At last, the inventors of modern skiing have something to cheer: Dave Ryding

It was hard not to be charmed by Dave Ryding’s slalom victory at Kitzbühel. His story has a little of everything the British want in their favourite winter Olympians, an unlikely beginning on a dry ski slope in Pendle, a homespun background, training in a shed his father built in the back garden and a mulish stubborn streak that meant he graduated on to the elite skiing circuit when he was 28, the sort of age when most people would be thinking about quitting already, and which, at 35, finally made him the country’s first World Cup race winner. “Ein Brite? Ein Brite!” was the headline in the next day’s Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Ryding is 50-1 to win the slalom gold medal in Beijing. There is something enjoyably improbable about it all, even now he has already gone and won a race. Great Britain is one of a handful of countries who have been represented at all 23 Winter Olympic Games.

They have won a grand total of 32 medals in them, in figure skating, of course, and curling, too, leisure centre sports that can be done indoors, plus skeleton and bobsled racing, a gold in ice hockey, believe it or not, back in 1936, and a smattering of bronzes in snowboarding, freestyle skiing and short track speed skating. In alpine skiing, Great Britain have won exactly nothing, nada, in almost a century of trying.

They almost did, once, when Ryding’s GB coach, Alain Baxter, finished third in the slalom at Salt Lake in 2002, a turn-up so unexpected that none of the band of British journalists covering those Games were there to see it happen because nobody figured he had a chance of winning anything. But it was stripped from him because he tested positive for a tiny quantity of methamphetamine he had inadvertently ingested after using a Vicks