Super Dave Ryding is desperate for Britain’s next skiing superstars to avoid slopes covered in sheep muck after years of tears helped him smash the sport’s glass ceiling.
The pride of Pendle honed his craft on his local dry ski slope but was not the only regular visitor with local sheep often leaving their mark on the Lancashire facility in northern England.
The 35-year-old will take to the slopes at Beijing 2022 when the men’s slalom gets underway on Wednesday knowing that none of his rivals will have had to endure the same struggles, and he hopes things will be markedly better for his British successors.
"It didn’t used to have fences around it and it’s on a hill and it’s full of sheep," said Ryding, recalling his old stomping ground that forged his path into alpine skiing.
"Sometimes the sheep would run across as you were training and you would have to wait for them.
"They would just wander across and do their business when we weren’t there. A rainy night and you would get a lot of splatters. It was horrible."
Ryding made national headlines last month when he became the first British alpine skier to win a World Cup with a stunning gold in Kitzbuhel, Austria.
After 13 years of hard graft on the circuit and ten years since his first top 30 finish, Ryding stood on top of the podium, an emotional moment for a man who admits he has “shed a tear at some point in exhaustion or fatigue of trying” in every season.
“I felt like I smashed my head through a ceiling which I had been smashing on for some time," said Ryding, who wants to capitalise on the “nuts” reaction to his win at home.
“I have done my job, I have got skiing on the front pages of national newspapers that sell millions of copies.
“The powers that be who are in charge of funding at the federation level, they have to go out now, get the funding secured for the next generation.
"I’ve always said it’s possible. You just have to work hard and you can get better year by year and you can do it.
“Now I don’t need to speak, I just have to put on [footage of] Kitzbuehel and say, ‘Look, it’s doable’. I don’t have to say it’s doable without having done it.
"We've got to keep building. We've got to take this momentum."
One of just six men to have won a slalom World Cup this season, Ryding will go for Britain’s first ever alpine skiing medal after waving the Union Jack at the opening ceremony.
His assistant coach Alain Baxter controversially had his Salt Lake City 2002 bronze stripped after testing positive for a stimulant in an American nasal inhaler not found in the British version and Ryding has pledged to “cut a medal in half” to share with his hero.
But there certainly won’t be any half measures on the slope, as always Ryding will pour blood, sweat and tears into his race on the biggest sporting stage of all.
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