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‘I was in so much pain’: snowboarder Katie Ormerod on injury, recovery and dreams of an Olympic medal
After a horrifying injury, snowboarder Katie Ormerod is finally on her way to Beijing – and is one of Team GB’s best hopes for a gold medal. Here she reveals how it all began on a dry slope in Yorkshire…
Katie Ormerod – nicknamed “Katie Oh!” for her crowd-pleasing medley of acrobatic snowboard tricks – is Team GB’s all-action poster-girl for the Beijing Winter Olympics next month, and an authentic hope for the country’s first ever snowsport gold medal. The 24-year-old athlete, an unexpectedly shy Yorkshire woman, became Britain’s first ever World Cup slopestyle champion in 2020. She has somehow overcome Britain’s lack of mountains, and a potentially career-ending shattered heel in 2018 (which required seven operations, the insertion of two metal pins, and a graft of pig skin), to make it this far. “It feels amazing – I’m just really happy that I am able to do this, because I had to work so extremely hard to make it here, and to come back from injury,” Ormerod explains.
Ormerod and I are speaking via Zoom from her home in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, during a break between contests in America and Canada. She speaks softly but assuredly in a Yorkshire accent; her lightning-blonde hair, which fans usually see dancing around in a plait as she executes her flamboyant tricks, is tucked casually beneath a cap.
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