Speed skater left red-faced as Team GB endure disappointing opening day at the Winter Olympics

Up went the curtain and down went the Brits. On an opening day of misfortune and defeats, tinged in one case with a dose of farce, it was hardly the start Team GB wanted at these Winter Olympics.

At opposite ends of a trying Saturday, one of their medal hopes, Katie Ormerod, botched the qualifying in the snowboard slopestyle, and their mixed curlers, in which gold is rated as a strong possibility, suffered a defeat that introduces just a modicum of jeopardy around their progression to the semi-finals.

In between, Will Feneley didn’t get out of the moguls qualifying, Rupert Staudinger was 24th in the luge and the short track speed skaters had a rotten time in their demolition derby of a sport.

Britain’s Farrell Treacy stopped one lap early in his 1000m short track heat on Saturday

Kathryn Thomson, who spent £22,000 funding her own season, was unlucky to crash on the first corner of her women’s 500m heat, and Niall Treacy also hit the ice in the men’s 1000m. Then it was the turn of his big brother, Farrell Treacy, who exited the same discipline by setting a high bar for calamity.

The issue came as he approached the conclusion of the seventh of nine laps, when he convinced himself he heard the bell for the final rotation. He hadn’t and after burning himself out in a frenzied dash to the second qualifying place, he had the awful realisation he still had a lap to go. In recovering from his misplaced dip at the line, he fell to fourth and was left stunned.

‘I don’t know what I heard in the stands but I thought there was a lap to go and went to the line a lap early,’ he said. ‘A big error. I’ve never done it before so to do it on the biggest stage is obviously heartbreaking. It’s never happened before so to happen at the Olympic Games is not fantastic. I don’t know if it’s a massive lapse of judgement or there was something that I heard. But that’s on me.’

British snowboarder Katie Ormerod missed out on a place in the women’s slopestyle final

It later emerged his build-up to these Games had been hammered by a positive for Covid just days before he was due to fly. After considerable anxiety and a cleared test, he was able to make it to China, only for this outcome. He goes again in the 1500m on Wednesday — with some luck he won’t rock up at the track on Tuesday.

If those results were underwhelming, sharper disappointment was reserved for Ormerod, who missed qualifying for the slopestyle final by a big margin. She needed top 12 and delivered 19th. Two years ago she was world champion, so those discussing her performance in the context of recovering from a horrific heel injury at Pyeongchang 2018 were perhaps generous.

She was distinctly upbeat in her assessment, but privately her failure will likely sting. ‘It feels amazing to call myself an Olympian,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting years to finally say that. To drop in and compete at an Olympics, it feels really special. I’m really happy with my runs. It’s been a really challenging and difficult course to master, so just to be able to put a full run down and it’s exactly how I wanted it as well, so I couldn’t be any happier.’

Team GB curlers Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds suffered their first defeat of the Winter Olympics

Ormerod will now turn her attention to next week’s Big Air event.

There was one win and one defeat for the mixed curling pair of Bruce Mouat and Jen Dodds. The world champions, and sharpest hopes of British gold, had moved to the brink of qualifying for the last four after beating the Czech Republic 8-3. 

But they then fell 7-5 to the unbeaten Italians, leaving them on four wins from six and likely needing at least two more from their final three round-robin games, starting with China and Norway today.

Mouat said: ‘Going into another two-game day it’s almost must-win now. I think six is the goal, so two of the next three would be amazing.’