Kristan Bromley has refused to rule out a return to the British skeleton fold as the team counts the cost of a calamitous series of performances at the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
All four British sliders finished well off the pace despite a £6.5million funding cycle in the wake of the sport’s historic three-medal haul in Pyeongchang in 2018.
In contrast, Bromley, a former world champion and four-time Olympian, is performance director of the Netherlands team for whom Kimberley Bos won a bronze medal on a fraction of the British budget.
Bromley told the PA news agency: “My door is always open and it has always been open. The British programme wanted to go down a different path and I respected that.
“I went down my own path and I wanted to work with international athletes and broaden my experience base outside the British programme.
Bromley built the sleds upon which Alex Coomber and his partner Shelley Rudman won medals at the 2002 and 2006 Games respectively. Richard Bromley was performance director for the South Korean team for whom Sungyun Bin won gold in Pyeongchang in 2018.
Bromley described Britain’s performance in Beijing, which saw Matt Weston score the highest finish with 15th in the men’s event, as a “backward step”, amid speculation elsewhere that recently-introduced equipment intended to give their sliders the edge had spectacularly backfired.
“From the outside looking in, it’s clear that something wasn’t right, and maybe that extended back to the season before,” added Bromley.
“Looking at their results, you could say it was a backward step and I’ve got no explanation for that. You have to already have a level of confidence to be in the mix for medals, and maybe their strategy was just to come in totally under the radar and it didn’t work.
“Just spending money and creating big teams doesn’t deliver medals. You’ve got to focus on the right athletes and the right technologies, and keep your finger on the pulse of what really creates a performance. Maybe somewhere along the way they lost that pulse.”
