Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I enjoyed the British participation in curling and ice dancing at the Olympics. Tina enjoyed Midwinter Break by Irish author Bernard MacLaverty. Marg enjoyed an unlikely documentary about a competition for making the best porridge, The Golden Spurtle. And, she explained what a spurtle is — and how she came to own one.

Snowboard Cross

I accidentally saw TeamGB win a gold medal. I clicked on “Mixed Team Snowboard Cross” just to see what it was.

Snowboard Cross is a race down a course with twists, hills, and jumps. The mixed team is a kind of relay where each team has a man and a woman. The men go first. The start times for the women are staggered by the differences of the men’s finishes.

The whole event goes quite quickly. There are four racers at a time. The quarterfinals have four heats. The two top finishers from each heat go to the two semifinal heats. The two top finishers from each semifinal heat will race for the medals.

The story of the day was British snowboarder Charlotte Banks. She overcame a one second deficit to win her first heat. She made the semifinal exciting with a dramatic pass. And then came from behind for a third time to earn the gold medal for herself and her partner Huw Nightingale.

Skeleton

Matt Weston by Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

I didn’t catch any of the skeleton races so I missed Matt Weston win gold in the men’s competition. Then, he won a second gold medal alongside Tabitha Stoecker, his partner for Mixed Team Skeleton.

Medal Count

The UK has never won more than one gold medal in a single Olympics and now they have three! They must be pretty happy, right now.