Team GB star Dave Ryding recalls years of skiing tears ahead of solo shot at salvaging Britain's Winter Olympic Games

Super Dave Ryding is desperate for Britain’s next skiing superstars to avoid slopes covered in sheep muck after years of tears helped him smash the sport’s glass ceiling.

The pride of Pendle honed his craft on his local dry ski slope but was not the only regular visitor with local sheep often leaving their mark on the Lancashire facility in northern England.

The 35-year-old will take to the slopes at Beijing 2022 when the men’s slalom gets underway on Wednesday knowing that none of his rivals will have had to endure the same struggles, and he hopes things will be markedly better for his British successors.

"It didn’t used to have fences around it and it’s on a hill and it’s full of sheep," said Ryding, recalling his old stomping ground that forged his path into alpine skiing.

"Sometimes the sheep would run across as you were training and you would have to wait for them.

"They would just wander across and do their business when we weren’t there. A rainy night and you would get a lot of splatters. It was horrible."

Ryding made national headlines last month when he became the first British alpine skier to win a World Cup with a stunning gold in Kitzbuhel, Austria.

After 13 years of hard graft on the circuit and ten years since his first top 30 finish, Ryding stood on top of the podium, an emotional moment for a man who admits he has “shed a tear at some point in exhaustion or fatigue of trying” in every season.

“I felt like I smashed my head through a ceiling which I had been smashing on for some time," said Ryding, who wants to capitalise on the “nuts” reaction to his win at home.

“I have done my job, I have got skiing on the front pages of national newspapers that sell millions of copies.

“The powers that be who are in