Bath PhD student Parsons wins GB's first medal of the 2018 Winter Olympics

Dom Parsons has won Team GB’s first medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics after gaining a bronze in the men’s skeleton.

Parsons, 30, finished 0.11 seconds ahead of fourth-placed Martins Dukurs whilst South Korea's Yun Sung-bin took gold by a record 1.63secs and Nikita Tregubov, an Olympic Athlete from Russia, won silver.

Parsons, who started out as a 400m runner and switched to skeleton in 2008, was in second place with just Yun Sung-bin and Martins Dukurs left to sled though was expected to be pushed back to fourth.

Yun delighted the home crowd with a stunning ride placing him first, subsequently dropping Parsons down to third in the standings but five-time World Champion Dukurs made several costly errors on the final run and finished outside of the medal positions.

"It hasn't really sunk in yet," Parsons told BBC Sport. "I thought I'd lost it after that fourth run. It felt like it'd had gone.

"But Martins Dukurs has made some more mistakes and he's the last person I'd expect that from. It's been great. All the work we've put in has paid off."

Parsons, who finished 10th in Sochi four years ago and has finished on the podium in the World Cup only once, has become the first British male to win a skeleton medal since John Crammond in 1948.

The Londoner is a PhD mechanical engineering student at the University of Bath where he also aides in the designing of skeleton equipment.

He was introduced to skeleton in 2007 at the university's push track and took part in his first competition just three months later in a Europa Cup event in St Moritz, Switzerland.

“I was in a bit of a daze whilst it was all going on. I’m just trying to process what just happened.”

“You don’t normally think of ‘Oh I’ll go try skeleton’ but it’s a great sport to do and it’s been a fun obsession for the last 10 years.”

Here's how @UniofBath student @domparsons won his bronze medal at #PyeongChang2018 https://t.co/1MMlwX2mtu

— Team Bath (@TeamBath) February 16, 2018

Image Credit - Wikipedia Commons

Image above is a stock Skeleton image and does not show Team GB's Dom Parsons.