Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale won snowboard cross mixed team gold to secure Team GB’s first ever Winter Olympic title on snow.
After heartbreak in their individual events, the British pair made amends with an astonishing performance to add Olympic gold to the World Championship title they won in 2023.
It is the first time Great Britain have won two gold medals at a single Winter Olympics.
GB’s only previous Olympic medals on snow were bronzes – for snowboarder Jenny Jones in 2014, and freestyle skier Izzy Atkin and snowboarder Billy Morgan four years later.
In an event that sees the men race first, Nightingale crossed the line in second place behind France’s Loan Bozzolo to set up Bankes perfectly – and she used her remarkable speed on the board to take the lead and pip Italy’s Michela Moioli to the line by 0.43 second.
It marked a second successive silver in this event for Moioli and Lorenzo Sommariva, while France’s Loan Bozzolo and Lea Casta took bronze.
Bankes, a former individual world champion and two-time overall World Cup winner, was left crestfallen on Friday when she exited the women’s event in the quarter-finals, just as she did four years ago in Beijing, despite being widely tipped for a medal.
Similarly, Nightingale was left wanting much more from himself after exiting the men’s competition in the round of 16, but found another level to produce arguably his best racing alongside Bankes.
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