‘I was in the unknown’: GB’s Charlotte Bankes wins race against time for a second chance at the Olympics

2025 was shaping up to be Charlotte Bankes’ year. By April, the snowboarder was leading the World Cup standings with five wins and had just picked up a silver medal in the World Championships, only pipped to gold by a dramatic photo finish. She was on track for a third Snowboard Cross World Cup title in four years, the ideal preparation for her fourth Olympic Games.

Then she broke her collarbone, and suddenly her Olympic year was flipped upside down.

Her recovery initially looked promising, and she was back on the snow in June, before a scan revealed the bone hadn’t completely healed. She underwent a second surgery in August, further jeopardising her hopes of making it back in time for the Games.

Eight months after the crash and slightly ahead of schedule, she returned to competition in Cervinia, Italy in early December. The 30-year-old crashed in the individual event – “just a little tumble”, fortunately – and exited in the quarter-finals. But she demonstrated not just her resilience but also why she remains one of the sport’s top competitors as she bounced back to win gold in the mixed team event, alongside 24-year-old Huw Nightingale.

“It was a good way to finish the week, that’s for sure,” she says modestly, on a call with The Independent. “I didn’t have that much expectation. I’ve done, what, 10 days on track since I’ve been back and only five where we’d really been able to push on, so we were just taking it day by day.

“I feel like I’m missing a few kilometres on the board, but luckily when I got back on snow, I was physically strong enough that everything responded quite well. I was a bit in the unknown.”

A fine run by Nightingale put the team in third spot going into the women’s leg, and fine performances in the heats against some strong teams meant the pair were confident despite Bankes’ comparative rustiness. “I hadn’t done four by four heats much at all because we hadn’t had the time, so it was just like, how do I react in that pack, can you make the right decision.

“In that final, it just seemed to all go quite smoothly. Huw put me in the right position and then it was just like, I can’t mess it up now!”

The final result was that Bankes – a very understated character – was “really quite pleasantly surprised” with how she rode. “For sure, I’d have preferred to do better [in the individual race], but also I learned a lot from that, it was probably a step that we needed to take.

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“I do have that speed, but I need to completely stay focused on myself and my riding and really attack each feature, you can’t be on the defensive at all. We saw that in training when I’m doing that, they’re fast runs and I make the right calls.”

An injury is far from ideal at the best of times, but with this one coming right before an Olympic year, it was a further blow. Bankes says: “It kind of put a little bit more time pressure on it. I probably wouldn’t have come back as quickly the first time [without the Olympics looming] – we didn’t think it was negative to do that – so the second time we were quite patient.”

Mentally, it was tough to deal with. She says: “At the start, it was just frustration to not be able to defend that position of leading the World Cup and to finish my season like that. But I was kind of like, at least it’s only a collarbone and I’ll be back soon.

“It was more [difficult] when it didn’t heal and I had to have a second surgery. I was supposed to be going down to South America for training, and it was kind of like, we’re going to have to completely change how I approach this season. It’s not ideal, but I think that you learn a lot of things as well.

“In an Olympic season you want to do what you know works. But that doesn’t mean that you’ll perform on the day, so kind of having to change it around… It’s lucky I’ve been really quite well-supported. It’s not been easy every day, it’s been slow, but I’m happy that we’re back on snow now and everything around the shoulder is getting stronger.”

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That pragmatic approach has paid off. This will be Bankes’ fourth Olympic Games but her first in Europe, and she says: “I think it’s going to be nice to kind of feel at home. My family’s planning to travel over and watch, and just being in that same time zone means that a lot more people can actually watch it on TV and share the moment. I think a lot more people are going to get behind us and get behind the Winter Olympics, and it will have a wider spread than past ones.”

She cites Turin in 2006 – the last time the Games were held in Europe – as a key moment for her. As a youngster growing up in Puy-Saint-Vincent in the Alps, she’d already got the snowsport bug, following in the footsteps of older brothers William and Thomas.

She says she was “too young to think that far ahead” in terms of becoming an Olympian, “but when I was growing up I went to watch [the Games] and it did inspire me. I think that being able to do that, inspire the general public and sporting fans into the Winter Olympics, and within that culture of winter sports – Italy is a massive skiing country – I think it will just bring in a lot more people and hopefully it’ll be a good show.”

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Bankes has unfinished business with the Olympics, having finished ninth in Beijing, while for GB as a whole, it was a comparatively disappointing Games, with just two medals. She says: “I think unfortunately it just didn’t click for anybody, and I think that was the big disappointment because we were strong going in and it didn’t work out.

“It didn’t really feel like the Games, to be honest: nobody really there to share it with, and that pressure of keeping to yourselves because you were scared of catching Covid and not being able to race. I think it probably did [affect how people performed], and it also used up a lot of energy.”

While she won’t go into Milan-Cortina with the same mantle as a favourite as she did in Beijing, she remains a serious contender both in the individual event and alongside Nightingale in the mixed team, having picked up an individual World Cup win shortly after we speak. She says: “This has pretty much refocused me pretty much solely on the Olympics [rather than the World Cup title]. It’s every four years, and last time it didn’t go well.

“It kind of just gave me that extra motivation to really put in the work. I’ll try to perform at my best and go for a medal, and that’s kind of my goal: to be happy with how I’m riding and focus pretty much solely on that, not on the end result, because I know that it’ll come from that.” On the basis of her career so far, you’d be hard-pressed to bet against her.