Kirsty Muir interview: I made podium in ski final – with a torn ACL
With one run to go in a Freeski Big Air World Cup in late 2023, Kirsty Muir decided to go for it, despite minor knee pain, and claimed a place on the podium. Two days later she discovered she had torn her anterior cruciate ligament and would be forced to spend the next year away from the slopes.
'I landed my final and third run and managed to get third, which was really cool, but then I went home and got a scan,' Muir tells Telegraph Sport from a hotel room in Geneva before this month's Freestyle World Championships in St Moritz.
'I was already getting a shoulder MRI scan because I had a bit of an issue with that and then decided to just get my knee scanned as well to be safe.
'It was quite a shock when I found out that I had fully torn my ACL, because I just didn't expect it – I was walking fine and doing the gym and everything totally normally. So it was just a bit of a shock.'
The following 12 months would be spent in the gym painstakingly building up to a return to the slopes. She was forced to watch her fellow athletes compete at the X Games while it took her two weeks just to be able to do a single leg lift. It would be another four weeks before she could put weight on the injured leg properly, as life became all about the 'small wins'.
Speaking from her hotel lobby after encountering WiFi problems, she admits: 'I am very much an adrenalin seeker and I need something fun all the time so it was quite difficult to take a step back and just stop and stuff, so that was difficult but I just told myself that was part of it and I'd be back to doing it soon. Luckily I did find ways during the rehab to still find some fun, but it was difficult to not ski for a year.'
Talking about her extensive recovery, Muir believes she has to be even stronger than she was previously in order to try to prevent a similar injury occurring in future.
Returning to the slopes was always the goal and recalling how she felt when that was finally a reality, Muir grins as she says: 'It was so so good, honestly, I just had the biggest smile on my face.
'It was so fun. I still had to build a bit more strength in my hamstring so we did just two weeks of normal skiing, just drills and feeling it out.'
After going home to build more hamstring strength, Muir could finally return to the snow park, which she describes as 'the best thing ever'.
When asked if the return made her feel like a kid again, she responds: 'Honestly I couldn't have been happier at that time, it was just so good.'
From when she was a small child following her brother down the slopes of Glenshee and The Lecht in her native Scotland, skiing has been a central part of Muir's life.
Aged 11, she enjoyed a first trip to the snow parks in the mountains having had to 'make the most of every opportunity' to travel because of the high cost, as Scotland's diminishing snow makes it difficult to do sufficient slope training. Instead, Muir uncovered her skill largely on the dry slopes at home during her formative years.
It was in 2022 that Muir burst on to the scene when she became Team GB's youngest competitor at the Beijing Winter Olympics, then aged just 17. She reached the final of both the freestyle and Big Air events, finishing fifth in the latter.
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Yet, suggesting the condition was 'probably' being over-diagnosed when the opposite had occurred historically, the second medic added: 'The problem is, of course, that it's all relatively subjective and, therefore, it's difficult to say to someone, 'I disagree. I don't think you've got ADHD'.' John Brewer, a former Ukad board member and science and medicine expert, said: 'If I was still the science and medicine expert on the Ukad board, as a non-executive director, I would certainly be probing the executive team to try to get us some information or an explanation behind that type of increase in ADHD applications if that had been brought to the board.' He added of ADHD: 'It's a little bit like asthma. Because if you ask me to fail an exercise-induced asthma test, I could do that very easily, even though I don't have asthma. Because I know what to do and it's dead straightforward to do it. 'It doesn't take a lot, dare I say it, to work out what people are looking for when they are conducting subjective assessments, in order to get that prescription.' Suspicion falls on 'rogue doctors' Michele Verroken, a veteran in th e war on drugs in sport who ran anti-doping at UK Sport before Ukad was formed, said any investigation should look for 'rogue doctors' who may be behind multiple applications. 'Anti-doping organisations should be looking at any clusters, any population increases,' she said. 'They should be looking for potential patterns of abuse, because that helps all anti-doping organisations understand if they've got over-emphasis by certain medical people in the way that they're treating and supporting performance training, and whether they're medicalising the whole approach to what's going on.' Dr Oliver Runswick, a senior lecturer in performance psychology at King's College London, has carried out research into the impact of exercise on those with ADHD. He said being physically active was 'an incredibly good symptom-management tool' and suggested athletes actually could be 'better at managing' their symptoms than non-athletes. Dr Runswick, who has also worked in sport, said he would expect those with ADHD 'severe' enough to require a TUE to be struggling with 'day-to-day' living. He added: 'You'd have to be outlining some pretty severe symptoms, which would make it almost impossible for you to be a professional athlete.' The sharp rise of athletes in Britain using ADHD drugs is in stark contrast to the trend in the United States, another country in which diagnosis of developmental disorders in the general population has been on the increase. Data obtained from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) showed a decrease in the number of TUEs it has granted for the condition over the same period (2019-24). One sports organisation that publishes its TUE data for ADHD is Major League Baseball, a move triggered by the performance-enhancing drugs scandal that engulfed it in the early 2000s. This transparency has coincided with a major fall in the number of TUEs granted, which almost halved between 2014 and last year. A Ukad spokesperson said: 'ADHD is a debilitating disorder that can have a profound effect on the way an individual functions, regardless of whether they were diagnosed with the disorder in childhood or as an adult. 'Our primary concern is to ensure that only athletes properly diagnosed with ADHD are granted a therapeutic use exemption. Whilst there is the possibility that athletes could attempt to misuse the TUE system, we have put in place the following measures to safeguard against this risk: Our ADHD TUE policy sets out the type of clinician who we accept ADHD assessments from, and the medical evidence required to support TUE requests, which is in line with UK best-practice guidelines regarding the diagnosis and treatment of ADHD. We have highly experienced psychiatrists on our TUE committee who are involved in the review of all ADHD TUE applications submitted to Ukad. The TUE committee also has the option to request a second opinion in instances whereby a diagnosis is ambiguous. 'Whilst the increases observed in the FOI data appear significant, the prevalence of athletes being treated for ADHD with stimulant medication in 2023 was 0.41 per cent of the UK national TUE pool. This is lower than the estimated prevalence of ADHD in adults, which is three to four per cent in the UK. The prevalence rate of 0.11 per cent of UK national TUE pool athletes being treated for ADHD with stimulant medication in 2021 is also lower than the 0.27 per cent of Olympians at the Tokyo Olympic Games being in receipt of a TUE for ADHD. 'Ultimately, the UK TUE prevalence data on ADHD is not out of place with national population and global athlete statistics [in a way that would] suggest that the increase in ADHD TUE approvals in recent years is down to athletes misusing the system.' Ukad also said the proportion of athletes it granted ADHD TUEs was in line with data indicating around 11 per cent of people with the disorder in England received medication for the condition.
