Winter Olympics: Team GB snowboarder Charlotte Bankes LOSES at quarter-final stage

She held it together for a brief moment but, just like her pursuit of a gold medal at the Winter Olympics, that didn’t last awfully long for Charlotte Bankes. It soon ended in tears.

What a soul-crushing experience for her, a world champion of snowboard cross who reserved one of her worst results in years for the quarter-final of her big day.

‘Honestly, I cannot quite understand what has happened,’ she said, and after failing to make the semi-finals of a discipline she dominates, that just about summed it up.

It wasn’t meant to go like this. Not for her, a serial champion, and not for the wider delegation of Team GB. 

At this point, they haven’t so much as left a footprint in the fake snow at Beijing 2022 and Bankes’s collapse will sting more than any. She was, if you pardon the obvious pun, their banker. That and their get-out-of-jail card. 

Team GB star Charlotte Bankes has failed to qualify for the snowboard-cross semi-finals 

After the first four days of these Games, the British performances had been poor; now, after five, they are very much looking like a trigger for an inquisition around £28million of lottery funding.

But back to Bankes for now. She is the athlete who found consistency in the wacky-races of a mad sport – in 11 races this season prior to arriving in China, only once was the 26-year-old off the podium. Seven times she crossed first, not counting the heat she won on Wednesday afternoon.

And so to her doomed quarter-final, which she led at halfway, with 10metres between her and third and the top two going through. 

Then, with her turn on bank five a little wide, she was passed first on the inside by Tess Critchlow of Canada, and crucially by Australia’s Belle Brockhoff on the outside. 

Things happen fast in snowboard cross; success by any metric is moving like a glacier for the British team. 

Bankes recovered from a slow start to lead the race but was pushed wide on a bend

It is a disappointing end for the world champion and one of Team GB’s gold medal hopefuls

Bankes, who crossed in third, and therefore nowhere, was distraught. ‘It’s disbelief,’ she said. I knew it was going to be tight racing, I knew it. I gave it my all but it’s frustrating to have the worst race of my season here at the Olympics.’

She added: ‘For sure, there has been a lot of pressure. I put a lot of pressure on myself and that is the biggest pressure. But I don’t think it was the pressure – we handled it well. Unfortunately I didn’t do the race I wanted to do today and it’s frustrating to do it at the Olympics.’

She soon disappeared around a corner and cried on the shoulders of support staff. If anything, it was almost jolting in these to see a modicum of emotion, when a few too many of Britain’s other defeated athletes have seemed happy to make up the numbers.

If there was a flipside to Bankes’s trauma, it was in the identity of the gold medal winner in the final – Lindsey Jacobellis of the US.  

American Lindsey Jacobellis triumphed in the final, winning gold 16 years on from her agonising defeat in the 2006 Winter Olympics

Jacobellis, 36, becomes world champion 16 years on from her disappointment in Torino

Jacobellis stands atop the podium after winning gold in the snowboard-cross on Wednesday

The 36-year-old had led the final of this event in 2006 and showboated off the final jump while leading by three seconds. 

She fell and was dumped into silver, so as ever with the Olympics, misery and joy seem to live in close confines.

For Bankes, who raced for France at the past two Games before switching to the nation of her birth, there will be a redemption shot in the mixed team event on Saturday with Huw Nightingale. 

On the basis that British prospects have fared so meekly here, it might be prudent to reserve optimism. 

Faye Gulini, Bankes and Belle Brockhoff in action during the fateful quarter-final