'I'm not scared of much': Meet Team GB's most experienced member, Zoe Gillings-Brier

It’s remarkable, that which people can find their way to enjoying: beards, prayer, the company of other people – and snowboard cross. Zöe Gillings-Brier, Britain’s number 1 SBX-er, explains: “Six of you race down a mountain, usually in about a minute and a half. You go over jumps and around corners at a top speed of 80-85 kilometres an hour, first one to get to the bottom wins.”

To your common or garden pussy, this sounds like the most terrifying game of chicken imaginable. “It’s not a sport for the faint-hearted,” Gillings-Brier, a veteran of three previous Olympics competing for a fourth time in PyeongChang, confirms. “You’ve gotta be fairly brave and pretty competitive.” Fairly. Pretty.

Gillings-Brier grew up on the Isle of Man and was always something of daredevil. “I’m not scared of much,” she cackles with disquieting joy. “When I was a kid, I’d crawl up stairs, stick my legs through the rails and dangle upside down eight foot off the ground just for fun, things like that … I’ve always been like that.”

Because her parents had a house in Albertville, France, she started skiing aged three before, when she was 10, her older brother started boarding. “And I was a typical younger sister, ‘I wanna do what he’s doing!’ so followed him to a few competitions and really liked it. I got more serious, got picked for the British team … well, the British team got formed, and then it was bigger and bigger competitions all the way up to the Olympics.”

Sounds pretty simple, but charming though such self-effacement is, the reality was somewhat different. For a start, Gillings-Brier had already put in years of preparation in gymnastics. “I didn’t have the grace for the dancing part,” she says. “It was the high-power stuff like the tumbling and the vault and things like that that I was best at. It’s one of the very good sports for kids to do because it gives you quite a large variation of skills that are then transferable into other sports.”

Like snowboarding, which she preferred to skiing. “I could sort of mess about on the snowboard a bit more easily, I could go switch, I could go backwards, and then I started competing doing all the events: snowboard cross, giant slalom, halfpipe, big air, slopestyle – I wasn’t very good at that.”

So Gillings-Brier specialised, settling on SBX. “I just love boardcross because you’ve got the aspect of your competitors right there, right next to you – it’s pure competition. It’s really easy to see who wins and who doesn’t, no judges involved, just who gets to the bottom first.”

At 19, Gillings-Brier realised that her hobby might work as a career – sponsorship now allowed her to cover costs. But she still had to sacrifice plenty: “I basically felt like a nomad for about 15 years because I didn’t have a base at all,” she says. “At one point I had some stuff in my parents’ house in the Isle of Man, some in my parents’ house in France, some in my husband’s sister’s house in France, some in a friend’s house in Leeds, some in another friend’s house in Leeds, and some with me wherever I was in the world at the time … I’d have to try and plan what equipment I was going to need for six weeks’ time, then try and work out where it all was … it was frustrating.”

These days, though, she has a house in Leeds that she bought with her husband, the British team coach, and they spend half the year there and half in Austria. So all she has to do now is guess what their 18 month-old daughter Lea will need over the period, explaining that “It’s wonderful because I get to be an athlete and be a mum at the same time, and I didn’t know if that’d be possible.”

In such context, to do what Gillings-Brier does requires an even more unusual nature than might be assumed. “I’m a fairly chilled-out person and yet very competitive at the same time – an odd mix,” she says. “Things won’t usually annoy me, I don’t get upset at much, I tend to like people.”

This same attitude allows her to embrace the unique challenge of her sport: “You travel around to all these different countries, turn up, often you see a course and then five minutes later you’re trying to race down it as fast as you can ... so you’ve got to be up for the challenge … you’ve gotta be pretty ballsy.”

Not many are as ballsy as her. “People like me just throw themselves into things. If I’m behind in a race and there’s an option to pass, I’ll go for it. Even if there isn’t quite enough room I'll try and barge my way in there … and generally it pays off.”

To assuage the inescapable adrenaline dump, she has devised a rationale to calm herself: “My pulse doesn’t go overboard – it used to when I was younger but now because I kind of know what to expect more … the fact that I know I’m gonna be nervous makes me less nervous and I know it’s ok. If I get tingly feelings in my hand it’s just a sign of the nerves so my heart doesn’t tend to go that overboard … it’s more likely to get really, really fast when I’m halfway down the course and about to crash into one of the other girls!”

Naturally, in a sport so wild, there are injuries. In 2005, Gillings-Brier broke her foot to such extent that her surgeon told her that her boarding career was over and that she would be lucky to walk properly ever again. “So about 11 months later I sent him a postcard from my first Olympics, ‘thank you for fixing my foot so well’.” She has not, though, forgotten the pain. “It was hurting pretty bad but as long as I didn’t move it it was ok, but then they had to bend it to put a cast on it so I could fly home and they had no painkillers, and that was the most painful thing I’ve ever felt … until childbirth. With injuries the worst is right at the start and then it gets better, or at least it plateaus. Whereas childbirth, it gets worse and worse and worse and worse and you don’t know how long it’s gonna last – that’s the killer.”

Because the sport is so terrifying, and because the threat of injury is so present, it is easy to overlook its basic physical demands. “You need power, strength, agility, balance, coordination, reaction time … lots and lots of different stuff,” Gillings-Brier explains. “You’re landing potentially from very high up, especially if things go wrong, and you’ve gotta have the strength to be able to absorb that landing and stay on your feet or at least not tear the ligaments in your knee right away.”

But there’s more to it even than that. “Getting my legs to pump, to move very very fast, from straight to bent, straight to bent in milliseconds – that’s the thing that I have to work on most in the gym,” Gillings-Brier says. On the other hand, she has a body-type that responds well to strength training and is able to build muscle easily, so simple rollers – big bumps of snow – allow her to generate speed when others cannot by pushing into them as they change from steep to flat.

Accordingly she is hoping for some at what will be her fourth Olympics, and also for general scariness. ‘Big, fast bumpy turns,” she asserts. “The faster and bumpier the better. I can hold on, basically, better than some of the other girls who’ll get scared.”

When it’s just cold, the run is faster but more predictable; when there’s fresh snow, Gillings-Brier comes into her own. “If you fall there’s a bit more cushioning, so you can board more aggressively and it makes the course more unpredictable as well – you can come round the corner and it’ll be dramatically different to how it was for the person before. It sounds weird that I’d want that but it’s not so much that I want that for me, I want that for my competitors. Because other people tend to get thrown off by that kind of thing more than I do … the more difficult the better.”

Which isn’t to say that Gillings-Brier is free of fear. The Olympic organisers released a 3D model of the start to her race, which even she found daunting. “It’s the sort of thing where as soon as I do it once it’ll be absolutely fine,” she says, “but you drop out from a height, I’d say about three metres through thin air, and then you land in a half-pipe. And at the top of the half-pipe wall, you go down that and then you go straight up the other side and then there’s a gap to clear, then you’ve gotta get over the top and land on the other side. As soon as I do it once I’ll be fine but until I do it once I’m gonna be a little bit wary of it.”

But in the meantime, it’s just a case of getting ready. “All the big stuff is done. It’s a case of refining the stuff that I know and making sure I’m doing as well as I possibly can do … I love the Olympics. I can’t wait and I would fly there tomorrow.”

Though Gillings-Brier isn’t one of the favourites in PyeongChang – she finished 9th in Sochi 2014, 8th in Vancouver 2010 and 15th in Torino 2006 – her nature insists that she be optimistic. “The great thing and the annoying thing about board cross is the unpredictability of it, so you never know what’s gonna happen. But as long as you’re there, on the start line, on the race day, then everyone in the competition’s got a chance of winning. So I’m gonna as fast as I can and beat as many girls as I can … I’ll try and keep my mind as empty as it can be and just watch the gate, and the first movement I see of the gate … GO!”