“When something breaks your heart it takes a while to love it again,” says Elise Christie with such cascading sadness that, for a moment, you worry that she will become a bit teary – just as she has on so many occasions since a Winter Olympics speed skating silver medal was ripped away from her.
Nearly a year has passed since Christie was disqualified from the 500m short-track final in Sochi, but it remains an open sore. The 24-year-old from Livingston crossed the line in second but in the replay booth the referee ruled that she was to blame for a crash that took out the Italian Arianna Fontana and the Korean Park Seung-hi and so relegated her to eighth. She was also disqualified in the 1,000m and 1,500m.
It seems cruel to ask how often she thinks about the incident, and crueller still when she tells you. “It is every day probably still, unfortunately,” Christie reflects. “I do have days where I do struggle with it but I have got people around me to help me with that. I’m a bit of an emotional one. I get a bit teary.
“Generally when I am on the ice I will try to get on with the job. But it will be after, when I have finished skating for the day, that I will think about it and get teary. But you need to let your emotion out sometimes otherwise it all builds up.”
Despite the internal floggings Christie gives herself, she has no regrets about that 500m final in Sochi. “If you said to me: ‘Would you take the bronze and not go for the gold?’ I would probably still say: ‘No,’” she says. “I think if I just settled for that bronze I would have been feeling the exact way I am now and still not been happy. That sounds a bit selfish and ungrateful, but the way I see it I’m only in control of the best person I can be. And if the bronze wasn’t the best person I could be on that day, then why would I be happy with it?
“The positive is it’s been a year already, so I’ve only got three more years until the next one.”
In conversation Christie holds nothing back. It is the same on the track, where her physical style earned her silver and bronze medals in the 2013 and 2014 world championships as well as six European medals across her career. In a sporting world increasingly reduced to platitudes and fudge, her tell-it-as-it-is honesty is admirable – even if it sometimes make you want to put your arm around her.
After the crash, Christie was deluged with hateful tweets from South Korea, blaming her for Park Seung-hi only getting bronze. It was so bad she stayed off social media for two months. “I didn’t turn off Twitter – it was turned off for me,” she says. “I did see a lot of the horrible stuff, and I did get bullied in school when I was very young and it kind of made me feel the same way. But actually when I got back from the Games everyone in Britain was so supportive and it really encouraged me to carry on. Without that I don’t think I would be skating right now.”
Really? “Yeah, I just thought how can a sport that you love, and put so much into, do this to you?”
The experience could have destroyed lesser mortals. Instead, Christie asked herself: “How I can become a more complete skater, relying less on my physical strength and more on tactics and guile?” The answer was a two‑month training camp in South Korea, where instead of mostly training with men, as she does in the UK, she practised with women.
“Obviously the boys race very differently to the girls so going to Korea enabled me to practise with some of the top girls in the world and learn to race a bit more,” says Christie. “But it’s a very different culture. There is no banter whatsoever.
“Because there’s a lower level of banter, they had so much trust in each other, so if someone was having a bad day that person didn’t feel judged by that. Quite often, if you are high up on the team in the UK, you feel like if you have a bad day, everyone is like: ‘Oh, what’s wrong with you?’ You can feel quite judged, I guess.
“But we have worked on that this year as a team – we have taken a massive step forward in terms of the discipline of not hitting someone while they are down.”
Christie found there were differences off the track, too. British speed skaters like to cycle because it uses the same muscles. The Koreans think cycling is bad for skating because it trains them in a different way. But while she found it “a bit like a military camp” at times, Christie enjoyed the experience. “I challenged myself to work on my weaknesses,” she admits, “because I have avoided it for years.”
It is something she hopes will pay off in the European Championships in the Netherlands, which start on Friday. Christie has fond memories of the event, having made her breakthrough as a 19-year-old in the 2010 edition.
“I was a lot different to now to be sure,” she says. “It was a lot more fun back then. I was just going out there and seeing what I could do. Now you are thinking: ‘I’ve got to get this right,’ and: ‘I’ve got to do this to try and win a medal.’ I was a lot different.
“Mind you,” she says, with a warm and welcome laugh. “I still change my hair as much as I did back then.”
Elise Christie is supported by the Sky Academy Sports Scholarships scheme, helping 11 young athletes fulfil their potential with tailored support, including funding and mentoring.
