Great Britain ended an 84-year wait for a four-man bobsleigh world championship medal after Brad Hall, Arran Gulliver, Taylor Lawrence and Greg Cackett claimed silver in St Moritz, Switzerland.
The British sled finished with a combined time of 4min 20.3sec to go level with the Latvian pilot Emils Cipulis’s team, both 0.69sec behind the German two-time Olympic champion Francesco Friedrich.
It is the second record-breaking result for the team in a matter of weeks.
They became the first Great British group to win a European championships gold medal in January, by a wafer-thin margin of 0.09 seconds.
Hall, the GB pilot, was thrilled to make history as he and his teammates became the first British quartet to step on to a world championship podium since Frederick McEvoy steered GB to silver in 1939.
“It’s an incredible achievement and I’m really proud of the team,” Hall said. “It’s been a hell of a long time since a four-man crew has won a world championship medal. To be the ones who have bucked that trend is pretty special.
“We would have loved to win gold and we knew we had that in us but we have to be happy with silver – it’s an historic result and not something many people would have given us a chance of doing a couple of years ago.”
Britain can claim to have had a role in the foundation of the sport. It has previously been ascribed to a group of Englishmen on holiday in St Moritz in the 1800s. Great Britain won gold at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. The modern crafts can travel up to 90mph.
Despite being the UK’s most successful winter sports team, for many a mention of bobsleigh will conjure memories of the famous Jamaican side that made their way into popular culture after the story of their participation in the 1988 Winter Olympics was made into the cult 1993 film Cool Runnings.
Britain does not have an actual ice track for competitors to practise on. Instead the British team partly trains at facilities at the University of Bath, where there is an off-ice 140m push-start track, where they can practise their starts.
PA Media contributed to this report
