, during the opening ceremonies.
UK Sport, the organisation responsible for distributing
National Lottery funding to elite sport, set Team GB a target of winning three medals, of any colour, at the Vancouver Games; two more than the single silver medal won in
Turin by
Shelley Rudman. If achieved this would have been the best performance by a British Winter Olympics team since
1936 when a gold, silver and bronze medal were won. The target was set following £6.5 million of funding in the four years leading up to the Games. Whilst no particular events were targeted as potential sources of medals, the success of British athletes in the previous four years was taken into account when setting the target; the men's curling team and the two-woman bobsleigh team, Nicola Minichiello and Gillian Cooke, won world championships, and in 2008
Kristan Bromley became the first man in the history of
bob skeleton to win the World Championship, European Championship and World Cup in the same year. of Great Britain (centre) with the gold medal she won in the women's skeleton alongside silver medalist
Kerstin Szymkowiak (left) and bronze medalist
Anja Huber (right). The preparations of Britain's skiers and snowboarders for the Games were hampered by the financial problems of the British Ski and Snowboard Federation (BSSF), operating under the name Snowsport GB, which was responsible for administering the lottery funds received through UK Sport. In August 2009 the BSFF was £300,000 in debt and a number of British skiers, including medal hope
Chemmy Alcott, were forced to fund their own summer training camps in New Zealand and Chile. On 5 February 2010, just a week before the opening ceremony of the Games, it was announced that BSSF had entered administration after the Royal Bank of Scotland withdrew the organisation's overdraft facility. This put the participation of British skiers in doubt, as a governing body is a necessity for Olympic competition, but the
British Olympic Association (BOA) revived a subsidiary company to take over. The financial difficulties suffered by Alcott, partly as a result of the BSSF collapse, led her to consider her future in the sport at the end of the Games. On 25 February, having finished 19th overall in the medal table, and 14th out of European countries, head of Team GB Andy Hunt said that despite not reaching UK Sport's target the team "have achieved what we set out to do" by bettering their performance in the 2006 Games. This was in reference to Amy Williams' gold in the women's skeleton, which was the sole medal won by the team.
Steve Redgrave, vice-president of the BOA, added "I don't think there is a sense of disappointmentI think there is a sense of celebration of winning that gold medal. I would take one gold medal over five bronze medals any day." Hunt also announced that the BOA would conduct a strategic review of funding and may support the channeling of more funds towards realistic medal hopes. ==Alpine skiing==