Britain does not have mountains. Britain does not have a snow season. Britain has plastic dry slopes that bake in the sun and get too sticky to ride, indoor snow centres with 180-metre runs that close at 10pm, and a network of Saturday kids clubs where eight-year-olds learn to throw their first 360s while their parents drink coffee in the cafe.
And yet. At X Games Aspen 2026, British riders took three gold medals: Mia Brookes in Women’s Snowboard Slopestyle, Zoe Atkin in Women’s Ski SuperPipe, and Kirsty Muir in Women’s Ski Slopestyle. Five medals total across the weekend, the biggest X Games haul in British winter sports history. Brookes won the overall World Cup park and pipe title. Muir came back from an ACL tear to win on the same course where she had taken a World Cup victory 12 days earlier. Atkin is the reigning halfpipe world champion.
This is not a coincidence. This is a system. And it starts in places like Kidsgrove, Halifax, Aberdeen, and Cheltenham.
The Dry Slope Foundation
Every elite British freestyle rider has the same origin story with minor variations: they learned on plastic, they graduated to indoor snow, they scraped together enough time on real snow through family holidays or GB Snowsport programmes to develop their skills, and they outworked competitors who had daily access to mountains.
Tyler Harding, the GB freeski slopestyle rider who competed at the 2018 Winter Olympics, learned to ski aged four on a dry slope before starting freestyle three years later under the influence of GB Park and Pipe head ski coach Pat Sharples. He has spoken publicly about the disadvantage: most competitors get to ski on snow every day, so he had to work twice as hard. Some days the dry slope was too sticky from the sun to train on. Other days it was too rainy or too windy. He made it to the Olympics anyway.
That experience is universal for British riders. The dry slope teaches you one thing that mountains do not: how to be resourceful. When your training window is limited, every session counts. When conditions are imperfect, you adapt. When you finally get onto real snow, you are hungry in a way that riders who grew up in Laax or Breckenridge simply are not.
Mia Brookes: Kidsgrove to World Champion
Mia Brookes is from Sandbach, Cheshire. She learned to snowboard at 18 months old at Kidsgrove ski centre in Stoke-on-Trent, where her grandfather worked. Her parents, described by Brookes as “three hippies who rocked up in our motorhome”, spent five ski seasons in Chamonix when she was young. She continued her snowboarding at Chill Factore in Manchester.
She joined the GB Snowsport programme at ten. At 11, she competed at the British Snowboard Championships in Laax. At 16, she became the youngest ever snowboard world champion and the first Briton to win a snowboard slopestyle world title, landing the first women’s Cab 1440 in the process.
She is now 19. She won the 2025 Crystal Globe in Big Air. She took X Games gold in Women’s Snowboard Slopestyle at Aspen 2026 with a score of 96.33. She is heading to Milano Cortina as one of Britain’s strongest medal prospects.
The pipeline: Kidsgrove dry slope, Chill Factore, GB Snowsport at 10, world champion at 16, X Games gold at 19. Start to finish, that journey began on a plastic slope in Stoke-on-Trent.
Kirsty Muir: Aberdeen Saturday Kids Club to X Games Gold
Kirsty Muir is from Kingswells, Aberdeen. She started skiing at Aberdeen Snowsports Centre at three years old. She trained on Scottish mountains, the Lecht and Glenshee, and on the dry slope at home in Aberdeen, attending Saturday kids club sessions where her passion for freestyle became clear.
She credits coaches Andy Begg and Zoe Silk for nurturing her talent. In her own words: “There was a really good community down at the dry slope, and although I was totally outnumbered by boys, people like Andy and Zoe never let me doubt myself.”
By ten she was competing across Scotland and England. At 11, she entered her first international competition at the British Championships in Laax. At 13, she was on extended training stints in Switzerland. At 14, she burst onto the senior scene by winning all three freeski titles at the Brits: Big Air, Slopestyle, and Halfpipe.
At the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics she won silver in Big Air and served as Team GB’s flagbearer at the closing ceremony. At the 2022 Winter Olympics she was the youngest Briton at the Games, finishing fifth in Big Air. Then came an ACL tear that took her out for two full seasons.
She came back. She won a World Cup slopestyle event in Tignes in 2025. She won X Games gold in Women’s Ski Slopestyle at Aspen 2026, 12 days after a World Cup victory on the same Buttermilk course. She also took silver in Big Air, missing gold by 0.44 points. Two medals in one weekend, less than two years after knee reconstruction.
The pipeline: Aberdeen dry slope at three, Saturday kids club, Scottish mountains, international competitions at 11, Youth Olympics at 16, Winter Olympics at 17, X Games gold at 21. From a Saturday session at Aberdeen Snowsports Centre.
Katie Ormerod: Halifax Plastic to Crystal Globe
Katie Ormerod is from Bradford, West Yorkshire. She started snowboarding aged five on the dry slope in Halifax, training alongside her cousin Jamie Nicholls and local legend Wayne Taylor. She also competed at county-level gymnastics from the age of four, which gave her the muscular strength and spatial awareness that would later define her freestyle ability.
She grew up riding at Castleford snowdome and Halifax dry slope, training as much as she could after school and on weekends. At 13, the British Snowboard team noticed her and invited her to train and compete abroad in the mountains.
At 15, she became the youngest girl to land a double backflip on a snowboard. At 16, she performed the world’s first female backside double cork 1080. At the end of the 2019-20 season she was crowned Snowboard Slopestyle Crystal Globe winner, the first British female and first British snowboarder to achieve the feat. She is a two-time Olympian.
Halifax produced Katie Ormerod, Jamie Nicholls, and Tyler Harding. One dry slope. Three Olympic-level athletes. That is not an accident of talent. That is an environment.
Maisie Hill: Cheltenham Dry Slope to Olympic Debut After Near-Death Crash
Maisie Hill is from Cheltenham. She got into snowboarding when her father took up the sport and learned on a dry slope near her home in England. When her father decided to relocate, the family moved to the French Alps when she was around ten or eleven.
In January 2023, Hill crashed into a wall of ice during a training session in Switzerland. She lacerated her liver, broke her spine, ribs, and pelvis, fractured a lung, suffered a bleed on the brain, and lost 20 per cent of her blood. She nearly died.
Nine months later, she was back on snow. Her recovery involved weekly physiotherapy sessions at Bath University and an extensive programme funded by the BOA and overseen by GB Snowsport. The physical recovery was one thing. Four months after returning to snowboarding, the mental challenges hit. She has worked with a sport psychologist since.
She now has multiple top-10 World Cup finishes, including a fifth place since returning from the crash. She made her Olympic debut at Milano Cortina 2026 in Big Air and Slopestyle, marking the anniversary of leaving hospital with her first Olympic competition.
From a dry slope in Cheltenham to nearly dying in a Swiss training facility to standing in an Olympic start gate. That is resilience that goes beyond sport.
The Next Generation Is Already in the System
The GB Snowsport Park and Pipe squads for 2024-25 featured 22 athletes across a World Cup squad and a Next Generation squad. The Next Generation squad includes riders as young as ten: Riley Sharpe, selected on a training basis only, is already in the system.
Txema Mazet-Brown, the Freestyle Snowboard Big Air Junior World Champion, completed a nation transfer to the British system ahead of the 2024-25 season and made his Olympic debut at Milano Cortina 2026. Emily Rothney holds a Freestyle Snowboard World Junior Championships podium. Liam Richards was newly selected in freeski halfpipe. Roahan Duncan, Lenny Fenning, and Teiva Hamaini are all coming through on the snowboard side.
Snowsport England announced a landmark strategic partnership with Snowcentres Limited, the operators of The Snow Centre in Hemel Hempstead and Chill Factore in Manchester, making Snowcentres the headline sponsor of the Snowsport England Talent Pathway. This directly funds development and elite athlete squads with access to indoor real-snow training facilities.
The Futures Project, launching at The Brits 2026, targets riders aged 12 and under with an introduction to freestyle competition. A proposed £300 million resort, if built, would give the UK one of the longest indoor snow slopes in Europe: a 400-metre run that would transform training access for the next generation.
What the Rest of the World Does Not Understand
The narrative around British winter sports is always framed as a surprise. How did a country with no mountains produce a snowboard world champion? How did a girl from Aberdeen win X Games gold in freestyle skiing? How is Britain sending eight park and pipe athletes to the Winter Olympics?
The answer is not a mystery. The answer is dry slopes, indoor centres, obsessive young riders, coaches who believed in them, and a national governing body that built a pathway from Saturday kids club to the world stage.
Kidsgrove taught Mia Brookes to ride at 18 months. Aberdeen taught Kirsty Muir to ski at three. Halifax taught Katie Ormerod at five. Those sessions cost a fraction of what it costs to train in Laax or Whistler. The athletes who came out of them are now beating riders who had every resource advantage imaginable.
Britain’s greatest winter sports generation was built on plastic. That is the story nobody else is telling properly. That is why Gravity exists.