If the Winter Olympics have left indelible images in the memories of the Canadian public, the flip side is that Britain’s medal return requires only the shortest of attention spans. Amy and Arthur remain the lonely contributors and, given that one of them is an inanimate object, the team champagne will remain on ice.

Amy Williams and her beloved sled ensured that Andy Hunt, the BOA chief executive received only a mild grilling when he met the media to pick the meat from Vancouver’s bones. The Bath student’s skeleton gold means that UK Sport will believe that the £2.1 million invested in the sport over the past Olympic cycle was money well spent.

Whether they will feel the same about the £1.1 million given to the misfiring curlers is more debatable, and although there is no doubt that Britain’s Olympians are hampered by a lack of mountains and facilities, there is a feeling that these Games have been a qualified disappointment.

The BOA tried to look on the bright side, despite the team falling short of UK Sport’s three-medal target. When asked whether the team had done enough to merit a hike in funding, Hunt almost conceded defeat. “We’d love more but we are realistic about where we are in the funding cycle,” he said. “It’s more a question of where we spend that money and there will be a joined-up process using the best practice of skeleton.”

So how good or bad were these Games? The BOA said that 69 per cent of the team were at their first Games and statistics show that most people win a medal at their second or third. The team was also young, with almost a fifth under 21. However, suggesting that eight personal bests from a team of 52 was good rather than an indictment of an inability to peak was a tad fanciful. Indeed, if “Better Never Stops” is the BOA’s tagline, it stalled for many of the team.

Williams was a delightful anomaly and, while it is true that the upgrade of a skeleton medal from silver to gold is an improvement from 2006, others were big let-downs. Foremost among them were Britain’s world champions. David Murdoch’s curling team went out in their tie-breaker against Sweden yesterday, leaving the skip to ponder: “We did everything we possibly could. We have trained six days a week for two years and came into these Games as world champions, but sometimes it just doesn’t go right.”

The women’s bobsleigh team were also world champions, although they arrived after a troubled build-up, with Nicola Minichiello’s bad eye and Gillian Cooke’s split bodysuit, and things became worse when a crash on their third run yesterday ended their hopes. “I’m absolutely devastated,” Minichiello said. “It was right on the edge and I lost it. At the flippin’ Olympics!”

The cynic might say that was a mantra for the whole team. “At the Flippin’ Olympics” might not resonate quite like “Own the Podium”, but Zoe Gillings no doubt felt it summed up her fortunes when she suffered a knee injury in her snowboard cross semi-final. Eve Muirhead showed flashes of brilliance on her curling debut and will be back for more, while Shelley Rudman and Kristan Bromley were both sixth in the skeleton.

In total there was one medal, seven top-ten finishes and a good deal of soul-searching. The number of top-ten entries was down on the nine in Turin, but Britain had won only 13 post-war medals going into these Games.

Sir Steve Redgrave, a 2012 ambassador, offered more mitigation, raising the idea of building a purpose-built long-track ice rink in Britain, big enough to house two smaller rinks in the centre. “Our short-track skaters get two hours on the ice a day,” he said. “That’s not enough.” Redgrave reckons that 83 medal chances, from skaters to curlers, could be housed in such a performance centre. “We were not very good at track cycling until we built a velodrome,” he said.

Hunt spoke of the difficulty of managing expectations and the case of Chemmy Alcott underlined that. An impressive thirteenth in the downhill, she finished a distant 27th in yesterday’s giant slalom but said that she had “knocked the door down”. However, it is also worth remembering that Ed Drake, who finished 27th in the men’s downhill, received only £6,000 annual funding and had to pay £3,500 to his now defunct governing body for the honour of being on the team — at the flippin’ Olympics.