Team GB’s Kirsty Muir: ‘When I’m in the air, it feels like I’m flying’

“When you are up in the air, it almost feels like you’re flying,” says Kirsty Muir, the youngest member of Britain’s Winter Olympic team, as she describes the sensation when her body is twirling like a spinning top high above ground. “When you are doing an easier trick, like a 360, everything seems to slow down. There’s time to look around. To see the world. And then comes this spectacular rush of adrenaline when you land.”

Muir is 17 but her name has been on people’s lips ever since, at 13, she won three events in the BRITS championship against a star-studded – and significantly older – field. Medals at the Europa Cup, Junior World Championships and the Youth Olympics followed, before she achieved her first World Cup podium place in Colorado last year. Yet that may only hint at her potential. Lesley McKenna, a three-time Olympian and programme manager at GB Snowsport reckons Muir is a “once in a generation” talent.

Certainly Muir is improving so quickly that a medal in Beijing is not out of the question. Her best chance is probably in slopestyle, in which athletes ski a course which includes a variety of obstacles and ramps, and earn points for their quality and originality of their manoeuvres. But the unpredictability of big air, which requires skiers to launch from an enormous ramp and perform jaw-dropping tricks, also offers a realistic shot at glory.

Does she believe she can do it? “I’m telling myself that I should think about my performance only,” she says. “If I do my best run, but the other girls go better than me, I will still be happy.”

There are two huge things in Muir’s favour: talent and temperament. Both attributes merged when she came second in the World Cup slopestyle in Colorado last March. “That was my