Winter Paralympics: Menna Fitzpatrick and Jen Kehoe win silver in giant slalom - BBC Sport
Great Britain's Menna Fitzpatrick and Jen Kehoe win a third Paralympic medal, finishing second in the visually impaired giant slalom.
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Britain's Menna Fitzpatrick and guide Jen Kehoe won their third Paralympic medal after finishing second in the women's visually impaired giant slalom.

They clocked two minutes 28.34 seconds over the two runs to add to a super combined silver and super-G bronze.

Slovakia's Henrieta Farkasova and Natalia Subrtova finished 5.34secs clear for their fourth gold medal.

GB's Kelly Gallagher and Gary Smith were fifth, with compatriots Millie Knight and Brett Wild seventh.

Welsh skier Fitzpatrick, 19, and Kehoe were second after the opening run, 3.62 seconds behind the Slovakian pair.
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They were unable to close the gap on their rivals in the second run but did enough to bring the GB medal tally from the Games to five.

Since crashing out early from their opening downhill event, they have recovered superbly and gone from strength to strength as the programme has gone on.

"I feel immensely proud of what we did out there," Fitzpatrick told BBC Sport.

"We definitely went out there and tried our very best. I was shattered by the end. We gave it our all.

"We were completely relaxed and just went for it.

"After the fall we just had to be strong and overcome it and show our best skiing to the world and what we are made of."

Northern Ireland skier Gallagher, who won GB's first Winter Paralympic gold in Sochi four years ago, had her best finish of these Games after seventh in the super combined and eighth in the super-G.

"This is one of the disciplines I love so I was hoping for a better result, but it is a strong field and hard to catch Henrieta," said the 32-year-old.

"We've come out and tried our best and proved a lot to ourselves.

"A couple of months ago, you wouldn't have imagined that we would even have got here."

The women's skiing programme concludes on Sunday with the slalom event.

In the men's standing giant slalom, GB's James Whitley was 11th as Switzerland's Theo Gmur won his third gold medal.

The GB wheelchair curlers' hopes of reaching the top four are in the balance after losing 9-3 to the USA to make it five wins from their nine round-robin matches.

Aileen Neilson's team will face home side South Korea and China on the last day of the round-robin phase on Thursday, and will almost certainly have to win both to have any chance of progressing.

They recovered well from losing twice on Tuesday to beat Germany 8-3 in the first of their two games on Wednesday.

Although they were denied big scoring opportunities in the third and fifth ends by two brilliant last stones from German skip Christiane Putzich, they held their nerve superbly to score three in the sixth end.

It seemed to rock the Germans' confidence and GB took advantage to score a further two in the next end to finish the match strongly with an end to play.

But against the US, who had only won one of their previous eight games, they struggled from the start, conceding five points in the third and fourth ends and the sixth end was another disastrous one as they conceded another three.

In the cross-country skiing, Britain's Scott Meenagh failed to qualify for the semi-finals of the men's 1.1km seated event.

With the top 12 to go through, Meenagh, who lost both his legs while serving in Afghanistan in 2010, finished 16th.

The women's seated title went to American Oksana Masters who overcame an elbow injury to claim her first Paralympic gold medal after silver and bronzes at both summer and winter Games.

The 28-year-old, who was born in Ukraine near the Chernobyl nuclear plant, was adopted from an orphanage aged seven and brought to the US by her adoptive mother Gay Masters, a speech and language professional.

She suffered from a number of birth defects to her limbs which eventually resulted in both legs being amputated and her having to have multiple reconstructive surgeries on her hands.

Masters dislocated her elbow in a training crash prior to the Games and then injured it again in a fall on Tuesday, which forced her to pull out of the 10km biathlon race.

But she showed her determination to win by 2.1 seconds and said afterwards that she wanted to race over the shorter distance, despite the injury.

"Yesterday was really tough. I literally did not think I was going to be able to race this sprint race, and I love sprinting," she said.

"But the team's medical staff evaluated my elbow and they said that with some taping it would be good to go for today.

"I definitely did start to doubt myself but internally I kind of knew that I have had four years to get here and I wasn't going to let an elbow take that away from me."