Sport

Gallagher's glorious gold

GOLDEN girls Kelly Gallagher and Charlotte Evans were on top of the world on Monday after making Winter Paralympic history.

Visually-impaired skier Gallagher, from Bangor, and guide Evans rebuilt their shattered confidence following Saturday's downhill disappointment to win Team GB's first ever Winter Paralympic title with victory in the Super-G in Sochi.

It sealed a remarkable turnaround in fortunes for the pair, who two days earlier had come home dead last, a result which Gallagher admitted had destroyed her faith in their ability.

Gallagher and Evans's teammates Jade Etherington and Caroline Powell won bronze, their second medal of the Games. Gallagher and Evans were the first of the six pairs down and had an anxious wait to see if their time would be good enough. Slovakia's Henrieta Farkasova, the downhill gold medallist, was expected to go quicker, but crashed, and when Australian Melissa Perrine also failed to finish, gold was secure. "It was really hard work coming from downhill into Super-G because they are similar speed events," the 28-year-old Gallagher said. "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'.

"Charlotte said to me, 'You've got to make a decision to turn it around and forget about all the pressure that's on us' and it has worked out. "We've had to do that so many times along the road when we have been training, whether I have been scared of something or I have been injured and physically hurt and mentally hurt. "I can't stress how hard we've worked. It has been horrible and there have been days where I

have said, 'What am I doing to myself? I'm not even enjoying my life,' but we have kept on going. "We've had to pull ourselves together so many times that I guess all that was training for what happened from our downhill to the Super-G. "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."

Gallagher follows Belfast's Michael McKillop, Eglinton's Jason Smyth and Seaforde's Bethany Firth as a Paralympic champion.

Athletes McKillop and Smyth pair both won double gold at the London summer Games in 2012, where Firth won a swimming gold medal.

Smyth had previously won two golds and the Beijing Games, where McKillop picked up his first Paralympic title.

* SUPER-G WHIZZ: Bangor woman Kelly Gallagher follows her guide Charlotte Evans down the course en route to winning the gold medal in the Super-G skiing event at the Winter Paralympic Games in Sochi yesterday

Picture: AP