The prize for winning a race one day had been a chocolate selection box, rather than the glimmer of your standard trophy. Elise Christie decided she wanted in.
And with that a young Livingston figure skater would recalibrate her, rather literal, tracks to that of the speed skating world, trading in the opinion of judges for the black-and-white jeopardy of a surge to one, immovable finish line.
Gyrating grace and Salchow artistry soon evolved into blistering speed at the apex of her discipline, fierce and fearless in equal measure, armed with unrivalled ambition, and an amplifying beacon of British sport.
Only, sport is never really black and white; Christie was disqualified from the 1500m heats at the 2014 Winter Olympics for not crossing the finish line, adjudged to have skated inside it by 1cm. As much might exemplify the tale of her cruel fate.
"I think if you asked me when I first retired, I remember actually saying the words to my mum 'you shouldn't have let me do that, I regret it all, I hate it', but obviously now I'm in a totally different place," Christie tells Your Site ahead of her documentary 'Elise Christie: No Filter', airing on Your Site on Wednesday February 25.
Success and soaring projections as the fastest on the planet naturally bred the challenge of an ever-intensifying thirst to quench, the incentive of a chocolate selection box becoming the incentive of what Christie describes as "life or death" Olympic glory.
But the sport with which she had fallen in love resisted undeniable talent with unrequited chapters. By the end of her career disqualification, death threats, gut-wrenching injury, three medal-devoid Olympic trips and the culminating deterioration of her mental health left a 10-time European champion and three-time world champion resenting that which she had loved so dearly.
"I just remember sitting there like 'I'm never getting better here, this is bad'," says Christie. "I'm honestly thinking, as bad as it sounds, that if I was diagnosed with terminal illness I would just let it take me because I was in so much pain."
"That's when something went off. I needed to do something, because this wasn't okay."
Today, with daughter Millie blowing raspberries while perched on her lap, Christie affords herself the chance to reflect fondly in the memories of competing with her best friend Charlotte across the world, and so too in the memory of what at various points in time had been global, world recording-holding supremacy.
She also concedes a frustrating irony to the unassailable predator short-track might be witnessing were you to sew the mindset and outlook of today's Christie into the Christie of a decade earlier.
"I was talking to the psychologist the other day who I worked with at the time, and he said if I skated now I would be even better because of the way I am," she says.
"Back then it was all very erratic and I couldn't think about anything other than winning an Olympic medal, I was just too caught up in it all. I was just so desperate. That's the word for it. Desperate."
Hindsight can antagonise an athlete's most painfully out-of-reach itch more than most professions in life, but it can also incite and unveil once-dormant perspective. The world sought to tell a story it did not know, Elise Christie's story. A story of heartbreak and brutal misfortune, a story where backlash inhumanly superseded sympathy and support in the face of shattered dreams at the Sochi and PyeongChang Olympic Game. A story that unjustly sold failure, a story of how an athlete flirting perennially with greatness could wind up working in Pizza Hut and turning to OnlyFans as a necessity to funding her life.
The world sought to chime in, often blindly, at every turn, when it was only ever Christie's story to tell, when only she ever knew the real story. At the age of 35, and now as a mother, hindsight does not erase the anguish but it does allow her to take pride in a story of staggering resilience, a story capable of inspiring more people than she might have ever envisioned.
"It's a bit in the middle of where some see it as a tragedy and some see it as a failure," says Christie. "But I think what I want the documentary to tell is the resilience and the mental health aspects."
She came back time and time again, when nobody could have blamed her for walking away, when few others themselves could have carried on. No Olympic medal would be required to narrate one of the most gifted, most rampant competitors Great Britain has seen. Let that be the story of Elise Christie and her will to fight on.
"When it comes to the sport side, being resilient, but also not completely judging yourself on a single performance or what someone else perceives you as," she continued. "Because if I could have just focused on going into the Olympics and raced how I normally raced, not how I raced on national television under a pressure, then my Olympics would have a completely different outcome.
"I am here having a normal life with a healthy child who's got a healthy mum. I've turned my life around from a few years ago, there will be people sitting at home feeling how I felt those years ago. If you told me this would be my life now I wouldn't have believed you."
Christie's stock had been modest but gathering momentum when she entered her Olympic debut at the 2010 Vancouver Games. Those affiliated with the Great Britain setup bubbled in 'wait and see' excitement over their emerging superstar; they knew, and the world was about to. No pressure, no real expectation, but instead a free hit with which to plant her foundations for a sustained short-track assault on the most prestigious stage of all.
It was billed as the start of a blossoming Olympic career, though few might have forecast the ensuing extent of her snowballing profile, its overwhelming fish bowl scrutiny and the hardship that lurked.
Christie revealed in 2021 she had been drugged and raped during a night out in Nottingham in the wake of the 2010 Games. Two years later in 2012 she skated just a day after surviving a house fire, before Olympic fever in the aftermath of the 2012 London Games proved a catalyst for her eruption as a poster girl for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and its accompanying, rapidly-mounting pressure. Suddenly, the free hit feel of Vancouver had drastically changed.
A defining moment arrived in the final of the 500m when she was disqualified for a collision with Italy's Arianna Fontana, prompting a wave of social media abuse from South Korean fans also holding her responsible for Park Seung-Hi's crash. Christie, tipped to win Britain's first skating gold medal since Torvill and Dean, was subsequently disqualified in both the 1500m and 1000m events to miss out on the podium, and upon returning home was terrified to leave her house such was the fear of the backlash.
"My following was very small before I went to the Olympics, it had shot up a bit from the media attention to like 8,000 people maybe, and the next thing is I've come back from a final and there are more than 8,000 people worth of death threats.
"I hadn't left my house other than to train or compete, I went to one of my team-mates' wedding receptions and I remember standing there not being able to take in anything anybody was saying. I didn't want to leave the house.
"I went out to South Korea for training and honestly thought I was going get hit in the face or something. It was a similar feeling of PTSD. That was probably when I was the most anxious and scared of life."
She hit back. She always hit back. Christie stormed to 1500m, 1000m and overall gold at the 2017 Rotterdam World Championships as the first non-Asian skater to win the women's overall world title in 23 years. On the surface it looked perfect preparation for the 2018 PyeongChang Games, before her build-up was scuppered by a leg injury Christie puts down to pushing too hard in training.
She was then disqualified in the 1500m event after a crash that saw her taken to hospital with an ankle injury, before also being disqualified in the 1000m heat. Christie would reveal she later started to self-harm having again fallen shy of her Olympic dream.
"It was in the lead up to PyeongChang and just after PyeongChang I was probably at my worst in terms of self-harming after PyeongChang, I felt really useless," she said. "I carried so much pressure that I didn't enjoy a minute of anything. It was what defined me as a person and then eventually got to the point where I was in that much pain emotionally and mentally that if I self harmed it took away from it almost because you had a physical pain instead."
Some questioned Christie over her self-harming, but she denied it, despite the cuts on her.
"I so unhappy and in so much pain, but I wasn't suicidal," she says. "I had given up on life, I was really unhappy, but I could, I would never have, and although I was self-harming and spiralling and damaging my life, I wasn't at a point where I would have killed myself."
Having initially intended to return for the 2022 Beijing Games, Christie suffered an ankle injury and ultimately retired in December 2021. She recalls feeling as though she had given up, beating herself up over a decision to walk away from all towards which she had dedicated her life.
"It ended up being the most traumatic experience ever. And I think now, I didn't give up. I just got to the point where I couldn't anymore," she said.
"When I retired I was a bit more emotionless. I was actually probably the most sick but was avoiding. It was PyeongChang that when I got the injury that my emotion just switched off, whereas in the lead up I was so emotional and it was driving me, but it was destroying everything else.
"I remember getting the injury and I think I'd probably less-consciously made the decision (to retire) way before that because I think my brain had such a trauma response now, it was like 'you cannot go there and fail again because you won't survive this'.
"The injury ended up a way out. I was turning up at the competition really scared, finding it a chore. My brain couldn't cope anymore."
Following retirement Christie spent time working in the Nottingham markets before being put on medication and referred to psychotherapy after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
"I remember one of the questions they asked me was like, 'what have you done since you retired?' and I couldn't remember the last year and a half of my life," she remembers. "It was me in a miserable blur, that first it was going in deep about what happened, I don't think I'd spoken to anybody about it all.
"There was probably eight years of damage to deal with."
Christie turned heads when she began working at a Pizza Hut in Nottingham, a source of income she balanced with two jobs in Scotland during the week in aid of distracting her mind from the past. She would finish one job at the airport at 3am, before moving onto the other at 7am. She could not afford to stop. Stop, and she would remember what happened.
There remained a glaring void. An absence of the feeling she was making a difference to the world. For so long she believed she would return to the track, for so long she believed she could prove things had changed, only to admit a 'losing battle'.
"I mean I wasn't really [making a difference to the world], they were just getting pizza," she laughs.
Christie soon gave birth to daughter Millie, at which point she allowed herself to embrace a life she had never perhaps imagined for herself.
"She's obviously made things even better for me," she says. "I'd say my life is quite simple now and that's different from anything it has ever been. I still want to achieve more, I still want more from life, I'd love to be back and involved in the sport, but I know that takes time. That's one of my biggest goals, to get back to that place and figure that out."
Christie has also spoken publicly of her decision to turn to OnlyFans, a social media platform widely known for content creators posting explicit images, as a means of addressing her financial struggles. She also works as an activities co-ordinator in Dundee, and by now is able to harness more than enough experiences with criticism to no longer be fazed by outside perceptions.
"The OnlyFans is very reduced and it's getting to a point where I don't want to, I don't feel like it's my personality," she explains. "The issue is financial. I was in a big hole.
"All the clickbait years ago would have really upset me, nowadays I reply to some of the comments because I find them funny.
"Did I ever see myself doing OnlyFans? Would I have probably judged someone doing it before I joined it? Yes, I probably would have. I'm not even going to lie about that. But it was what I needed at that point.
"At the minute, it's still part of my income that I require, I'm trying to minimize it. I do work full time, people don't think I do, but what I earn from my full-time job does not cover my outgoings."
She remembers her time between Vancouver and Sochi as the favourite portion of her career, flying high as one of the most exciting prospects in her sport. She remembers her time between Sochi and PyeongChang as her worst, admitting there was barely a day she could say she enjoyed.
"I did love it for a period of time and I still love it now, I don't think I ever really fell out of love with it like I think I did," she says. "I think I just couldn't handle the pressure anymore. But the sport itself I still now love. "It is just very sad it went through that period where I wasn't enjoying it."
Christie wishes her story had been different, she wishes it played out in her favour. But she also now hopes her story can inspire others.
"I want to tell the real story, and I think the mental health aspect having an impact on even one person would mean a lot," she says. "If every single person had given up on me, I had really close friends that didn't, then it could have ended a lot differently.
"Just don't give up on yourself. Trauma does affect people and it does destroy people, but there is a way back."
Watch 'Elise Christie: No Filter', a Your Site New Focus Fund documentary, on Wednesday February 25, offering an intimate and moving first person account that takes us behind the headlines.​​​​​​
If you are affected by the issues mentioned in this article or want to talk, please contact the Samaritans on the free helpline 116 123, or visit the website
