Tonight Lizzy Yarnold slid head first through the twists and turns of ice to emerge, as she had planned, as an Olympic champion in the skeleton.
After sliding at beyond 80mph on the most technically advanced tea tray in the world her reward was to win only the 10th British gold medal in the history of the Winter Olympics.
A snowstyle bronze medal was won earlier this week by the Bristol snowboarder Jenny Jones. She admitted the tension was hard to bear as she stood at the foot of the hill at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park for 45 agonising minutes, waiting to discover whether she would be going home an Olympic medallist or a nearly woman.
Her score of 87.25 for a superbly executed second run had, for a brief while, actually put her into the gold medal position, but with 10 more riders to follow she knew her fate was out of her hands.
Jenny, an aspiring gymnast in her early teens, was an early pioneer of the snowboard scene.
After signing up for a lesson on her local dry slope in Bristol when she was 17, she was so hooked on the sport that she took herself off to Tignes, in the French Alps, to work as a chalet maid and indulge her new passion on snow. After years of commitment to the sport, at the age of 33 Jenny Jones wins an Olympic medal.
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