“If we can’t do it this time, I’ll be gutted,” says Vicky Gosling. “We’ve got the ingredients, we just need the perfect recipe and to make sure we produce the goods.”
Most senior sports figures tend to shy away from expectation, eager to avoid increasing pressure in a goldfish-bowl world. A select few embrace it, and as Team GB’s skiers and snowboarders prepare to launch their assault on the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, Gosling believes that there is every reason to be bullish.
It is close to eight years since she became chief executive of GB Snowsport, the national governing body for snow disciplines. The period has proved transformative, with unprecedented success following Gosling’s hasty rebrand of an organisation formerly known as British Ski & Snowboard. During the four-year Olympic cycle from 2018 to 2022, British skiers and snowboarders produced an all-time high 40 major international senior and junior medals. In the four years since, that has almost doubled to 77, as podium finishes become commonplace.
It is not difficult to see why Gosling believes this can be Britain’s breakthrough Olympics on snow.
Gosling thrives in adversity. Two decades in the Royal Air Force – including serving in the Gulf War – ended when she was seconded to help establish what would become the Invictus Games, the multi-sports event for disabled military veterans founded by Prince Harry.
Headhunted to lead Britain’s snow sport governing body in early 2018, she inherited a bold vision to turn GB into a top-five ski and snowboard nation by 2030 – a country with zero world-class snow facilities attempting to muscle its way into the global elite. Gosling immediately embraced such audacity.
“That was part of the reason I was attracted to the role,” she explains. “If anybody had told me you could swim 200 metres with one arm before I did the Invictus Games, I wouldn’t have had much belief in it.
“I was able to look at the data and the quality of snow sport talent we have within Britain to start securing the belief that it was possible. If you look at the difference in eight years, it’s a big transformation. Maybe we went too soon with 2030, but unless you put a marker in the sand, you’re not going to get there.”
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Gosling shifted the rebranded GB Snowsport from an administrative body to a more flexible organisation that better represented its athletes. A funding increase from UK Sport aided the cause, as did the recruitment of foreign-based skiers and snowboarders with British heritage, who were attracted to the new culture. Commercial revenue soared as medals rolled in and optimism grew.
Yet the bare fact remains that GB has still only ever won three Olympic medals on snow – bronzes in 2014 and 2018. Beijing 2022 was supposed to be the British team’s coming of age, but no skier or snowboarder finished higher than fifth.
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The blame has primarily been attributed to the dual challenges of Covid and Brexit. “We knew going in,” says Gosling. “The other nations were still training – they had access to the slopes. They still allowed the elite to train, and we just had back gardens. You can’t compete with that.”
Brexit restrictions remain a headache, with limits on travel within the European Union prompting a shift to faraway slopes in Chile, Argentina and New Zealand. “It’s cripplingly expensive, but essential, otherwise we fall behind,” says Gosling.
Funding is a constant source of anxiety. The £7.27m that UK Sport awarded GB Snowsport for this Olympic cycle is ring-fenced solely for freestyle ski and snowboard programmes – still far below other global snow superpowers – while alpine and cross-country skiing receive just £80,000 a year each annually.
“I have this conversation day in, day out with other athletes who compare what they have,” says GB’s Olympic-bound ski cross racer Ollie Davies. “Everybody tips their hat to what we do with the resources that we have.”
Putting their finishing touches to preparations for the Milan-Cortina Olympics, GB’s top trio of Mia Brookes, Zoe Atkin and Kirsty Muir won gold medals at last weekend’s prestigious X Games. All have also claimed world titles since the Beijing Olympics.
“Beijing was a tough one for GB,” says British freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, ahead of his fourth Olympics. “There were plenty of GB athletes who could have got a medal there. But that’s the nature of the sport – it’s over in 30 seconds. I feel confident it’ll go our way, hopefully at least a couple of times, this time.”
If it does, the ambition is for medal success – won in an Italian time zone amenable to British audiences – to serve as inspiration for more.
“I think this Olympics is going to showcase snow sports to the British public at the highest level more than it has done for a long, long time,” says GB Snowsport head coach Pat Sharples, who caught the skiing bug on a dry slope in Lancashire. “I’m keen to build on that and bring on the next generation. We’ve seen a lot of our top kids come from our dry slopes and get to the very top.”
It is something Gosling is certainly not going to stop shouting about: “We’re over here with no mountain ranges and one of the most exciting stories there is. What we deliver against the odds is unbelievable.”
Photograph by David Ramos/Getty Images