On This Day in 2014 – Kelly Gallagher and Charlotte Evans win Super-G gold

Kelly Gallagher and guide Charlotte Evans won Great Britain’s first-ever gold medal at the Winter Paralympics on this day in 2014 with victory in the women’s visually impaired Super-G in Sochi.

The duo had experienced disappointment days earlier in the downhill event where they were five seconds off the pace and finished last.

Yet visually impaired Gallagher and guide Evans turned around their fortunes, with a time of one minute and 28.72 seconds enough to secure the Super-G title ahead of Russian world champion Aleksandra Frantceva.

Evans had been emotional after a sixth-placed finish in the downhill, but vowed they would “come back fighting” and proved true to her word.

The first of the six pairs to take on the course, Gallagher and Evans navigated the track impressively to set what would prove a winning time.

Russia’s Frantceva and guide Pavel Zabotin clocked one minute and 28.94 seconds, but it was not enough to deny Gallagher and Evans gold and they were joined on the podium by compatriots Jade Etherington and guide Caroline Powell, who claimed third (1:29.76) to follow their silver in the downhill.

“It was really hard work coming from downhill into Super-G because they are similar speed events. We were told by our sports psychologist to put it away, it’s one result. It’s so easy to say, so hard to do,” Gallagher explained.

“I lost all of my faith in myself, in Charlotte, in our processes, in what we were doing and I was like, ‘I only have a couple of hours to put this together, because we’re going to be back on snow and we’ve got to race’.

“We wouldn’t have got here if it wasn’t for Charlotte. When I haven’t believed in myself, she has believed in us and believed in herself.”