Muir misses out on Olympic medal by 0.41 points

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 sat in sixth after her second.

The 21-year-old brought out her best when it mattered, but it was not quite enough.

“I put it out there on every run,” an emotional Muir 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 – arguably a bigger star off the slopes – took silver, but crashed on her final run to allow Gremaud a victory lap, a Switzerland flag tied around her neck, billowing in the wind as she soaked up her moment on the course.

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.

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

After Beijing 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.

“I’m going to look forward to big air, but I just need to take this one in,” Muir said.