Arguably, the only thing scarier than launching oneself feet-first down an icy track at speeds of up to 140 kilometers per hour (87 miles per hour) is launching oneself headfirst down the same track at the same speeds. As the 2026 Olympic Games conclude their first week of competition, focus on the sliding sports has turned to skeleton.
The first skeleton medal will be handed out this evening, with the fourth and final run of the Men’s Skeleton competition set to begin at 3:05 p.m. ET (9:05 p.m. local). The men already took two runs on Thursday, and in the second run, British slider Matt Weston set a track record through two runs. He’s 0.3 seconds ahead of his nearest competitor, Germany’s Axel Jungk.
Weston is a -700 favorite to take home the gold at DraftKings Sportsbook. If he does manage to hold on, it would be Great Britain’s first medal of these Games. The next two contenders come from the world’s most dominant sliding nation, Germany: Jungk (+600) and Christopher Gotheer (+1000). China’s Chen Wenhao and Italy’s Amadeo Bagnis both have +3000 odds of taking home gold.
Men’s Skeleton prediction, pick
With two runs down, it’d be surprising if Weston didn’t hold on, given that he set the track record with a 56.21-second time in his first run and bettered it by 0.33 seconds in his second lap. He was the only man to finish the track in less than 56 seconds, and though some other athletes went faster towards the end of the course, he had the best start, reaching speeds of 47.73 kph before the first split. Margins are thin — he beat Jungk by just 0.06 seconds in the first run — so a 0.3-second cushion is fairly large, and he’d have to make a relatively significant mistake in order to lose.
The results of the first two runs didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Weston has won five of the seven individual races that he’s entered this season, including a 0.15-second win at Cortina d’Ampezzo across two runs in January ahead of Austrian Samuel Meier, who sits just 14th in the standings. Both of his defeats came against countryman Marcus Wyatt, who bested him by 0.14 seconds in the ISBF World Cup in Sigulda, Latvia, and also in a World Cup race in Altenberg, Germany, in each man’s most recent race. Wyatt sits seventh, 1.12 seconds behind Weston, and though he had a good start in each, he wasn’t able to make up the difference further down the track.
Of course, the racer with the best chance of limiting Weston to silver is Jungk. Jungk had the second-fastest time in each heat and typically gets faster as the competition goes on, as he actually had the fastest second-heat time in both the Cortina and Lillehammer World Cup events despite winning neither. Weston, meanwhile, frequently posts worse raw times in his second heat, bettering his first heat in only two of his seven races prior to the Olympics. He did perform better in his second heat at these Games, but in a larger sample size, Jungk has generally been better at learning from his mistakes than Weston, so the four-heat format should help him. Jungk also reached a higher speed at the third checkpoint in each of his runs.
Ultimately, it’s quite likely that Weston holds on for gold, but it’s worth noting that in 2022, Gotheer won gold, with Jungk claiming silver and Weston finishing all the way back in 15th, 4.23 seconds behind Gotheer, and in that competition, he had the slowest fourth-run time of the 20 racers who advanced to that stage. Weston has obviously improved, but his margin ahead of Jungk is tight enough that if he slips up at all, Jungk could slip gold around his neck.
