Chemmy Alcott

In the World Cup, Alcott achieved seven top-30 results, with a best finish of 12th place in the super-G at Bad Kleinkirchheim, Austria.

In a weather-disrupted British Championships (Meribel, France), Alcott won the slalom and giant slalom titles.

The super-G was cancelled due to adverse weather conditions, as was the Senior downhill.

Born in Hove, East Sussex, England, Alcott was named after Sophia Loren's character in the 1961 film El Cid. She started skiing at 18 months old on a family holiday in Flaine, France, and first raced at the age of three.

The Torino Winter Olympic Games saw Alcott finish 11th in the downhill, the best Olympic performance by a British female skier since 1968.

Alcott was however disqualified from the combined event following the first run of the slalom, where her skis were found to be 0.2 mm narrower than the FIS regulations allowed.

It was the best result by a British woman for more than 30 years, after Gina Hathorn's 9th-place finish in a Slalom at Heavenly Valley in March 1972.

However, a knee ligament injury meant that Alcott was unable to defend her British titles.

Chimene Mary "Chemmy" Crawford-Alcott ( Alcott; born 10 July 1982) is an English former World Cup alpine ski racer.

She competed in all five disciplines: downhill, super G, giant slalom, slalom and combined.

In 1993, Alcott won the Etoile D'Or French Village Ski Championship, became a member of the British Junior Alpine team in 1994 and won the 1995 Sunday Times Junior Sportswoman of the Year award.

Every British summer from the age of 11 to 19 Alcott travelled to New Zealand to train in the winter.

She was a talented athlete, representing Richmond in dry slope skiing, and in tennis at the London Youth Games.

Alcott made her FIS race debut in August 1997 in a Giant slalom event at Coronet Peak, New Zealand.

By the end of the 1997/1998 season, she had made her debuts in both the FIS Junior World Championships (Chamonix) and the British National Championships (Tignes), where she won a Silver medal in the giant slalom.

She returned to the Australia/New Zealand Cup in 1998, during the European summer winning the overall championship.

Alcott competed in four Winter Olympic Games and seven FIS World Championships and has been overall Senior British National Champion 7 times (1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009) and Overall British Ladies Champion 8 times.

The following winter Alcott won silver (super-G) and bronze (giant slalom) medals at the 1999 European Youth Olympics in Štrbské Pleso, Slovakia.

In December 1999, Alcott made her World Cup debut in a giant slalom race in Lienz, Austria.

The winter of 1999 also saw her crowned World Schools Champion, before adding the World Artificial and Australian Overall Championships to her name in 2000.

At the 2001 Junior World Championships, Alcott finished 8th in the slalom event on her way to 5th in the overall classification.

This season also saw Alcott capture the 2001 British Junior title and the Senior British super G title in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, Austria.

In March 2003, Alcott scored her first World Cup points by finishing 27th in a GS event in Innsbruck, Austria.

At the British National Championships in Tignes, France, Alcott won the slalom title for the first time on her way to a clean sweep of all the discipline titles.

Throughout the 2004 World Cup season, Alcott consistently finished in the top-30, including an 11th-place finish in the Lake Louise super G – less than 1.5 seconds behind Renate Goetschl's winning time.

In January 2004, Alcott achieved her first top-10 result, a 9th-place finish in the Cortina downhill.

At the 2005 World Championships (Santa Caterina, Italy), Alcott finished 19th in the downhill, 22nd in the super-G and 35th in the giant slalom.

At the British National Championships (Meribel, France), Alcott again won the downhill, super-G, and Slalom), also winning the Victrix Ludorum trophy for the Overall Championship for the third time.

She was inducted into the London Youth Games Hall of Fame in 2011.

Aged 11, Alcott broke her neck in a skiing accident, recovering with two vertebrae fused together.

She still carries X-rays of the injury so that if she is ever in an accident, the hospital will know not to prise the vertebrae apart.

Alcott's career injuries include a dislocated jaw, broken neck, broken back, broken ribs, groin tears, two ACLs, compound tibia/fibula fracture and a broken ankle.

She retired from international competition following the 2014 season.

She competed in all of the Alpine disciplines with a best result of 14th position in the combined event.

Later in the season, Alcott returned to the Junior World Championships, finishing in 4th place based on overall championship points (ahead of Lindsey Vonn).

In her final British Junior Championships, Alcott won all the titles on offer.

She also won British Senior tiles in the giant slalom, super-G and Downhill – claiming the Overall Senior crown for the first time.

At 19 years of age, Alcott was ranked in the Top 10 in the world for her age group, while also rising from 683rd to 126th in the downhill rankings over the course of the season.

Her Olympic debut followed in Salt Lake City, Utah.

She recorded 19th and 22nd-place finishes in the super-G and giant slalom events, respectively.