Olympics-Britain sets ambitious medal target for Milano-Cortina Games

Britain's Medal Aspirations for the Olympics

By Martyn Herman

Current Performance and Optimism

LONDON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Britain will target between four to eight medals at the Milano-Cortina Olympics, with team chiefs quietly confident that they can beat the record of five achieved at Sochi and PyeongChang.

Funding and Support for Winter Sports

The team returned with only two medals four years ago in Beijing but, with 21 world championship medals across the various sports in the current Olympic cycle, optimism is running high.

Key Sports and Athletes to Watch

UK Sport, who distributed 32.5 million pounds ($43.75 million) to the various winter sports' governing bodies in the current cycle, say they have set the target range, rather than a specific target, in collaboration with the governing bodies.

"We should absolutely feel confident, we have so many athletes who have achieved podium after podium, which is unprecedented," Kate Baker, Director of Performance and People at UK Sport, said on Tuesday.

"Our medal ranges reflect the fact that British athletes are arriving at the Games in hugely competitive form."

Britain's strongest medal prospects will be at the sliding and curling centre in Cortina. Those two sports have provided Britain with 12 Winter Olympics medals.

Success in snow sports has been elusive, though, with only three medals -- Jenny Jones's bronze in snowboard slopestyle at the 2014 Sochi Games and Izzy Atkin and Billy Morgan taking bronzes in freestyle skiing and snowboarding in 2018 in PyeongChang.

Despite funding cuts, the current crop of snow sports athletes are genuine medal contenders.

Mia Brookes won slopestyle gold at the 2023 world championships, aged 16, and the overall World Cup Snowboard Park and Pipe crystal globe in 2024 while Charlotte Banks won silver at last year's snowboard cross world championship.

($1 = 0.7429 pounds)

(Reporting by Martyn HermanEditing by Gareth Jones)