How Team GB Winter Olympians beat The Fear

What do you do if you fall 40 feet on to hard-packed snow? If you're a Winter Olympian, you pick yourself up and try again.

There is a fine line between success and failure in winter sports, where a few millimetres when landing difficult tricks on snow can make the difference between a medal or serious injury.

Dealing with the fear of what might happen if things go wrong is just as important for an elite Winter OIympic athlete as honing any other skill of their craft.

The jeopardy is real as athletes heading to the Milan-Cortina Games push the limits of what is physically possible in their sports while pushing themselves out of their comfort zones.

"The biggest challenge of my sport is definitely overcoming the fear," says freestyle skier and Team GB Winter Olympic medal hopeful Zoe Atkin, who is preparing for her second Winter Games.

The 23-year-old competes in ski halfpipe, where competitors drop into a 22-foot deep pipe and complete as many tricks as they can while jumping as high out of the halfpipe as possible.

They are judged on the amplitude - the height they reach - as well as the difficulty of the tricks and how well they have executed them.

Stanford University student Atkin is studying symbolic systems in the United States. It has aided in her quest to emulate older sister Izzy and win an Olympic medal.

"Symbolic systems is interdisciplinary. It's a lot to do with computer science as well as cognitive science. It's studying machines that simulate the brain.

"Being able to understand fear from a biological process has helped me on the slopes," she says.

For Atkin, fear is at its lowest, maybe unexpectedly, on competition day.

"That's just nervousness around the result and performing to your best, which is easier to combat," she tells BBC Sport. "I do meditation in the morning, to focus on the now.

"The fear comes in training; when you are practising something you are not familiar with, that is when the uncertainty comes in.

"When a spectator watches a sport, they might think we are adrenaline junkies. But it is very precise - we are just a niche athlete."

Zoe's sister Izzy claimed slopestyle bronze in Pyeongchang in 2018.

It gave Britain a first skiing medal at a Winter Olympics - 16 years after Alain Baxter lost his slalom bronze when he failed a drugs test after using an over-the-counter nasal decongestant that he believed to be permitted.

Zoe was watching from the stands eight years ago in South Korea with her parents, and her sister's achievements spurred her on to pursue her own skiing career.

"Working with a sports psychologist has been important - when I was younger, I felt more intense fear, which was a barrier to performance," Atkin says.

"I am pretty young still, but there were a lot of expectations internally, things I want to achieve."

She heads into the Games as the reigning world champion and this season has finished on the podium in each of the World Cups, including a win at Copper Mountain and claimed gold at the X Games.

"Now I've won things, surely I shouldn't be afraid and I should have confidence?" she says.

"But no matter how established you are, there's always a comfort zone you need to push to progress. It's always a continuous progress, a journey I now have more fully embraced."

Atkin has been fortunate in that she has avoided serious injuries, unlike her sister who broke her pelvis just before the 2022 Winter Olympics and has since retired from competitive skiing.

GB team-mate Kirsty Muir has also had her fair share of injuries.

The 21-year-old competes in ski slopestyle and big air. She rides rails and performs tricks of large ramps.

She knows all too well about the horrors of serious injury in the line of duty.

In December 2023, a scan revealed that repeated blows to her knee had resulted in a torn cruciate ligament, ruling her out for a year.

Muir, having "never not skied for that long in my life", says she is fit and firing for Milan-Cortina – but admits the road back was hard.

"The sport progresses continually, so having that much time off was difficult," Muir tells BBC Sport.

Muir has won World Cup events in ski slopestyle and big air this season and also won at the X Games but is no stranger to the occasional crash landing.

The key to overcoming that fear, she says, is accepting they will happen.

"The injury wasn't my scariest, as it didn't happen at a specific moment," she says. "It's more when things out of your control go wrong.

"I've had skis come off my feet or my goggles come over my eyes when about to jump, and I've been flying through the air without skis on my feet. That is a weird feeling.

"We are good at adapting to situations, not thinking about it until it happens. There is no point in worrying - be prepared, then adapt."

In the moment before beginning a run, with a giant halfpipe or slopestyle course or big air jump in front of them, what is running through an athlete's mind?

Atkin thinks of nothing at all.

"Meditation is more like an umbrella term for mindfulness," she says. "But I do sit down, doing the hand pose, for about 10 minutes before going up. You can overthink things and overinflate the risks, wonder if fears are plausible and reframing them - it lets me disregard thoughts that are unhelpful, like 'what if I fall?'.

"I've had scary falls. It is all part of the process; it takes a certain mental strength - to be OK with falling.

"Part of our training is falling safely; if you are about to over-rotate, it is better to open and land on your side. That air awareness is something you train on. We can take big falls and know we are prepared to take them.

"I was working on this trick I previously had a mental block on.

"I would sit at the top, full of fear, trip and fall on my hip repeatedly. But I committed to finishing it - little steps every day, pushing myself to confront my fear. That allowed myself to build my confidence, and it felt like a personal victory as well."

GB Snowsport, the national governing body, has worked with athletes on calming techniques – including by taking some freediving, to learn how to stay focused when out of their comfort zone, as well as breathing techniques under high pressure.

According to Muir, the best way to prepare is to start that preparation long, long before you drop in.

"The times I feel fear are when I am trying something new, that feels more like a leap of faith," she says.

"When we are going for a new trick, it is never from zero to 100. You do each step to make sure you are comfortable. Then you go for it, which is difficult.

"I centre myself - there is a moment you have got to try. Those moments are scariest, but most rewarding. It is thinking toward that moment.

"The most important thing is accepting that our sport is risky, but it is something I have chosen to do. I am the one in control.

"At the top of the course, all those thoughts go away - I try to think it's just me and the course, and put in the best run I can."

In the battle to make sure fear doesn't win, Atkin and Muir have very different approaches.

Atkin says: "I can tell me it is just bodily reactions, and it is understandable - it would be crazy if I didn't feel fear. Just reframing fear as something more positive, that you can do it even if you have that fear.

"If you were to take a regular person and drop them in a halfpipe, logically you feel fear. But we train our whole lives for one specific thing."

Muir's attitude is a little less logical. While thoroughly grounded in training and technique as a world champion athlete, there is also superstition and a little bit of music sprinkled in the mix.

"I have a lucky snood - the face masks people use when they ski - always on my person," she says.

"I got it off one of the skiers I admired at the dry ski slope when I was younger, and I've always had it with me.

"And I have The Pretender by Foo Fighters as my competition song - I only play it at comps, that helps me switch off. Then during training, I have rock music.

"My dad listened to rock, and my sister loves [Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl's former band] Nirvana, so I started listening and it spiralled from there."