Ryding goes from dodging sheep to being a leader in his field

Yanqing - Dave Ryding (GBR) is determined the next generation of British skiers will not have to follow his unconventional route to the top.

The 35-year-old will line up for the men's slalom on 16 February as one of six skiers to win on the world cup circuit this season. But he knows none of his medal rivals has had to deal with the obstacles he overcame.

Ryding grew up in an area of northern England where he had no access to a mountain, or indeed snow. Instead, he had to make do with a local dry ski slope, and he was not the only visitor.

"It didn’t used to have fences around it and it’s on a hill and it’s full of sheep," Ryding said. "Sometimes the sheep would run across as you were training and you would have to wait for them."

Their presence was not the only inconvenience.

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

Ryding did not let such inauspicious beginnings put him off. Instead, he grew to "love the grind". By 2009 he had forced his way onto the world cup circuit and three years later he recorded his first top-30 finish – 26th in the slalom in Levi, Finland.

While many may have associated Ryding’s ambitions with Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards – the British ski-jumper who famously finished last twice at the Olympic Winter Games Calgary 1988 - they soon started to take notice.

On the back of a first world cup podium place, the Briton finished the 2016/17 season ranked the eighth-best slalom skier in the world.

It has been far from easy. Ryding says there has not been a season where he has not "shed a tear at some point in exhaustion or fatigue of trying".

But everything changed just a few weeks ago when he became the first British skier to win a world cup slalom.

"I felt like I smashed my head through a ceiling which I had been smashing on for some time," Ryding said of his victory in Kitzbuehel, Austria, on 22 January.

The reaction in Britain was, as Ryding puts it, "nuts". And now he wants action.

"We have to grab this opportunity," he said.

"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 charge of funding at the federation level, they have to go out now, get the funding secured for the next generation.

"I’ve always said it’s possible. You just have to work hard and you can get better year by year and you can do it. Now I don’t need to speak, I just have to put on (footage of) Kitzbuehel and say, ‘Look, it’s doable’. I don’t have to say it’s doable without having done it.

"We've got to keep building. We've got to take this momentum."

Article courtesy of Olympic Information Service