It was hard not to be charmed by Dave Ryding’s slalom victory at Kitzbühel. His story has a little of everything the British want in their favourite winter Olympians; an unlikely beginning on a dry ski slope in Pendle, a homespun background, training in a shed his father built in the back garden and a mulish stubborn streak that meant he graduated on to the elite skiing circuit when he was 28. That’s the sort of age when most people would be thinking about quitting already, and that, at 35, made him the country’s first World Cup race winner. “Ein Brite? Ein Brite!” was the headline in the next day’s Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Ryding is 50-1 to win the slalom gold medal in Beijing. There is something enjoyably improbable about it all, even now he has already gone and won a race.
