political demonstration at a sporting event’. It is a reminder to the entire world of what modern Russia is.”
Heraskevych, Ukraine’s first skeleton athlete, held up a ‘No War in Ukraine’ sign at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, days before Russia’s 2022 invasion of the country.
Rule 50.2 of the Olympic Charter states: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.”
Heraskevych had said he intended to respect Olympic rules which prohibit political demonstrations at venues while still raising awareness about the war in Ukraine at the Games.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 athletes from Russia and Belarus were largely banned from international sport, but there has since been a gradual return to competition.
