Clifton Hugh Lancelot de Verdon Wrottesley, 6th Baron Wrottesley competed for Ireland in the men's skeleton at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, finishing 4th - the best result ever achieved by an Irish athlete at the Olympic Winter Games.
After the first of his two runs he lay in bronze medal position, but fell agonisingly short on his final run, missing out on the podium by just 0.42 seconds.
Wrottesley spent his first two years in Abbyknockmoy, Co. Galway. His father was killed in a car accident when he was two years old, and he subsequently moved to Spain with his mother. He inherited the barony in 1977 on the death of his grandfather. He was educated at Eton College, the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and served two years as an officer in the Grenadier Guards before working as a stockbroker in the City of London.
He took up sliding on the Cresta Run in St Moritz in 1988 and became the most successful slider in the track's history, winning the record number of victories across its four classic races. His father had also competed in bobsleigh for Great Britain. Wrottesley served as Chef de Mission for the Irish team at the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics and later became chairman of British Skeleton. He was elected to the House of Lords as a Conservative hereditary peer in a 2022 by-election.
Bobsleigh
