TeamGB won their first medal at the Winter Paralympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea today, when Millie Knight secured a silver medal in the visually impaired women’s downhill category.

 

 

Together with her guide, Brett Wild, Knight finished 0.86 seconds behind Slovakian Henrieta Farkasova and her guide Natalia Subrtova.  Knight’s time was 1 minute 30.58 seconds.

Knight was the youngest competitor ever to represent ParalympicsGB at an Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014 when she was just 15.  In Russia, she was the team’s flagbearer at the opening ceremony (see image above) and she came 5^th in the Downhill and 5^th in the Giant Slalom.

Then in 2017, she won the World Para Alpine Skiing Championships in Tarvisio, Italy – the first World Championship for a British para-skier.

But she’d previously crashed and suffered concussion on the very same course in PyeongChang in 2017, putting her out of action for several months.  However, today she showed no fear in her medal-winning run on that course.

After the race, she said: “I literally can’t stop smiling…  This is amazing, the year we have had to get here, it has been a struggle. ..It is the best feeling in the world.  I knew I’d stopped at the finish line and that was my goal, there was no repeats of last year where I just landed on my face.”