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• On this day in 2010 – Amy Williams claims skeleton gold at Winter Olympics

  Amy Williams tamed Canada’s notorious Whistler track on this day in 2010 to claim skeleton gold and become Britain’s first individual Winter Olympic gold medallist in 30 years.

  On a course where Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili tragically died the previous week, Williams steered four near-perfect runs to claim victory by over half a second.

  Kerstin Szymkowiak took silver a full 0.56 seconds behind Williams, while her Germany team-mate Anja Huber earned the remaining podium place with bronze.

  Williams set a track record of 53.83 on her first run and shattered it by going 53.68 on her first of two final runs, she then led from start to finish to follow figure skater Robin Cousins in the British Winter Games hall of fame.

  Speaking about the course, situated to the north of Vancouver, Williams said: “I love this track. Once you get over the fear factor you learn to love it and the speed is your friend.

  “You’ve got to work with it and relax and if you do that it’s a great track to slide.”

  Her record-breaking run helped her set a 0.3 second lead overnight and despite fears that nerves could play a part when she returned to the track, the 27-year-old insisted she had never let her position play on her mind.

  “I surprised myself because I wasn’t really nervous,” added Williams, who won Team GB’s only gold medal at the Vancouver Games on what was her Olympic debut.

  “I slept absolutely perfectly and I was quite excited. It doesn’t feel like an Olympic Games – it just feels like a normal World Cup race except with more people shouting for me.

  “I’m not very good at statistics so I didn’t realise I’m the first gold medallist for a long time. But I think it shows that if you have the determination any country can be good at any sport and you just have to concentrate and do your best.”

• On this day in 2018: Lizzy Yarnold retains her skeleton title at Winter Olympics

  Lizzy Yarnold became Britain’s most successful Winter Olympian on this day in 2018 when she overcame illness to retain her skeleton title in Pyeongchang.

  Yarnold, from Sevenoaks in Kent, snatched victory on her fourth and final run with a new track record to make it back-to-back gold medals after her triumph at Sochi 2014.

  Laura Deas claimed bronze as Britain won two medals in the same event for the first time at a Winter Olympics.

  Yarnold went into the final day 0.10secs off the pace after complaining of feeling dizzy, but cut the deficit as overnight leader Jacqueline Lolling of Germany slipped back to third place after the third round.

  The Sochi 2014 champion trailed Austria’s Janine Flock by 0.02 ahead of the final run, meaning Yarnold was the penultimate slider to take to the track and had to watch her rival’s performance.

  The Briton clocked a track record of 51.46secs to take the lead in thrilling fashion and Flock floundered, relinquishing her spot on the podium to spark jubilant celebrations among a sizeable British contingent at the Olympic Sliding Centre, including Welsh racer Deas.

  An emotional Yarnold, who became Britain’s most decorated Winter Olympian, said: “I’m overwhelmed and exhausted. I don’t really know how it happened.

  “After the first run I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be able to finish the race because my chest infection was so bad I was struggling to breathe and I got here only with the help of my team.

  “I guess four years ago, three years ago, the whole team all dared to dream that this was possible and I just went with them all and we managed it.”

  With Deas finishing third behind Lolling, and Izzy Atkin having earlier secured bronze in the women’s ski slopestyle, it was the first time Britain had won three Winter Olympic medals on the same day, overtaking the record two from Chamonix in 1924.

• Torvill and Dean’s stunning routine remains perfection on ice, 40 years on

  Forty years of salchows and sequins have failed to diminish the memory of the most seminal moment in figure skating history.

  Olympic medals have been won and lost, oceans of tears have been shed in the ‘kiss-and-cries’, quads have been celebrated, kneecaps have been clubbed, strawberry desserts have been allegedly ingested.

  But Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s performance to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics remains the byword for skating beauty, the perfect moment that, for all the sport’s enduring majesty and penchant for controversy, remains unsurpassed.

  The pair are in their late sixties now but they remain synonymous by their surnames, and their influence on the sport and its subsequent generations, increasingly due to their association with ITV’s ‘Dancing on Ice’ is as indelible as ever.

  ‘Bolero’ is still routinely used for Olympic programmes, mostly recently in Beijing in 2022 by 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, who wiped the mousse from her mouth and became the first female skater to land a quad jump to its creaking restrain.

  But Ravel’s 1928 orchestral composition will always belong to Torvill and Dean, its opening bars instantly sweeping those of us of a certain age back to the night when we were one among 24 million others sat in front of our television sets to witness sporting history.

  Dozens of British ice dancers have been both inspired and burdened by Torvill and Dean’s unrepeatable achievement. For the Kerr siblings, John and Sinead, two European bronze medals was enough to spark comparisons with their illustrious predecessors.

  Speaking prior to their second Olympics in Vancouver in 2010, where they would finish a creditable but scarcely comparable eighth, John Kerr felt the need to remind an interviewer: “We are not the new Torvill and Dean and we never have been. We are ourselves.”

  It has been a proven a more fruitful relationship for the current British number ones, Lewis Gibson and Lilah Fear, whose two European silver medals and current world ranking of two make them the most successful British ice dance pairing since the halcyon days of the 1980s.

  Gibson was born in 1994, a full decade after that avalanche of uninterrupted sixes, so it is not the memory of that string of perfect sixes that inspired him to take up the sport, but rather Torvill and Dean’s professional after-life on ITV.

  “I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t create (that),” Gibson told Olympics.com in 2022. “I remember watching that first episode and my mum shared with me where she was when she watched them (in 1984), so it came full circle.”

  “They created the legacy of ice dance in Britain, they pushed the limits of the sport and did all these new things, and the pride we have for ice dance in Britain comes from them,” said Fear.

  To mark the 30th anniversary of their famous moment in 2014, Torvill and Dean returned to the scene of their greatest moment for the first time, performing their routine in front of 5,000 spectators in an arena that had been ruined then rebuilt after the Bosnian war.

  “I have thought back so often to that night and the thing I still remember more than anything is kneeling down to start the routine, and the way the crowd went silent,” said Torvill, as she prepared to reprise their routine inside the Zetra Ice Hall.

  Forty years on, theirs is a legacy that shows no signs of defrosting.