Jaclyn Narracott broke the track record in the women’s skeleton in Beijing on the way to taking the silver medal, Australia’s first in the skeleton at the Winter Olympics.
Hannah Neise maintained Germany’s perfect record at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre with the gold medal, ultimately sliding 0.62sec faster than Narracott, with a total time of 4min 07.62sec. Kimberley Bos of the Netherlands won bronze.
Narracott went in to the event’s final day in the lead, and was the first athlete to slide in the third heat. She immediately posted a new track-record time. But Neise bettered it with her next run, and despite a scorching final run, the Australian could not stop Neise making it a skeleton one-two for Germany after they won the men’s event on Friday.
Great Britain’s Laura Deas finished 19th after a disappointing Olympic campaign. Skeleton sees athletes race head-first down a frozen track in a tiny sled at speeds of up to 140km/h, and Deas saved her fastest run til last, but the 2018 bronze medallist was well off the pace. Her teammate Brogan Crowley finished 22nd out of 25.
“Indescribable, unbelievable, surreal,” Narracott said in an interview with Channel Seven. “It’s just everything that I’ve dreamt of. And to actually realise it ... it’s going to take a while to sink in. [At the top of the final run] I was just trying to remember to go smooth and be flow-ey, and have some fun, and it was all going to be OK no matter what happened.”
The 31-year-old, whose skeleton career was nearly ended by concussion in 2019, added: “I can’t believe it ... I would love this to be the catalyst to get more girls back into our sport [in Australia] ... There’s no reason why we can’t be competitive at every Olympics and every World Cup.”
Narracott’s uncle Paul Narracott was the first Australian to compete at both a Summer and Winter Olympic Games. He competed as a track sprinter at the 1984 Los Angeles Games before joining the two-man bobsleigh team at Albertville in 1992.
Growing up in Bracken Ridge in Brisbane’s north, Jaclyn Narracott was a talented sprinter. Then she took her first ride on a skeleton in 2012. A decade later, in January 2022 at St Moritz, she become the first Australian to win a World Cup gold medal in skeleton.
The sport of skeleton has its roots in sleighing. In 1884, the famed Cresta Run - a natural ice skeleton racing toboggan track - was built in St Moritz, Switzerland, and in 1892 a new sledge made entirely of steel was introduced. Its bony appearance gave the sledge – and ultimately the sport itself – a new name: skeleton.
Men’s skeleton appeared at the 1928 and 1948 Games (both in St Moritz) but due to the sport only being available at the Cresta Run at the time, it was replaced at the Olympics by the more popular luge and bobsleigh. Not until the 2002 Salt Lake City Games was the skeleton reintroduced as a men’s and women’s event.
After finishing 16th on her Olympic debut four years ago, Narracott arrived at her second Games in career-best form, after breaking the track record and topping the podium in Switzerland last month. Her husband and coach, Dom Parsons – who won a bronze for Britain at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games – is with her in Beijing for the first time since October, and it’s working wonders.
“All year, we were doing it via FaceTime and with video,” Narracott said. “To have him by my side, seeing the ice as I’m seeing it ... it’s huge.”
