Muir just misses slopestyle medal as Brookes targets podium for GB

Freestyle skier Kirsty Muir missed out on Great Britain’s first medal of the 2026 Winter Olympics by the narrowest of margins with a fourth-place finish in the women’s slopestyle.

Muir scored 76.05 points with a brilliant third run, finishing only 0.41 behind Canadian bronze medallist Megan Oldham at Livigno Snow Park.

Having fallen on the penultimate jump of her opening run, Muir – who had qualified third – sat in sixth after her second.

But despite a vastly improved performance on her final attempt, a crestfallen Muir was left wanting more on the biggest stage.

“I put it out there on every run,” the 21-year-old told BBC Sport.

In a final that demonstrated the strength of women’s freestyle skiing, Mathilde Gremaud successfully defended her Olympic title by only 0.38 points.

China’s Eileen Gu – the world’s fourth highest-paid female athlete in 2025 but arguably a bigger star off the slopes through her modelling and brand endorsements – took silver, but crashed on her final run to allow Gremaud a victory lap.

Muir is one of Team GB’s best medal hopes at the Milan-Cortina Games, and has another shot at the podium when she competes in the big air starting on Saturday.

“I just need to have a moment to process. I don’t want to dwell on it too much,” she said.

“I’ve got at least a day or so until I hit the big air. I’m going to go through this, accept it and try and find the positives that I can from it, and then completely reset because the big air is just a completely different competition.”

Four years ago in Beijing, Scotland’s Muir was GB’s youngest competitor at 17 and finished fifth in the big air and eighth in the slopestyle.

After those Games, Muir achieved three World Cup podiums, but in December 2023 an MRI scan showed she had been competing with a fully torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).

An operation followed in early 2024, as well as surgery on a shoulder problem that had troubled her for some time.

Eleven months later she was back on snow, and her maiden World Cup gold arrived in Tignes in March 2025.

Two more have followed this season, as well as slopestyle gold and big air silver at the invitation-only X Games on the eve of the Olympics.

Muir was likely to be back at the snow park to watch team-mate and close friend Mia Brookes tackle the snowboard big air final, which starts at 18:30 GMT.

Brookes, one of the biggest names in her sport as a world champion and two-time X Games gold medallist, qualified in third.