From Eddie The Eagle to luge and biathlon – winter sports GB will never master

Fractions of points. Marginal over-rotations. Steps of out twizzles. Agonising near misses have been the story of Great Britain’s 2026 Winter Olympics so far.

Yet there were times when even near misses were an outlandish aspiration. And sports whose peaks – or even foothills – have remained utterly unconquerable to home nation athletes.

Here the Press Association picks out the five Winter Olympic sports for which no amount of heavily-funded performance programmes would be likely to yield a place on the podium.

Shove a Briton down an ice chute head-first and the world seems to be their oyster. Ask them to lie back and it is a different story. Britain’s first Olympic luger, Gordon Porteous, was disqualified from the 1964 Games for failing to cross the finish line feet-first. Britain’s best ever luge result was 15th by Jeremy Palmer-Tomkinson at Lake Placid in 1980.

Over two dozen British competitors have strapped on smallbore rifles and skied off into the snowbound Olympic countryside since biathlon made its debut in its modern form in 1960. A sport with deep roots in ancient hunter-gathering techniques, they could not have done much worse if they had paused en route to pick nuts and berries.

It was a case of what might have been for Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, who blamed his pair of last-place finishes in Calgary in 1988 on a pair of misted-up glasses. Edwards proved so embarrassing to the stuffed shirts at the British Olympic Association they introduced stringent new qualifying criteria designed to put off would-be imitators. Team GB’s only subsequent ski-jumper, Glynn Pedersen, finished 43rd and 48th in his two events in 2002.

Blending cross-country and ski jumping, Nordic Combined evolved in Norway in the late 19th century as a means to identify the ultimate versatile skier. Clearly a guy from Cornwall, whose highest peak is the 420m Brown Willy, was always going to be disadvantaged. So credit to Percy Legard, Britain’s only ever competitor in the discipline, who panted home in 45th place in 1936.

Blame global warming for Britain’s lack of long-track speed skaters. For the first few Winter Olympics multiple athletes, most of whom were Norfolk-based and honed their skills on East Anglia’s frozen fens, represented the Union Jack. Since the Fens stopped freezing, long track hopes have melted away. Dutch-born Cornelius Kersten and his partner, Ellia Smeding, ended a 30-year absence when they raced for GB in Beijing in 2022.