Partners on and off the ice talk about the tensions and joys of competing alongside the ones they love at the Winter Olympics

Every Olympics has its love stories. Usually, they’re all about the quantities of free prophylactics being handed out in the athletes’ village (this year’s edition has an image of the Olympic mascots, the friendly stoats Milo and Tina, on the box). But you have to look a little harder to find the great romances of these Games, which have been on the ice rink in Cortina, where, for the large part of the past week, a trio of married couples were competing against each other in the mixed doubles curling. It is essentially a competitive lovers’ stress test held in front of a live audience.

It’s a peculiarity of the Winter Olympics that there are so many partners partnering with each other in different events. There were two in the ice dancing: the US pair of Madison Chock and Evan Bates won silver and the Italians Marco Fabbri and Charlène Guignard came fourth. Which is all very well. But if you want to see a relationship you can actually relate to, curling was the sport to watch. It’s as if they made an Olympic event out of sharing the front of the car with your partner on a road trip with a map and no satnav.

• Briton triumphs by nearly a second in Milano Cortina

• First British man to win individual winter gold since 1980

And on the seventh day, Great Britain finally won their first medal of these Olympics. At nine o’clock on Friday night Matt Weston, the man his teammates call “Captain 110%”, became the first British man ever to win the gold in the men’s skeleton, after four faultless races across the two days of competition.

The 28-year-old broke the track record at the Cortina Sliding Centre four times in succession, and won in a combined time of 3min 43.33sec, which was almost a full second ahead of the runner-up, Germany’s Axel Jungk. “I’ve been fortunate enough to win world championships, and European championships and other things, and this blows them all out the water,” Weston said. “I almost feel numb. I keep touching this medal to make sure it is real.”

Covering the first week of events at Milano Cortina 2026 has been enlightening but not straightforward

It’s a seven-hour trip from one end of the opening ceremony to the other. I leave Milan at midday and arrive in Cortina just as the athletes are making their parade around the town square. Cortina’s a one-street town, and it’s been closed down, but everyone’s hanging off the balconies. I see three men in lederhosen, five in identical Wayne Gretzky jerseys, and more people than I can count in luxurious furs. The first person I talk to is a member of the Qatari police force, who is working here as part of a security agreement between the two countries. This is the sixth Olympics I’ve worked on, but the others all took place in summer. I’m pleased to see he looks even more out of place than me.

• British racer poised for podium after opening rounds

• Sledder turned in back-to-back Cortina track records

This was the race that will always be remembered for the one man who didn’t make the start. Exactly 21 minutes before the men’s skeleton was scheduled to begin the International Olympic Committee put out its press release announcing that it had revoked the Olympic accreditation of the Ukrainian slider Vladyslav Heraskevych after he refused to compete without his helmet decorated with the images of his fellow athletes who have been killed during the Russian invasion of his country. It was so late the two British competitors, Matt Weston and Marcus Wyatt said they didn’t even find out about it until after they had finished.

By then, the news had already spread around the world, and the one Ukrainian journalist present, Stanislav Oroshkevych, from tribuna.com, found he was suddenly surrounded by colleagues from Germany, Britain, Japan, and a dozen other countries, all asking him for public comment on what was going on. Soon, the Ukrainian press attache arrived to save him and announced that Heraskevych would come to give an impromptu press conference himself. The photos of Heraskevych standing behind the barriers near the finish, his helmet tucked under his arm, addressing a crowd of 30 journalists, will be one of the iconic images of these Olympics.