Alpine ski racer Dave Ryding talks mental health journey: "I really don't think UK Sport understands"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

High in the Italian Alps, a 39-year-old Englishman is preparing to race. Soon he will lock into his skis, take a deep breath of sharp mountain air and then throw himself down the compacted frozen snow of the Winter Olympics slalom course beneath Monte Vallecetta.

When he hurtles towards the finish-line, Dave Ryding will zigzag and turn through a series of gates marked by polymer poles, subjecting his knees and ankles to immense forces, while reaching speeds of 80km an hour.

With some understatement Ryding, known as The Rocket, describes this as “quite stressful”. Downhill racing is faster, but slalom is the more technical event where competitors are more likely to make a mistake and crash – with hundreds of cowbell-clanging spectators waiting for him to do just that.

“It’s an amazing experience in front of a big crowd,” he says. And frightening? “You learn to perform under pressure, to take the energy from the crowd and not have nerves about it.”

When we talk, Ryding has just breakfasted on Greek yoghurt, oats “and blueberries from Aldi”. In summer he grows his own blackcurrants in the Lancashire home he shares with his wife, Dutch skier Mandy Dirkzwager, and their three-year-old daughter, Nina. Ryding, it’s clear, is emphatically not someone who spent months in the Alps every winter.

He was brought up near Pendle in Lancashire and, rather than Courchevel, the first time Ryding encountered winter sports it was on the local artificial ski slope – taken there by his father Carl, a ski-mad visionary who sensed, rightly, that his six-year-old son might be good.

Carl coached his son on the plastic slope and worked on a market stall in the nearby town of Leyland. “He sold women’s underwear,” says Ryding. “Then he became an industrial cleaner.”

When it became increasingly apparent that both Ryding and his younger sister Joanna were talented skiers, Carl retrained as a gas engineer to increase his income and help pay for his son’s one holiday a year in the Alps to practise on the snow. Ryding’s mother, Shirley, who ran her own hair salon, kept the household going and drove the children to races. Even his grandparents helped. “My family had to make big sacrifices,” says Ryding.

The sacrifices paid off. He went on to be the most successful British skier of all time and among the best slalom skiers in the world, getting seven world-cup podium finishes but no Olympic medal and always falling just short of the career-defining victory that would put him among the greats.

“There have been more bleak moments than good,” he says. “But I’ve managed to maintain an attitude of ‘Why am I doing this?’ It’s not always about winning, but getting the best performance out of myself.”

At the 2017 World Cup in Finland, Ryding was winning and then crashed. “I can still feel that moment when my skis went away from me and I fell. I’ll feel that until I’m 90. It was hard to take because I was so close. There was a sense of, ‘Will I ever get another chance like that?’”

Then, just when he’d begun to doubt that he could do it, Ryding won. On 22 January 2022, at the World Cup in Kitzbühel in Austria, he took first place; the first Briton and, at 35, the oldest man to do so in the event’s history. Three weeks later Ryding was the flag-bearer for the Great Britain Winter Olympic team in Beijing and strongly tipped for a medal.

But Ryding was unravelling. “The Word Cup was the ultimate high; I’d tried to achieve this my whole life, and worked to that moment,” he says. “I had a lot of positive feelings, but I just felt so drained, absolutely empty, to be honest. And then having to go to China in a Covid lockdown situation, I wasn’t mentally or emotionally ready to compete.” He was only 0.78 of a second behind a bronze medal place but came in 13th place.

There were immediate consequences. As a result of what it judged to be a poor Winter Olympics performance, UK Sport withdrew much of skiing’s World Class Programme funding ahead of the 2026 Games. This lack of empathy for what Ryding had been through still rankles.

“I really don’t think UK Sport understands,” he says. “They put a big emphasis on mental wellbeing, and they took no interest in what actually could have been going on in my mind for that Olympics.”

A very different man is heading out to the 2026 Winter Olympics. As well as becoming a father in 2022, Ryding has also announced his retirement. Milano Cortina will be his fifth and final chance to win an Olympic gold. “The decision is an easy one,” he says. “I’ve got a family who I would like to dedicate some time to.”

The final will be judged over two rounds. “That’s the beauty of slalom. Because you have to do it over two runs, and on the second run, it counts down so the leader goes last. So not only is the course at its bumpiest for the leader on the second run, but the stakes are at the highest. If you’re leading, you’re the one with it all to lose.”

Moreover, the leader must sit in a chair with a camera pointed at him, waiting to see if he is beaten. “If there are another 10 people to go, and you’re leading it, you still have that buzz every time someone comes down.”

In the past, Ryding has added some theatrics to the process by playing air guitar as he waits. “Some will think, ‘What a saddo!’, but it shows that I’m human, not some kind of robot,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than someone sitting in that chair showing no emotions.”

Ryding is highly likely to be the oldest competitor in his event but is relatively unconcerned about his levels of fitness and credits his time on Pendle’s plastic slopes. “Touch wood, I sit here with no pains. I think it’s because I didn’t overuse my body when I wasn’t as strong.

“When I was young, I’d ski twice a week on the dry slopes and it’s totally different – you don’t get the bumps, you don’t have the same crashes. If I had been born in the mountains, it could have been different. So, I look back and I wouldn’t change what I did. What I’ve achieved has been fantastic.”

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