Path To Pyeonchang: County Durham ski cross star Emily Sarsfield closing in on her Olympic dream after a decade of disappointment

SHE might be one of the leading names in British winter sport, but Emily Sarsfield could be forgiven for not having too much time for the Winter Olympics.

Back in 2010, the County Durham ski cross star suffered a horrific high-speed crash that left her with a career-threatening knee injury and scuppered her hopes of competing in the Winter Games in Vancouver. Four years on, and while the pain of her exclusion from the 2014 Winter Olympics might have been less physically intense, the mental anguish was even harder to bear.

Having achieved the qualifying standards to compete in Sochi, Sarsfield was awarded a place by the International Skiing Federation. However, British Ski and Snowboard refused to ratify her selection, and despite going through a drawn-out appeals process with the backing of a petition boasting more than 10,000 signatures, she was forced to watch on with intense frustration as her dream of Olympic competition once again disappeared.

Another three-and-a-half years have passed since then, and Sarsfield finds herself less than 160 days away from the start of the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang. Unsurprisingly, as she chats on the phone from a ski cross training camp in Chile, she finds herself wrestling with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, she has spent the last few years constantly telling herself not to live her life counting down to the next Olympics. But with the selection process for Pyeongchang drawing to an end, she finds herself within touching distance of realising a dream she he has held since she first took to the artificial slopes at Silksworth when she was still a pupil at Belmont School.

“I’ve been through so much over the years, that I never wanted to make this Winter Olympics a big thing for me,” said Sarsfield, who was still a teenager when she swapped more traditional skiing for the thrills and spills of ski cross, a discipline where six skiers race against each other over a series of bumps, jumps and gulleys. “In the past, I’ve geared everything to trying to make the Olympics. Every training session, every race, every decision about the rest of my life, was done with that in mind.

“This time, it’s been different. I haven’t been living my life for other people, or doing what I’ve thought might be best for ranking points or whatever. I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do and really enjoyed it. It’s been a release really, not having any of that pressure.

“But you reach a point where you can’t really ignore that any longer. The Winter Olympics are coming, and if they were taking place tomorrow, I’d be ranked high enough to qualify. I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t exciting, but it also means I have to start thinking about things a bit differently. I have to get my head around the fact that after all these years, I might actually be an Olympian.”

Sarsfield is 34 now, not overly old in the world of adrenaline sports, but far enough through her career to accept that this kind of opportunity might not come around again.

With two thirds of the qualifying process complete, Sarsfield sits in 18th position in the world rankings, with the top 32 guaranteed a place in Pyeongchang, provided the British authorities do not decide to intervene in the same ham-fisted manner that prevented her from competing in Sochi.

Unsurprisingly, the process that resulted in Sarsfield being excluded from the team in 2014 became extremely acrimonious, with threats of court proceedings and an internal inquiry that eventually resulted in the BOA changing some of their selection procedures.

Many of the executives involved in sidelining Sarsfield four years ago have subsequently left British Ski and Snowboard, and when the federation appointed a new chief executive, Rory Tapner, in 2015, he made a point of attempting to clear the air.

Whereas Sarsfield spent the first decade of her career without any funded coaching support, often paying her own way to travel from resort to resort, hoping to be able to tag on to other national squads and utilise their coaching structures, she now benefits from a designated coach and a wider support structure that reflects the growing professionalism right across British winter sport.

The wounds of 2014 are beginning to heal, although Sarsfield admits to some lingering trepidation about how she will be viewed if she makes it to Pyeongchang.

“It is a bit strange,” she said. “But to be fair to the new people at the federation, they’ve tried to make it as comfortable and welcoming as they can. I was at a media day for the whole of the British winter squad in Edinburgh the other day, and that was the first time I’d really met some of the people who were involved in everything that happened in Sochi.

“I was travelling up thinking, ‘I wonder how this is going to go’, but a lot has changed in the last few years and I feel like I’m in a much better position now. We got a new performance director (Dan Hunt), who had been at British Cycling, and I think he looked at me and said, ‘Well how she is ever going to get better if she doesn’t have a coach’. That has been a big game-changer for me.”

With the help of her new coaching network, Sarsfield has successfully re-established herself in the world’s top 20. She might have finished last season in an even higher position, but an injury in the second half of the campaign meant she had to sit out a number of events.

The casualness with which Sarsfield speaks about her injuries never ceases to amaze – “it wasn’t anything too serious this time – I just snapped the medial cruciate ligaments in both knees” – but as she prepares to return to the competitive circuit as the winter calendar begins to crank into gear, isn’t she worried about more bad luck in the build-up to the Olympics?

“I always say this, but you just can’t think like that,” she said. “I’ve probably broken just about every bone in my body, but unfortunately that’s just part and parcel of what I do.

“You could get knocked over crossing the road tomorrow, so when I’m standing in the start gate, I can honestly say I haven’t got a single thought about what might happen in terms of getting injured. If you start thinking like that, that’s when you’re really in trouble.”

Sarsfield has spent the last few months training with the British snowboard squad, often linking up with Maisie Potter, a highly-rated 20-year-old who competed at last year’s Junior World Championships.

Jenny Jones made history when her bronze medal in snowboard in Sochi made her the first Briton to win a Winter Olympic medal on snow, and Team GB’s tally of four medals four years ago equalled the nation’s best-ever haul.

UK Sport has doubled its investment in Olympic winter sports from £13.5m for the four-year cycle to the 2014 Sochi Games to £27.9m for the run-in to Pyeongchang, and chef de mission Mike Hay insists the nation should be excited about the medal chances for next year’s Games, which begin in early February.

“In my time skiing, there’s been a massive change right through winter sports,” said Sarsfield. “When I started out, it was still all a bit ‘Eddie the Eagle’ really. You were almost congratulated just for having a go.

“It couldn’t be any more different now. It’s certainly not ‘Eddie the Eagle’ any more – you’ve got world-class athletes competing at the very highest level in a load of different disciplines.

“It’s great for kids starting out in skiing or snowboarding now – there are so many opportunities for them and a path they can follow right to the top. That’s great, and it’s nice to think I might have played a little part in the process that’s made that happen.”

If there is any sporting justice, Sarsfield’s reward for more than a decade of devotion will be a place in Pyeongchang. Just don’t ask her to focus on it too intensely yet.