Scots skiing ace Kirsty Muir eyes 2026 Winter Olympics after claiming first World Cup win

In qualifying, Muir finished in ninth place, comfortably making the cut for the sharp end of the contest, but everyone starts from zero points on finals day, and she has her sights set on an even higher placing.

“I’ve got a few things to clean up [on my run] and then I can push to do better,” she says. “We got the job done – got through to the finals, and that’s the main thing. Tomorrow, though, the slate gets wiped clean, so it’s all go.”

For Muir, 20, to be competing at all, let alone at such a high level, feels somewhat miraculous. Following her impressive showing at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, where she took fifth in big air and eighth in slopestyle at the age of just 17, she was enjoying a dream start to her season in December 2023 when disaster struck. A crash at the World Cup event at Copper Mountain in Utah left her with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus damage – injuries which required surgery and kept her off the snow for the best part of a year.

After such a long break from competition, you might have expected her to take a while to return to her previous level, but since rejoining the World Cup tour in February Muir has been clocking up some impressive results. At the World Cup event in Aspen, Colorado, at the start of February – her first competitive appearance in over a year – she finished 8th in the slopestyle and 12th in big air, and later that month she claimed a sixth place slopestyle finish at Stoneham, near Quebec City.

The best was still to come, however: at the next World Cup event in Tignes, France, she finished seventh in the big air and won the slopestyle – her first ever World Cup victory. She was, she says, “very stoked”.

“I felt like I was riding smoothly and I was really enjoying being on skis,” she says. “After my first run [of two] I was pretty happy because I had pretty much put down the run I wanted. Waiting for the scores you’re always a bit nervous, because even if you think you've done well sometimes the judges can pull you up on tiny things that maybe aren’t so good, but yeah, I was stoked on that one.”

The two Tignes events were part of the resort’s Mountain Shaker festival, which also incorporates skateboarding, concerts and street art – Muir describes it as having “an unreal atmosphere.”

“For the big air, it was almost like a home competition for me,” she says, “just because there were so many Brits in Tignes and they were all at the bottom shouting my name. It was me and Tess Ledeux that were getting the biggest crowd applause – Tess is French, so it was obviously her home event, and then me because there were so many Brits in the crowd.

“Then for the slopestyle, the course was really cool,” she adds. “It was a bit different to usual, because usually you have the rails and then the jumps, but the rails were in the middle of the course. You got used to it, but for the last jump, because there was such a long run in from the last rail, you had to make sure you weren’t taking too much speed off and keep focused.”

Muir first started skiing at the age of four, and honed her skills on her local dry slope in Aberdeen as well as at The Lecht and Glenshee. Following her injury in 2023, she returned home to the north-east to recuperate, and she credits “friends and family at home” as well as her coaches Jamie Matthew and Joe Tyler and Team GB physio Alison Robb for keeping her positive during that time. Seeing the rest of the skiing world carrying on without her on social media while she was unable to ski was particularly difficult, she remembers.

“Social media can be hard,” she says, “just seeing people putting out edits of them skiing – particularly in the spring when that’s the best time to ski cos it’s so much fun with your friends... but then I was just trying to think about the next time I’d get to do that.”

Did she ever feel as if she might never make it back to competing? “I think you always have that,” she says. “You think, ‘Oh, am I ever gonna feel normal again? Am I ever going to get back?’ But you kinda just have to put those thoughts out of your brain. You’re always going to have some weird, negative thoughts but you’ve just got to accept where you are and then push through it.”

The following day, in the slopestyle finals in Engadin, Muir does indeed improve on her qualifying position, racking up an impressive sixth place finish. “I definitely didn’t ski my best,” she says afterwards, “but I’m stoked I went for it. That’s the main thing, I think. In this sport you’ve just to go for it, and I did that, and gave it my best. I was hoping for more [in terms of final position] obviously, but I’m still happy to have put my run down. We’re still just making steps [after​ the injury], so I can’t be too unhappy.”

Unhappy? With sixth in the world?​ There’s still plenty of time for Muir to qualify for the 2026 Winter Olympics; given her current trajectory, it’s perhaps now less a question of whether she can get herself there, more a question of what she might achieve when she does.

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