IT started as a hangover cure — and ended up with lashings of champagne to toast an Olympic medal.
While some people might opt for black coffee and aspirin to recover from a skinful, Dom Parsons’ perfect antidote was hurtling down a slope on a tea tray at 80mph.
And just over a decade later, he has won Britain’s first medal of these Winter Olympics with a bronze in the skeleton.
The man who twisted Parsons’ arm was skeleton athlete Adam Pengilly — now an International Olympic Committee member, who was sent home in disgrace from PyeongChang 24 hours before his protege won his medal.
Parsons, 30, said: “The skeleton was great fun and a great hangover cure. Adam is the one to blame.
“We were at a barbecue and I stayed on my friend’s couch.
“Adam persuaded my friend to have a go at some skeleton trials — I didn’t even know what skeleton was.
“I went to the trials and I was suffering a bit with the fun of the night before.
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“Then Adam said to me ‘Do you want to have a go on the push track?’ That was the start of an obsession.”
It seemed Parsons had agonisingly missed out on a medal when he was 0.02sec slower than Nikita Tregubov, leaving him fourth.
But on a dramatic final run, Latvian Martins Dukurs made an error and fell from second to fourth, with Parsons clinching bronze by 0.11.
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South Korea’s Yun Sung-bin cruised to gold and Russia’s Tregubov took silver.
Parsons added: “I thought I’d binned it.
“I made a couple of mistakes that dropped me behind Nikita and Martins was the last person I would have expected to make those mistakes. I’m very grateful I got lucky.”
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