Katie Ormerod interview: Resilient snowboard star hoping to complete Olympic journey from Brighouse to Beijing

If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again.

The 24-year-old snowboarder from Brighouse has been doing that her whole career, certainly when it comes to her Winter Olympics journey.

As a 16-year-old back in 2014 she hoped to qualify to represent Team GB at the Sochi Olympics but inexperience was against her.

“It would have been amazing to go at 16. But if I had gone to Sochi it would have been just to experience it and not bring a medal back,” she says.

Four years later, Ormerod was ready to compete for a medal in PyeongChang, only for fate to deal her a cruel hand.

The day before the Games were to start, Ormerod broke her heel in a nasty fall in training.

Not only was it Olympics over, for many it could have been career over, but not for this irrepressible young Yorkshirewoman.

“No matter what happened, I did not want to let the broken heel stop me, or hold me back,” reflects Ormerod, whose heart-wrenching story dominated the headlines for the next few days before competition finally began in South Korea.

Social media posts of her with her foot in plaster but her thumbs up punctuated the many good news stories filtering back home from the carnival of those 2018 Winter Olympics.

Fast-forward four years and Ormerod is trying again, trying for a third time to finally make it to an Olympic startgate in both the snowboard slopestyle and snowboard Big Air competitions.

“I’m definitely hoping it’s third time lucky,” she tells The Yorkshire Post from her home in West Yorkshire yesterday, just hours after her selection to represent Team GB in Beijing was confirmed.

“I’m just happy that I’ve actually qualified, that my training is done and I’m going in in one piece.

“There’s been a lot of really big contests since PyeongChang and up to now, but the Olympics is the pinnacle and I’m excited to finally get there and show everyone what I can do.

“I never doubted that I would get here, my philosophy has always been I’m going to snowboard as long as I physically can.”

It was her unadulterated love for the sport that kept her mind focused during the dark days of the post-2018 Winter Olympics.

While the likes of Izzy Atkin were celebrated for their medal breakthroughs in freestyle skiing in South Korea, there was no bitterness from Ormerod, just an increased desire to finally take her rightful place in Olympic folklore.

“I was only 20, nine months into the rehab, I was physically the strongest I’d been but still walking with a limp, I was in a lot of pain,” she says.

“That was when it got really scary.

“But it wasn’t an option that it could be career-ending, even though it very nearly was.

“I knew I would do everything in my power to get back, even if it took me years and years, I would keep going.”

Ormerod needed multiple operations but was back competing inside 18 months and more importantly, winning.

The 2019-20 season was her best as she became the first Briton to win the overall World Cup slopestyle title and stood on the podium five times.

“The Olympics is huge but I love the contests in between as well,” she says of the winter season. “That is what I love about snowboarding, there’s always a competition, there’s always a World Cup, and they’re huge.

“Globally the Olympics are massive, but in snowboarding the World Cups are also big so I love all of that.”

The Covid pandemic stopped her in her tracks, forcing her to improvise with her training in those early months of lockdown.

“I was doing gymnastics in my back garden,” says Ormerod, recalling her roots as a young gymnast.

The lack of access to the Alps hindered her training over the following months, and the inability to move freely between countries in the pandemic age restricted the number of competitions she could contest.

But like all British Alpine athletes, working around restrictions is something Ormerod has been doing since the age of five.

It was her mother and father who introduced her to snowboarding when they tried the sport at Halifax Ski and Snowboard Centre, a venue that would play a crucial role in her development in the sport.

Already an aspiring gymnast – “they put me into gymnastics because I was jumping out of boxes and going mental in the house” – snowboarding further quenched her thirst for an active lifestyle.

When in her early teens she had to decide between snowboarding and gymnastics, Ormerod opted for the snow-peaked mountains because of the embracing culture of the sport.

It is a love affair that kept her going.

If the narrative arc of her story reaches fruition in Beijing, she hopes it can prove inspirational to a generation of youngsters more and more exposed to the urban, edgier sports like snowboarding.

“That would be the dream,” she says. “I’m hoping that seeing British athletes at the Winter Olympics will inspire kids to take up snowboarding.

“I’m hoping that my story will have inspired and also proved that it is possible.

“I was born and raised in West Yorkshire, I still live here now. I started snowboarding riding plastic on a dry slope and now I’m competing at the Winter Olympics.

“Although it was really hard work and I had to really work for it, I did have that passion and that drive to go all the way and I’m hoping others will recognise that and see that you don’t have to come from an Alpine region to make it to the Winter Olympics.

“Hopefully, that inspires people to create more facilities in the UK because that’s what it needs. That’s how I got into it, having access to a local facility.”

If anyone is inspired by what she accomplishes in the snowboard slopestyle on Saturday, February 5, and Sunday, February 6, and Big Air eight days later, what would her advice be?

“Just look up your local slope or indoor centre, there are facilities dotted around the UK,” says Ormerod, mindful of the one at Castleford along the M62 from her Brighouse home.

“Just go and get involved, give it a go. It’s given me the most amazing life, I love snowboarding. It’s such a great sport, it brings such a huge sense of freedom and creativity. And you can make it to the Olympics if you work hard enough.

“So hopefully we get more people involved.”

Anyone who is taken to try it, do not be surprised to see Ormerod still out on the slopes.

She wants to snowboard until she is 30, meaning the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina are well within sight.

By then hopefully she already has her Olympic reward, a medal for resilience and perseverance, the very essence of an Olympic journey.