Elise Christie is winning her race to be fit for another date - either with Olympic destiny or disaster.

The three-time world champion is nursing soft tissue damage to her right ankle after crashing during the 1500m semi-finals, just days after also taking a tumble in the 500m final.

But she took part in a light training session yesterday and has impressed the Team GB medical team with the speed of her recovery.

She will spend a longer more intensive session on the ice before the British Olympic Association’s chief medical officer Dr Mike Loosemore, coach Nicky Gooch and performance director Stewart Laing make the final call with Christie - just hours before she is due to skate.

However, she is determined to compete, with her boyfriend, Hungarian skater Shaolin Liu confident she will be on the line.

“I’m cautiously optimistic and the reason for saying that is she was on the ice today,” said Team GB chef de mission Mike Hay on Monday.

“That was purely to see if she could put the boot on and skate around a little bit. She will go through a tougher training session tomorrow.

“If she comes through that – and it’s still a big if – then she will compete tomorrow evening.

“She absolutely wants to, we just need to make sure that medically everything is ok.”

Christie has suffered a succession of disappointments at the Olympics - with death threats after her performances in Sochi four years ago - but Hay insists she is mentally prepared, should she line up in her favourite event.

The 27-year old Scot has a relatively straight forward draw and must finish in the top two of the four-person race to reach Thursday’s quarter-finals, which will give her further time to recover.

“She is a different athlete to four years ago. I’m not sure she could have handled this in the same way then,” added Hay.

“You don’t become a triple world champion without some resilience. She’s got one chance to go and she’s desperate, she’s going to just be determined to make sure that ankle is fit.

“We do dampen expectations a bit because she’s coming back from an injury. Whether she makes it or not is still in the balance. But there’s obviously going to be an element of risk if she does make it too.”

Learning the lessons from Sochi, Christie vowed to quit social media during the Games, although she has been active on Twitter since her race.

The overwhelming majority of comments on social media have been supportive but Hay believes she won’t be able to escape the trolls.

“Most people have goodwill but there are some haters,” admitted Hay.

"What we don't do is gag our athletes. It's up to them to handle it, they know the risks if they want to go and engage with people when they should be focusing here.”

Will Elise race again? Catch the women’s 1000m heats live on Eurosport 1 on today at 10am. Don’t miss a moment of the Olympic Winter Games at Eurosport.co.ukand the Eurosport app