Nick Westby: Team GB captured true Olympic spirit to deliver Sochi memories

Team GB will land at Heathrow today as heroes.
MEMORABLE: Great Britain's Lizzy Yarnold celebrates winning Gold in the Women's Skeleton Final in Sochi.MEMORABLE: Great Britain's Lizzy Yarnold celebrates winning Gold in the Women's Skeleton Final in Sochi.
MEMORABLE: Great Britain's Lizzy Yarnold celebrates winning Gold in the Women's Skeleton Final in Sochi.

Four medals secured in Sochi is a record-equalling haul, one that meets the target of between three and seven set by paymasters UK Sport and matches the four won in the first Games held 90 years ago in Chamonix.

As ever in sport, success is measured on results. In football it is all about trophies, in tennis it is grand slams, and in the Olympics it is medals.

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Jenny Jones finished third in the snowboard slopestyle final and won a bronze medal, Britain’s first of the 22nd Winter Olympics.

Her place in British sporting history is secure.

She has already appeared on numerous chat shows, a seat next to Matt Dawson on a Question of Sport and Freddie Flintoff on A League of their Own have already been dusted down and you can get bet your bottom ruble there will be a big feature on her in the end-of-year BBC Sports Personality awards.

Lizzie Simmonds, a swimmer from Beverley, finished fourth in the 200m backstroke final at London 2012, touching the line seven-tenths of a second behind the girl who won bronze.

It was a great achievement for the 23-year-old, but to the wider world, fourth is nowhere in the Olympics.

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The position equates to first loser, which to some with a win-at-all-costs mentality is still second place.

And so, few people outside the world of swimming or the Olympic bubble know who Lizzie Simmonds is.

Such are the margins between glory and obscurity.

And Team GB fell on the right side of those margins in the unseasonably balmy temperatures of Sochi.

Jones’s run, as impressive as it was, was at the mercy of the judges.

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David Murdoch’s team were one stone from elimination in their play-off with Norway and squeezed through the semi-final because the Swedish skip made a mistake with his final stone that opened the door for Murdoch to exploit.

Full credit to Murdoch and his men, they barged through the door when it creaked open, and by and large when the hammer dropped over the last fortnight, they were on the right side of it.

I am not trying to be negative here. I think what Britain have achieved on the snow and ice over the last fortnight is immensely creditable for a nation deprived of...well, snow and ice.

I just don’t think how Britain’s team is viewed on their landing in London later this afternoon should be determined purely on the number of medals they have in the overhead lockers.

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For as well as people like Jones, the men’s and women’s curlers, and certainly skeleton queen Lizzy Yarnold have done, there are other athletes who can return home beaming with pride having helped Great Britain towards their most successful Games of the modern era.

The ‘fridge kids’ in particular deserve enormous praise. Jones won the only medal for the skiiers and snowboarders who learned to defy gravity on dry slopes and snow zones in Sheffield, Halifax, Castleford and Bristol; and therefore are playfully mocked by their peers for doing so.

But is the fifth place achieved by James Woods, the sixth place of Jamie Nicholls and the seventh of Katie Summerhayes – all three Yorkshire folk no less – any less of an achievement?

Yes there were more people ahead of them, but their triumph is in promoting their sport of thrills and spills and doing it all with a smile on their faces.

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They each looked like they had a ‘blast’ to borrow a word from the snowboarding dictionary.

Their success is in introducing a sport to a new generation of people, the ultimate irony of course being the Sheffield slopes that Woods and Summerhayes learned on and which stood for 24 years, now lay disused on a barren wasteland. That issue was addressed in this column before the Games and sadly, looks no closer to being resolved.

Thankfully, for those inspired by the daredevil deeds of our new heroes, there are alternative venues around the county.

Kristan Bromley can also return home feeling immensely proud of not only his Sochi Games, but his entire career.

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The Lancastrian who made his home in Sheffield to harness the best of the region’s technology to try and give himself an edge in the world of skeleton, finished eighth in his fourth and final Games.

If his career is measured in Olympic medals, then he fell short. But that is such a narrow perspective on which to look at a life in sport that is highlighted by a world title, two World Cup-winning seasons and a hat-trick of European gold medals. He also recorded three top-10s at the Olympics.

Measuring success for Bromley is like quantifying the career of golfer Colin Montgomerie, a Ryder Cup legend and the continent’s leading player at the end of the season on eight occasions, but never a major championship winner no matter how close he came.

In an interview with Bromley before he headed out to Russia – one of those discussions with a sportsmen you wish could last all day – the seasoned campaigner delivered a line that resonated with me about what the Olympics is all about. “It’s not just about winning medals,” he said. “It’s about satisfying that inside drive to be the best you can be; that’s what the Olympics is all about.”

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Bromley returns home from Sochi knowing he gave everything he had and at the age of 41, he can have no regrets after mixing it with the world’s best – predominently opponents who have more adequate training facilities than he – for more than a decade.

As they step off the plane today, Team GB will rightly be lauded.

UK Sport – who pumped a record £13.5m into the winter sports programme – have seen their medal target met.

But the success story of these Olympics from a British perspective is about so much more than a handful of gold, silver and bronze.

AND ANOTHER THING

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The Winter Olympics has a reputation for the madcap and bizarre. That’s its niche. People who don’t usually watch sport find themselves tuning in for hour upon of hour of curling or the death-defying leaps of aerial skiiers.

It also has a reputation for intriguing mediocrity, like the distinctly average performances of Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards and the Jamaican bobsled team.

The 1988 Games in Calgary proved a watershed moment. Edwards was ostricised by his governing body and never jumped again, such was the embarrassament the publicity for his failure generated.

But no matter how much the IOC try to crush it, the pursuit of the Olympic spirit by someone well below the standard still shines through.

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In Sochi we had the Indian luger Shiva Keshavan who nearly capsized on his sled but made it to the finish despite having learned on dry land with no support from his nation. Then there was the Peruvian skiathlete Roberto Carcelen who crossed the line 27 minutes down on Dario Cologna but was clapped home by the champion.

Cycnics would say they have taken a national spot that the fifth-best Norwegian or German could have taken, but these try-harders are what make the Winter Olympics so appealing.