The 2026 Olympic skeleton champion explains what makes him tick, and reveals one attribute that puts him ahead of the rest
After two weeks of being glued to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, we’re reminded again what makes an Olympics so compelling. It’s not the performances alone that keep you watching, but the individual stories behind them.
Never before have we been taken inside these stories in such detail. From Eileen Gu’s Tik Toks at the top of her runs, to Lindsey Vonn’s hospital bed updates, the athletes themselves have provided backstory that conventional coverage can’t get close to.
GB’s skeleton champion Matt Weston, the hot favourite for gold coming in to Milan-Cortina, took a different tack as his big moment approached. He shut down his phone and employed a basic ‘burner’ phone in its place, containing just a few key numbers of his inner circle.
Enjoying the season of his life, he wanted to close out any unnecessary distractions from the job in hand.
“I think going in as world number one with a massive target on your back and after the season I've had… there's definitely that added pressure,” he told Georgie Ainslie on the Performance People podcast ahead of the Olympics, “but at the same time there's added confidence.”
Pressure is a privilege
The four year cycle of an Olympics only serves to ramp this pressure up another few notches.
“It's not just externally, it's internally,” he says. “I don't know what's going to happen in the next four years… I've got a life outside of skeleton as well. I'm not sure what's going to happen in the next four years. So this could be one of my last chances to go to a games and come home with the gold medal.”
To watch a British athlete handle this level of expectation, and execute so clinically and brilliantly, confirmed Weston is cut from a different lycra – becoming only the 13th GB athlete in history to win a winter Olympic gold tells its own story.
In sporting terms, Weston could be seen as something of a modern day renaissance man. A promising schoolboy rugby player in the Saracens academy, he also excelled at taekwondo before a back injury closed that chapter down.
In 2017, he was introduced to skeleton through UK Sport’s ‘Discover Your Gold’ initiative which matches promising athletes to winter sports. He not only possessed the necessary physical attributes, but a competitive drive that stands out even in elite sporting circles.
Headfirst at 80mph
Skeleton demands the full package – speed, strength, athleticism, and skill. Face-down whilst topping out at 140km/h at 5-6G, courage comes in handy too.
Sport at this level always comes down to fine margins but skeleton makes every fraction of a second count. Twice Weston has been in a three-way tie on exactly the same time as his competitors. The tiniest error can be the difference between winner and also-ran.
Weston’s pre-Olympic run of seven wins and two second places on the World Cup circuit speaks to the dominance he has found in his sport. And this despite a 12 inch tear in his thigh that threatened to derail his season.
“If I can recover better than my opponents, then I’ll be in better shape than them on race day.”
“I’m always carrying injuries,” says Weston. “My body feels broken half the time. I’m held together by tape going down the track.”
The recovery edge
Recovery is an essential part of ensuring he can hit the extremes of this explosive sport.
“It’s very taxing on the body and we can only do three runs a day because it’s so mentally exhausting too,” he says. “If I can recover better than my opponents, then I’ll be in better shape than them on race day.”
Of all his transferable skills, mindset has to be his biggest weapon. “It’s all up here,” he says, emphasising how working with psychologists has allowed him to find this unprecedented consistency.
It requires walking a razor’s edge between intensity and calm. “The more relaxed you can be the faster you’ll go,” he explains.
Added to that, Weston admits to an innate perfectionism that leaves him constantly looking for improvements, even when he’s won.
The attribute that makes him different
As a sport, skeleton rewards adaptability. Each run is different and no run is perfect. How you handle mistakes and unexpected challenges is a crucial differential.
“One of the things I work on with the psychologist is this idea of being the most adaptable athlete” he explains. “You can have this perfect blueprint, but if one thing changes, you don't want to just crumble.”
“The hardest thing to do, I think, in any sport is the psychological side of it, but it's also the thing that makes the biggest difference.”
As the John Allen Paulos quote goes: "Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security". It’s a lesson that works as well for sport as life.
The more prepared we are to expect – and even embrace – the unexpected, the greater the resilience we build, and the higher our chances of success.
What Matt Weston turns his hand to in the future we’ll have to wait and see, but given his approach to life and competition, you wouldn’t want to miss it.
ainslie + ainslie is the official recovery partner for GB Snowsport
