Sochi 2014: Gold, and a flag to carry
At the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, Yarnold won skeleton gold – the latest in an unbroken line of British skeleton medals stretching back to Salt Lake City 2002, when Alex Coomber claimed bronze.
Since National Lottery funding for elite sport began in 1997, Team GB and ParalympicsGB have won over 1,000 Olympic medals across Summer and Winter Games combined – and skeleton has punched well above its weight in that tally.
Shelley Rudman had taken silver in Turin, Amy Williams gold in Vancouver – training alongside the young Yarnold at the University of Bath – and now Yarnold had added her own chapter to the story.
Sports scientists at the University of Bath later noted that her winning margin in Sochi had been partly attributed to her push-start performance – itself the product of National Lottery-funded biomechanics research conducted at the track where she'd trained for years.
Yarnold was chosen to carry the Great Britain flag at the closing ceremony. A fitting end to a remarkable journey from unknown heptathlete to Olympic champion.
But she had bigger ideas.
PyeongChang 2018: Against all odds
The road to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang was one of the most remarkable stories in British sporting history – and most of it was hidden from public view at the time.
Yarnold had been diagnosed with a vestibular disorder affecting her inner ear. She was suffering from a chest infection so severe that she was struggling to breathe on the first day of competition. And she had been carrying an undisclosed knee tumour that would require surgery the moment the Games were over.
She nearly pulled out.
Instead, on the final run, she set a new track record.
She won gold by nearly half a second. Sharing the podium in third place was her British teammate Laura Deas – who in that moment became the first Welsh woman ever to win a Winter Olympic medal, and completed the first time in history that Great Britain had won two medals in the same Winter Olympic event.
When Yarnold retired later that year, she was the only British Winter Olympian ever to have won two gold medals. She had already received an MBE after Sochi. She was awarded an OBE after PyeongChang.
What makes the achievement all the more extraordinary is that it was built on a facility that, by international standards, is modest: the push-start track at the University of Bath, funded by the National Lottery, which has never had a home ice track.
World-class results, produced from the ground up, through investment in the right people at the right time.
Back at Bath
With the 2026 Games under way in Milano Cortina, Yarnold was back at the University of Bath as a National Lottery Ambassador – this time as host and judge of the National Lottery Win-ter Challenge – part of a series of events celebrating the Games and the investment that makes British winter sport possible.
Four influencers from across the fitness world attempted to master the skeleton push start, with Lizzy assessing every attempt. Her teammate Laura Deas was back on the track demonstrating the technique.
The National Lottery has invested more than £200 million in winter sports since 1995 – including over £130 million directly into elite performance programmes – supporting athletes and grassroots clubs from every nation of the UK.
Over £32 million is raised every week for Good Causes by National Lottery players, helping British athletes turn their dreams into reality and inspiring people right across the country to get active in sport.
For England, those players helped fund a push-start track in Bath, a talent identification scheme that found a heptathlete who didn’t know what skeleton was, and push-started a career that ended with two Olympic gold medals and a place in history.
