Winter Olympics: How Team GB can still win plenty of medals

For some years, it has been said, Great Britain has been punching above its weight in winter sports.

No ice track, few snowy mountains, and yet world champions, X Games medallists and World Cup podium finishes aplenty.

But right now, those punches are coming in the opposite direction – and they feel heavy.

Many expected Team GB to be on the medal table by now, with at least three, perhaps four medals on the board. Instead, the total remains at zero.

There have been three agonising fourth-place finishes for freestyle skier Kirsty Muir, snowboarder Mia Brookes, and curlers Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds, while a solitary error cost figure skaters Lilah Fear and Lewis Gibson dearly when they had been battling for a bronze in the ice dance.

But it has demonstrated just how tight the margins are.

Take Muir, for example. Just 0.41 of a point was the difference between bronze and fourth place in the slopestyle.

Had she not squatted on a landing on her final run, she would have made the podium.

Brookes, meanwhile, knew she needed to go huge on her final big air run for a chance of a medal – and so she did.

She landed a competition-first backside 1620 trick – featuring four-and-a-half rotations – but over-rotated at the very last moment.

Had she landed it cleanly, she would have won a medal.