Ashleigh Pittaway wins second Junior World Champs medal of her career on another good weekend for skeleton and bobsleigh athletes
University of Bath-based skeleton athlete Ashleigh Pittaway won Junior World Championship (JWC) bronze for the second time in her career in Switzerland on Saturday.
Pittaway’s combined time of 2:22.83 over her two runs on the legendary St Moritz track was only bettered by Germany’s Hannah Neise and Susanne Kreher, with the Brit performing brilliantly on her second slide to move up from fifth at the halfway stage.
The result matched the 20-year-old’s third-placed finish in 2019 and was a tenth international medal to date in her fledgling career, which also includes the 2016 Youth Olympic Champion title.
It’s fair to say that social distanced medal ceremonies don’t have quite the same buzz about them but the pride in standing on the podium with the 🇬🇧 draped around you can never really be dimmed ✨ Congratulations on JWC 🥉 @Pitterbread1 #podium pic.twitter.com/noTwCFkMuF
— GBBobsleighSkeleton (@The_BBSA) January 23, 2021
Laurence Bostock finished tenth in the men’s race in 2:19.87, a significant improvement on his previous year’s placing of 16th.
Those results came a day after Marcus Wyatt narrowly missed out on a second IBSF World Cup medal of the season as he finished fifth in Konigssee, just sixth-hundredths of a second shy of a podium place. Matt Weston and Craig Thompson were tenth and 16th respectively.
The women’s race saw Brogan Crowley beat her previous World Cup personal best by placing ninth. Laura Deas was 13th, two places ahead of University of Bath Sports Performance alumna Madelaine Smith.
There were more top-ten finishes in the weekend’s Bobsleigh World Cup racing, with Brad Hall and Greg Cackett placing a season’s best fifth in the two-man and Mica McNeill sixth in the women’s monobob.
Sochi 2014 Olympic bronze-medallist Bruce Tasker, now a bobsleigh coach, also briefly came out of retirement to help Hall, Cackett and Taylor Lawrence finish a fine seventh in the four-man. Lamin Deen, Ben Simons, Joel Fearon and James Dasaolu also produced a strong performance to finish 13th.
The British Bobsleigh & Skeleton Association are based at the University of Bath, with their athletes using the Team Bath Sports Training Village – including the UK’s only push-start track – for their home training. Visit www.teambath.com/bobsleigh and www.teambath.com/skeleton to find out more.
Picture credit: @IBSFsliding on Twitter.
