High Wycombe’s Winter Olympics hopeful Jerry Rice vowed to take inspiration from new British Olympic skeleton bronze medallist Dom Parsons as he targeted his own podium success at Tokyo 2022.

Parsons got Britain off the medal mark in PyeongChang last Friday when he secured a dramatic third-place – the first Olympic male skeleton medal for the nation since John Crammond 70 years ago.

But if Rice has his way, we will be only be made to wait another four for the next.

The 27-year-old made his Olympic Games bow in South Korea alongside Parsons, rising to the challenge with an impressive tenth-place finish.

That was by far the biggest result of his career with his World Cup campaign this season yielding a best finish of 11th in St Moritz last month.

And with Parsons having placed in exactly the same position in Sochi as Rice did at these Games, the latter was keen to take heart from what could be achieved.

“Dom finished tenth in Sochi four years ago so if I can see myself on that same trajectory it definitely gives me an extra drive for sure so we'll see what happens,” he said.

“He made us all nervous right at the end there but he deserves it. He works hard and he was the man who always said that he had the potential to do something like that and he's done it.

"I wanted a top 12 and I said if I was in the top ten I would be over the moon and I am. It took me four runs to put down four solid runs but in the end consistency does always win out in a four-run race and I'm so happy.”

Rice was backed by an enthusiastic following both trackside – chants of Rice, Rice, Rice echoed around the finish line of the Olympic Sliding Centre after the third and fourth heats – as well as at home and on social media.

In the end he finished 3.69 seconds off ice cool champion Yun Sungbin of South Korea although Parsons was only two seconds ahead of him.

But after struggling to get to grips with the track originally during training, Rice was delighted to finally put it together when it mattered most.

He added: “I struggled in training if I'm honest and I turned up on race day and I knew I had a little it of work to do. I managed to click with the track at just the right time.

“My start's been coming along over the season and I was pleased I was able to start well and slide well enough.

"I was much more relaxed for these two runs if I'm honest. The first run I just wanted to get over the pre-race jitters and I had a good enough first run and after that everything relaxes much more and you tend to think about things less because you know roughly what you need to do and it becomes very robotic and you just execute so I was very relaxed.”

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