Britain’s coolest Olympic hopeful
She tears across the ice in body armour at a chilling 35mph and is our best bet for a gold medal. Meet...
RACING at 35mph on blades 1mm thick, Britain’s best hope for gold will begin her bid for Winter Olympic glory today in a blur of flying blonde hair and Lycra-clad limbs.
Elise Christie, 27, the triple world champion at short-track speed skating, is a star in the most adrenalinefuelled events of the Games, which opened in South Korea yesterday.
And she has a big point to prove, after crashing out of all her three disciplines the last time around in 2014. That disaster led to online death threats, but there is steel in the 5ft 3in Scot, who says: ‘You have to be odd to be number one.’
FASTEST WOMAN ON ICE
Elise won the 1,000m, 1,500m and overall world titles last year, and is the world record holder over 500m. That’s some achievement in a sport awash with thrills, spills, falls and crashes, as rivals jockey for position around each tight bend of an ice track with no designated lanes.
She starts her assault on all three distances this morning with the heats of the 500m discipline at 10am.
A skater from the age of seven, at 12 she discovered the thrill of raw speed, and three years later was invited to train fulltime at the National Performance Centre in Nottingham, 250 miles from home, and moved in with a host family.
Elise was urged on by her ‘pushy’ mother, 52-year-old nurse Angela Wright, a promising long jumper in her teens who had to quit with a knee injury.
KNOCKOUT RACING
In short-track speed skating either four or six competitors race anti-clockwise round an oval track. It’s a knockout format, with the fastest two or three qualifying.
In the helter- skelter action, you can be disqualified for blocking an opponent, and even for ‘team skating’ where competitors from the same country conspire to fix the result.
South Korea is arguably the world’s top short-track skating nation.
SPACE-AGE KIT
Her skin suit’s made of a synthetic material moulded to her body and designed to make her as fast, aerodynamic and flexible as possible. It contains some Lycra, but the exact make-up is secret.
Underneath it, Elise wears a cut-proof layer, either built into the suit or worn separately. It’s vital because of the razorlike skating blades which can cause havoc when skaters crash to the ground.
The blades are 17in-18in, much longer than traditional skates, and placed offcentre so the boot does not touch the ice when the skaters turn. The boots are made from fibreglass, graphite and Kevlar, using customised foot moulds. Elise has just one pair – with her name stitched on to the gold straps.
STRONG LEGS
Strong legs are vital, as well as big lungs to drag in ragged breaths in the searing cold at high speed. ‘We develop very toned legs very fast,’ she said in Muscle And Fitness magazine. ‘The fitter you are, the more blood you can get going through your legs.’
She trains up to six hours a day, five or six days a week. Much of it is to build ‘power and explosiveness’. It includes jumps and dragging sleds. After training, she puts on ‘recovery tights’ back at home in Nottingham.
HER YOUNG BLADE
Elise has been dating Hungarian speed skater Sandor Liu Shaolin since 2015, making them the ‘Posh and Becks’ of the ice world. Sandor is fond of sharing his love for Elise with the world by posting on social media. Some are countdowns of the number of days until he can ‘see my babe again’ when they are competing around the world.
BEATING BULLIES
At the Sochi Games in 2014 she was disqualified in the final of the 500m, the heats of the 1,500m and the semi-final of the 1,000m. She cried in a BBC interview and closed down her Twitter account because of death threats.
She admitted the internet trolls nearly made her quit. ‘It made me feel like I couldn’t carry on competing, and competing at an Olympics was a childhood dream,’ she said.
After Sochi, she trained in South Korea, and was surprised to find she was a hero to fans who liked the rough and tumble of her sport.
She tells Radio Times: ‘I don’t want to be remembered as that girl who was bullied after the Olympics. I want people to remember my sport and my achievements.’
In a few days, this fast and furious lass from Livingston might just have got her wish.