Snowboarder Katie Ormerod hopes the story of her remarkable comeback ‘inspires others’

It feels a little unfair to begin Katie Ormerod’s story with the brutal heel injury that occurred only hours before the 2018 Winter Olympics, if only because it deflects from the fearless talent that makes the 24-year-old Yorkshirewoman one of Britain’s best medal hopes when the 2022 Games begin in Beijing next month.

But this injury – which required seven operations, two metal pins inserted into her foot and a pig-skin graft – has shaped the first two Olympics of Ormerod’s snowboarding career. Perhaps more importantly, it is her reaction to it and her ability to embrace the road from hospital bed back to the sport’s highest air that makes her story so compelling.

Ormerod was 20 when it happened, on the brink of her debut Games in Pyeongchang with a Big Air World Cup gold recently added to her CV and confidence high that her bag of spins and tricks could deliver history in South Korea – Britain has never won a snowboarding Olympic gold. Ormerod’s events – slopestyle and big air – are designed to pull the Winter Games away from some of its staid traditions and create a spectacle. Slopestyle is a course of jumps and rails which provides the fireworks display, while big air is one huge bang, which first appeared in Pyeongchang after the success of the former in Sochi. They are breathtaking to watch, and therein lies the risk which Ormerod knows all too well.

She is no stranger to setbacks; to list all the injuries she has sustained is to take a brief lesson in anatomy. By 20 she had already snapped the anterior cruciate ligament in one knee and torn the meniscus in both; she had broken her scapula, an ulna and radius in each forearm, fractured her wrist and cracked a vertebra at the base of her spine. So when she describes the moment she split her heel bone in half as entering a whole new dimension of agony, you know she really meant it.

“I didn’t realise it was physically possible to feel so much pain,” she told The Independent in 2019. “All my other injuries were paper cuts compared to this one. It was so, so painful. The initial impact, when I hit the ground and it broke, that was by far the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.”

The crash occurred in practice the day before the Games began. She was transferred to a hospital in Seoul for emergency surgery where a few upbeat Instagram posts gave the impression of an athlete on the mend, but the reality of Ormerod’s long journey was only just becoming clear – one of emotional turmoil, of tested faith, and of cruel exploration into a tolerance for pain.

“I had another four operations within four weeks of being home, which were all skin operations because by that point they’d realised I’d had complications,” she said. “It was basically back and forth to London once a week to get operated on and then just coping with the pain.

“After the first surgery, where they pinned it back together, I kind of just hoped it would stop the pain, but it hurt even more, and after each operation it was really sore and that didn’t go away. Then, once it started to settle down a little bit, I had a trapped nerve in my foot which was causing lots of sleepless nights.”

Ormerod spent months in a wheelchair, unable to even wear shoes. Naturally she wondered if she would ever walk again, let alone snowboard, but, she told the Guardianthat “the love for [snowboarding] was bigger than the pain I was in”.

Not only did she recover but she flourished back on her board. In 2019-20 she became the first Briton to win a slopestyle World Cup title and also earned a prestigious FIS crystal globe for collecting the most points during the season. “I had a whole year to visualise the kind of tricks I wanted to do,” she said. “That’s a lot of practice.”

open image in gallery

Ormerod first showed a propensity for risk aged four, flinging herself off a cardboard box and breaking her nose. Her energy around the house was enough for her parents, Mark and Claire, to seek an outlet. She was hooked on snowboarding from a young age, going to Halifax dry slope and taking on the big kicker at five, and loving the rush. Family skiing holidays in Europe with her parents and her brother Harvey kept up her skills and interest, but that sporadic practice was not going to be enough to compete with the top snowboarding talents from America, Japan and Europe’s more mountainous countries.

What elevated Ormerod was her passion for gymnastics. Tumbling and trampolining would later form the basis of her athletic prowess on a snowboard. Success on the gymnastics floor brought trophies which fuelled a competitive edge to add to her love of learning and mastering new tricks, and by 14 she was winning adult snowboarding competitions on a national level. Her gymnastic talent underpinned eye-catching tricks such as her signature backside double-cork 180, which she became the first woman ever to pull off aged 16 – she only just missed out on qualifying for the 2014 Games in Sochi.

Now Ormerod returns to the Olympic stage full of hope that she will get to show off her skills this time around and enjoy the thrills she missed out on four years ago.

“I’m proud of how hard I’ve worked,” she told reporters this week. “I knew it could have been career-ending but I was determined not to think about it. Since then I’ve had the most successful season of my career and made my second Games team. I’m so proud I stuck with it and showed that resilience and determination. I hope this story inspires others to keep following their dreams. I just didn’t want to let the broken heel stop me or hold me back.”