From Beijing, CHN
(February 9, 2022) – One day after Natalie Geisenberger won her third straight Olympic gold medal, her German teammates Tobias Wendl & Tobias Arlt duplicated that effort with their own historic third straight Olympic gold.
As it had been for so much of their career, the race came down to a battle between Wendl and Arlt and teammates Toni Eggert and Sascha Benecken. Eggert and Benecken were the first German team to go and and set a track record to take the lead early. They held that lead until Wendl and Arlt’s run from the fifth starting position where they came down .045 seconds quicker to move into the top spot. With no other team within a tenth of a second of the two German teams it was down to them to decide the gold medal.
For their second heat Eggert and Benecken were once again nearly flawless on their run to put the pressure on Wendl and Arlt. But like the two Olympics prior to the 2022 Games Wendl and Alrt didn’t flinch. While their second run was slightly slower than their first, they once again set the quick run of the heat to win their third consecutive Olympic gold medal.
It was the first time a doubles team had won three straight Olympic gold medals.
“It’s hard to explain how this feeling is, but it’s just incredible,” Wendl explained. “I think we’ll need some days to calm down and see how we really do feel about what we’ve accomplished.”
“Our past season hasn’t been very great,” Arlt continued. “And our prior training session wasn’t great plus we had a positive COVID test so we had to miss some test runs. I feel like we showed up unprepared and were using equipment we’d barely tested in St. Moritz. We didn’t expect everything to fall into place from the get-go.”
For Eggert and Benecken the silver medal came four years after a bronze in Pyeongchang. As they crossed the finish line
“I think we made a great second run, very similar to the first run,” Eggert said of their medal run. “We knew if the Tobis did another great run we might be behind them. It depended on their nerves, but they were strong enough and I take off my hat to them!”
“All the way to the end we’ve always been close,” Benecken said of the competition between the German teams. “Today until the very end it was a poker game between us. On our training runs we weren’t showing our full hand, but we’re very happy that we’ve been so successful as a team.”
Behind the two German teams the Austrian duo of Thomas Steu and Lorenz Koller cruised to a bronze medal. The Austrians were considered a potential favorite for a gold medal after being the quickest team throughout official training, but a combination of a less-than-perfect slide and a not great start draw left them well behind the Germans after one run. Their second slide also was slightly skiddy and while that wasn’t enough to move them up to contend for a gold medal, they did take their first Olympic medal, a bronze.
Though they were quick in training, the Austrians knew that they’d have an uphill battle.
“We knew that the two German teams were bluffing a bit in training,” Steu said. “We didn’t do that. We’d been running flat out all through training. We expected more speed, but I’m still mega happy with how things worked out!”
Koller agreed.
“We were probably a little too overconfident with how our equipment was, but I’m still thrilled with a bronze in the Olympic games!”
Latvia put both of their sleds in the top five. Martins Bots and Roberts Plume set the fifth quickest time in both heats on their way to a fourth place finish in their first Olympics. Andris and Juris Sics, considered medal contenders entering the race, had a mistake out of Curve 13 that set them back to sixth in the first heat. They moved up one place to finish fifth for their fifth straight top ten Olympic finish.
For the brothers Sics the result was a bit of a disappointment.
“It wasn’t what we expected,” Andris Sics said. “We drove off and something happened to our sled. We checked the steels and somewhere along the track we drove over something…a small rock or something…and the steels were all very rough. So we had no chance for time.”
Emanuel Rieder and Simon Kainzwaldner of Italy rounded out the top six.
Tristan Walker and Justin Snith had a small mistake in their first run that put them out of medal contention, though they did set the start record on that run. The Canadian duo finished the race in seventh place as the top non-European team in the event.
The United States’ Zachary di Gregorio and Sean Hollander struggled throughout most of the training runs leading up to race day, but put down what was likely their two best runs in Yanqing to finish 11th after entering the second heat in 12th.
Results:
| Pos | Names | Nation | Bib | FIL Rank | Start 1 | Start 2 | Run 1 | Run 2 | Total |
| 1 | Wendl / Arlt | GER | 5 | 2 | 7.014 | 7.036 | 58.255 | 58.299 | 1:56.554 |
| 2 | Eggert / Benecken | GER | 2 | 1 | 7.072 | 7.033 | 58.300 | 58.353 | 1:56.653 |
| 3 | Steu / Koller | AUT | 11 | 4 | 7.054 | 7.062 | 58.426 | 58.639 | 1:57.065 |
| 4 | Bots / Plume | LAT | 3 | 7 | 7.035 | 7.059 | 58.628 | 58.791 | 1:57.419 |
| 5 | Sics / Sics | LAT | 1 | 3 | 7.099 | 7.110 | 58.703 | 58.734 | 1:57.437 |
| 6 | Rieder / Kainzwaldner | ITA | 4 | 5 | 7.032 | 7.073 | 58.602 | 58.995 | 1:57.597 |
| 7 | Walker / Snith | CAN | 10 | 12 | 7.013 | 7.018 | 58.895 | 59.023 | 1:57.918 |
| 8 | Denisev / Antonov | ROC | 8 | 8 | 7.108 | 0.126 | 59.040 | 58.953 | 1:57.993 |
| 9 | Chmielewski / Kowalewski | POL | 7 | 13 | 7.068 | 7.092 | 58.992 | 59.073 | 1:58.065 |
| 10 | Bogdanov / Prokhorov | ROC | 6 | 6 | 7.075 | 7.090 | 59.376 | 59.132 | 1:58.508 |
| 11 | Di Gregorio / Hollander | USA | 15 | 25 | 7.106 | 7.108 | 59.389 | 59.126 | 1:58.515 |
| 12 | Park / Cho | KOR | 12 | 19 | 7.139 | 7.159 | 59.361 | 59.366 | 1:58.727 |
| 13 | Vavercak / Zmij | SVK | 9 | 16 | 7.096 | 7.108 | 60.138 | 59.704 | 1:59.842 |
| 14 | Gitlan / Serban | ROU | 13 | 23 | 7.126 | 7.134 | 59.694 | 60.243 | 1:59.937 |
| 15 | Stakhiv / Lysetskyi | UKR | 14 | 20 | 7.213 | 7.220 | 59.983 | 60.080 | 2:00.080 |
| 16 | Vejdelek / Pekny | CZE | 17 | 22 | 7.284 | 7.228 | 60.248 | 59.869 | 2:00.117 |
| 17 | Huang / Peng | CHN | 16 | 30 | 7.243 | 7.226 | 60.732 | 60.840 | 2:01.572 |
