Team GB is joyously camp – all glitter, if not so much gold

Bounding out for their first Spice Girls routine, British Olympic figure skaters Lewis Gibson – in a leopard-print vest – and Lilah Fear, in a union jack sequined dress, the pair appeared to have been transported straight from a Saturday night ITV show. Not always popular in the skating world for their reliance on silly outfits and great tunes, rather than precise twizzles or well-pointed toes, they continue to be supremely popular with audiences.

Incredibly, this is the less camp of their two routines. The second one involves the duo clad in glittery tartan, skating to a Scottish medley of The Proclaimers, Auld Lang Syne and The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond. Joyous.

Team GB may well be languishing at the bottom of the medal table, but if there were a Camp Olympics, we would undoubtedly soar to the top. “The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural; of artifice and exaggeration,” wrote Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp. She might well have had the British Winter Olympics team in mind. While other countries have focused on credit card fraud (France) or romantic affairs (Norway), Team GB’s mission in Milano Cortina has been to showcase the very best of kitsch, campy British culture.

The standard-bearers for this have been figure skaters Fear and Gibson – we can be grateful to chef de mission Eve Muirhead, who recognises this is where our strengths lie. Sure, figure skating may be the most obvious vehicle – but it doesn’t end there.

Bruce Mouat’s insistence on wearing a cap while he curls? Camp.

Fear’s strong American accent despite going to school in Hampstead? Camp.

Gus Kenworthy taking a piss in the snow that said “Fuck ICE”? Hmm – maybe not camp but the medium for his message definitely gave it a certain twist.

Even the idea of British people doing winter sports feels camp. British skiers and snowboarders learned on dry slopes – on fake snow. That’s camp!

In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam argues that failure could be a way to critique the norms and expectations of heteropatriarchy. That must have been the intention when Fear tripped in the free dance routine, putting them firmly out of medal contention.

From snowboarding to skiing to curling to figure skating, failure has been the modus operandi of Team GB at Milano Cortina 2026. So why not embrace it at this point?

Winter sports might not be our forte but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring some camp fun to the snow and ice.

Photograph by Jean Catuffe/Getty Images