The first question to ask Elise Christie is: why? After all the trauma the Winter Olympics has brought her, from death threats to depression, why is she willing to subject herself to another Games?
‘I’ve asked myself this a lot,’ the speed skater tells Sportsmail from her home near Nottingham, one year out from Beijing 2022.
‘When I show up to the next Games, a lot of people will probably think, “What is she doing?” I’d be lying to say it’s not traumatic. It is scary and I’ve got that fear of it happening again. Last time it nearly killed me.
Short track speed skater Elise Christie has opened up on how the Olympics ‘nearly killed’ her
‘But I’ve not got a life-altering injury, I’ve not got a life-changing disease. So stopping gives the wrong example of the Olympic spirit. It shows I have given up and I would never want that to be the defining moment of my career. It’s not who I am.’
When Christie says that the Olympics ‘nearly killed’ her, it is not just a turn of phrase. Despite being a three-time world and 10-time European champion, the 30-year-old Scot is best known as the athlete who was disqualified in all three of her events at Sochi 2014, then crashed twice and was disqualified again at Pyeongchang 2018.
But what is less well known is what happened to Christie 10 months after her nightmare in South Korea. December 28, 2018, to be precise. The day she nearly died.
‘I pushed down as hard as I could and cut because I’d had enough,’ she reveals. ‘Then about 30 seconds later, I remember being like, “I don’t want to die”.
Christie is happy right now and ready to compete in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing
But Christie has bravely opened up on previous difficulties that she has encountered
‘I had a friend downstairs and he called an ambulance. It was a bad cut, but I was lucky.
‘I never described myself as suicidal. Suicidal people don’t want to live and can’t see a reason for life. I wouldn’t say that was me, but I couldn’t deal with how I was feeling any longer.
‘In that moment I did what I felt like I needed to do to get rid of it and be gone and stop feeling like this any more. That was my way out. In that moment, you’re not yourself. It’s like an out-of-body experience.
‘Afterwards, there were about four days where I just lay in bed disgusted with myself and numb. I had technically had an attempt at my life. I don’t often self-harm now. But if I do, I would never do it that badly because I’ve always got that fear.’
SO HOW did Christie reach rock bottom? She dates her troubles to being bullied at school, and a fire nine years ago at her apartment in Nottingham which she was lucky to survive.
But her problems piled up after Sochi, when she received death threats on Twitter from South Koreans, who blamed her for their heroine Park Seung-hi crashing in the 500m. ‘I was diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) after Sochi,’ says Christie. ‘When they said I had it, I was like, “Shut up, what a load of crap”. I just ignored it and carried on.
She is best known as the athlete who was disqualified in all three of her events at Sochi 2014
‘It’s normally caused by one significant trauma or lots of little traumas added up. Mine is because I’ve had a lot of traumas that I’ve not dealt with.
‘When I got the death threats in Sochi, it brought it back to that fire. My brain was going, “You should have died back then, now people are saying they are going to kill you”.
‘Now I understand it all and death threats don’t affect me. I don’t spend my days thinking I should be dead any more.’
Because of her PTSD, Christie even started having panic attacks doing the thing she loves the most: skating.
‘We linked it to what happened at the Olympics and the death threats,’ she explains. ‘So when I am triggered and I skate, I feel like I’m going through trauma. I become terrified.
The 30-year-old Scot crashed twice and was disqualified again at Pyeongchang 2018
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‘I skate around thinking I’m going to fall over all the time. It’s awful because it’s so different to my normal feeling of skating where I love going fast. I used to have to get off the ice, but now I get through it and stay on.’
For three years, Christie suffered in silence. It was not until two months before Pyeongchang, when she was being forced to compete while injured, that she finally sought help and was prescribed anti-depressants.
‘I was so scared of being labelled depressed or crazy,’ she admits. ‘I was like, “I’m so weak, I need medication, what have I become?” It sounds so ignorant now, but that’s how I felt.’
With injury issues and mental health problems engulfing her, it is no surprise what happened to the Team GB poster girl and gold medal favourite in Pyeongchang. But back home things got worse.
‘I spent eight years of my career working towards Pyeongchang. It was always meant to be my defining moment,’ Christie says. ‘But I came home and pretended it wasn’t real. Then I started becoming very irrational. I started spending money and would cry all the time. I still had things — my boyfriend, my coach, money. But gradually they all started to go, one by one.
Four years on, Christie is ready to use her agony in 2018 as motivation for success
‘A lot of it was because of my behaviour but I couldn’t change my behaviour because I was broken. I got to that point where I was like, “I don’t feel anything and I need to feel something”. And that’s when I cut myself for the first time.
‘As soon as I did that, it all just started to spiral. Self-harm is such a bad habit. People drink, do drugs, gamble. Self-harm was the thing I used. It was my coping mechanism at that time.
‘It just spiralled to that point and it took a long time to come back up from it.’
AS A little girl, Christie wanted to build aeroplanes. She sometimes wishes she’d stuck to that plan. She explains: ‘Someone asked me the other day, “What would you do differently with your life?” and I said, “I wouldn’t have done speed skating”. It’s sad, isn’t it?’
But Christie is happy right now, joking she has gone from blonde to brunette because she’s ‘all about the easy life these days’. She still takes medication but has only self-harmed once in the last six months.
‘I’m in the best place I’ve been in a long, long time,’ she admits. ‘I’m not there yet but it’s getting better every day.
‘The biggest thing for me was acceptance. I can’t change that I’ll never be a Sochi or Pyeongchang medallist. The only thing that I can change is what happens in Beijing.’
While out in China, Christie has already decided she will come off social media. She has learnt from those horrific experiences. ‘It’s sad because I will never go into this Olympics thinking it’s going to be a lovely experience,’ she says. ‘I don’t think it matters what I do, I’m going to get trolled because of my reputation.
‘But I won’t be on social media from June or July up to the Games. It’s not healthy for someone who openly suffers from mental health issues.
‘The worst thing that could possibly happen is that I’ve got myself the dream of an Olympic medal and then I get trolled and it just ruins it for me.’
It begs the question, why is she even on social media?
‘I won’t let bullies control my life, because that happened throughout school and I left one school because of it,’ admits Christie, who regularly updates her Instagram followers on her mental health.
‘Secondly, the mental health side is so important for me. If I can just save or help one person understand why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling, that’s important enough for me. Yes, social media is crap at times, but it can save lives, too. Talking about it is therapeutic. Every time I talk about it, I understand it more.’
Christie is writing a book about mental health and her life – with one chapter still to write
For that reason, Christie is finishing a book about mental health and her life. But there is one chapter yet to be written.
‘I know it’s my last Olympics, I don’t want to carry on after this one, but I’m still going in with that medal hope,’ she adds.
‘I feel it wouldn’t make sense to not win one after everything else. It’s not life or death to me any more but it would really mean everything to finally get it right on the day.’
Source: Daily Mail
