'I knew I'd come back'

Kirsty Muir is back after being out for more than a year with a knee injury. She's eyeing the Olympics, writes Flo Clifford

- Flo Clifford

Kirsty Muir was in the form of her life when the ground was ripped from under her feet. The talented Scottish freestyle skier, who competes in the slopestyle and Big Air disciplines, secured two World Cup podiums in the first half of the 2023-24 season and was on course for a best-ever campaign.

One of those podiums was in the Big Air in Copper Mountain, US in December 2023. She picked up bronze - but the 19-yearold was also troubled by a niggle in her knee. On her return home, an MRI revealed she had in fact ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and sustained meniscus damage. Over a year on the sidelines, including surgery on both the knee and an existing shoulder injury, followed.

Her return to action this January was "emotional", the Aberdeen native tells The Independent, but it was almost as if she had never left, as she qualified for both finals in her first competition back, in Aspen, Colorado.

"Luckily, when you're skiing, you have goggles, so no one could see I was crying a little bit when I first got back!" she says. "But it was all from happiness. I was over the moon, quite overwhelmed.

"There were so many different aspects: I hadn't seen my friends in a long time, I hadn't had the adrenaline and the nerves of a comp. Even just comp training is stressful so I had a lot going on in my brain."

But having spent 14 months out of action, neither she nor her team put pressure on her return, and she says the season has "100 per cent" exceeded her expectations.

"Mostly it was just seeing how I'd get on," she says of her approach to this campaign. "We obviously knew that this year was the Olympic qualification year, so that was one thing on our checklist, trying to get the results to put towards that.