"I cried writing this book. I cried a lot, actually".
It's easy to look at Eve Muirhead and assume she's led a comfortable life.
Having been born to a champion curler, she was identified as a precocious curling talent herself, winning everything there is to win in the junior ranks (multiple times, in most cases) before going on to make her Olympic debut while still a teenager.
And when it was all, ultimately, capped-off with Olympic gold, on the surface, it appears that Muirhead’s story is straightforward, with an almost exclusively upwards trajectory.
Except this couldn't be further from the truth.
Yes, Muirhead’s highs have been as high as they can possibly get in the sporting world.
But the depths she had to plumb on the way to these peaks were, she reveals in her autobiography, which will be released next month, close to insurmountable.
Muirhead’s book is a rare glimpse into the innermost thoughts of an athlete who, almost exclusively, exuded an air of toughness and grit. Rarely, if ever, during her career, did Muirhead allow her guard to come down either publicly or even privately.
It’s probably why, admits Muirhead, who’s now 35 years old and three years into retirement, she found the writing of this autobiography such a taxing and draining process.
"It took months to write this and I cried more than a few times because it was very hard going back over certain parts of my life,” the Perthshire woman says.
“But I wanted to really open up because I felt like there was no point putting a book out and being all fluffy around the edges and not including the difficult things. I wanted to tell my real story.
“I think this shows that the life of an athlete is full of challenges; it’s not just glamour and medals like people might think from the outside. People see me standing on the podium receiving an Olympic gold medal, but there's so much more to it than that.
“There's a lot more downs than ups. I look like I'm quite a tough person but actually, on the inside, I often feel very different.”
She didn’t, however, commit to curling immediately. She was what she calls “not the slightest bit academic” and struggled at school as a result, but Muirhead excelled at golf and playing the bagpipes, as well as curling. When the time came to commit to one of her three talents, she opted for curling but she could, she believes, just as easily have gone for one of the other two which would, of course, have altered the course of her life entirely.
Almost a soon as curling became her focus, though, Muirhead’s talent flourished.
Four world junior titles and an Olympic debut had all been been ticked-off by the time she was 20 years old.
It was in the aftermath of those 2010 Olympics, though, that Muirhead’s mindset began to change. A disappointing seventh-place finish in Vancouver was far from satisfying for the ambitious Scot who, at this stage in her career, was unrecognisable from the finely-tuned athlete into which she transformed.
Indeed, it was a trip to the London 2012 Olympics that changed Muirhead and, it’s turned out, altered women’s curling as a whole.
“I came away from the Vancouver Olympics disappointed and when I went down to London in 2012 to watch the summer games, I came back up with a completely different mindset about how I wanted to be as an athlete,” she recalls.
“I started doing much more fitness and conditioning work and I would like to think that I was one of the first female curlers to take the physical side of things seriously. I wanted to be a step ahead of everyone else at all times.”
“When you go to go an Olympic Games as the reigning world champion, it definitely alters the way you are viewed by yourself, by other people and by the media,” she says.
“So our semi-final defeat against Canada was one of the toughest defeats we'd ever had. It was our first major disappointment.
“Ultimately, we came away with a bronze medal so we did finish on a high and we ended with probably the best game of the week for us. And when you put it into perspective, getting a bronze medal at the Olympics shouldn't be that much of a disappointment. But if I had been entirely happy with bronze, would I ever have gone on to win gold?”
Another Olympic disappointment was to follow in South Korea in 2018, with Muirhead missing the vital shot that would have won GB bronze. Instead, she and her teammates returned home with a fourth-place finish and empty-handed.
In the aftermath of those Olympics, Muirhead underwent hip surgery to help an ongoing and serious injury that she’d been carrying for quite some time with the intention of trying, yet again, to win Olympic gold four years later.
However, just months out from the 2022 Winter Olympics, which would take place in Beijing, Muirhead was in the worst state of not only her career, but her life.
A deep depression had set in and although medication would help Muirhead, she admits her mind went to places she’d not wish on her worst enemy.
Indeed, the prologue of her autobiography details how she hit “rock bottom”.
“I don’t want to be here,” she writes.
"'Here’ wasn’t this picturesque corner of central Scotland. ‘Here’ wasn’t an ice rink, the British Curling elite athlete programme or the treadmill which should be culminating in a fourth Olympic Games. ‘Here’ was far more general. As general as it comes. ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Full stop.”
Just months out from the Olympics that would eventually define her, Muirhead was at her lowest ebb. Despite their stutter in qualifying for Beijing 2022, Team Muirhead did ultimately secure an Olympic place and Muirhead headed to Beijing in a considerably better frame of mind than she’d been just months previously.
It wasn’t a flawless competition from Muirhead and her rink, but they made it into the final to face Japan. Team Muirhead was heavy favourites, justifiably as it turned out, and a comfortable victory saw them become GB’s first Olympic curling champions since fellow Scot, Rhona Martin 20 years previously.
“Six months out from Beijing, if somebody had told me I was going to end up with an Olympic gold medal I would just never have believed it. To be honest I wasn't sure I'd even be back on the ice, never mind be Olympic champion,” she says.
“So many things went into helping me become an Olympic champion but I think one of the main ones was just focusing on myself. I stopped being so worried about what other people thought and I spent a lot of time on my own.
“By the time the team got to Beijing, we were in a good place because we'd been very open and honest with each other and that's when we really gelled.
“Before Beijing, I'd been scared of losing and scared of making mistakes but at that Olympics, I'd come to terms with the fact I was going to make a load of mistakes but it was about how I bounced back from those mistakes that would matter.
“And I just enjoyed it.
“But I wish I could relive that moment of winning because it's still a blur. My biggest feeling was just relief, though.”
Since hanging up her broom, Muirhead hasn’t slowed down. Amongst other things, she’s chef de mission for Team GB for next year’s Winter Olympics.
Being immersed in the Olympics for the fifth time, but the first as anything other than an athlete, will, she admits, be a surreal experience.
But would she rather be out on the ice next year? Her answer is definitive.
“If you ask me if I miss the big occasions like World and Olympic finals then yes, I miss them a lot,” she says.
“But then I bring myself back to reality and remind myself that to be in those big occasions, so much work needs to be done.
“And so if you ask me if I miss curling, no I don't.”
“Eve Muirhead: Ice Queen: The Autobiography” will be released on the 18th of September
