Andy Murray rescued from mountain during first skiing trip – ‘I’m in trouble here’
Andy Murray spent decades making the sporting impossible, often look difficult, but entirely possible.
The Scot, 37, retired at the Paris Games last summer, bringing a curtain down on a legendary career which included three Grand Slams and two Olympic gold medals. His struggles with injuries were often difficult to watch, but he made a habit of getting himself back off the court to keep swinging.
After hanging up the racket, Murray has been in search of new sporting endeavours, including his link up with Novak Djokovic as a coach, and his impressive travails on the golf course.
But the the father-of-four admitted that after a post-retirement skiing trip, he quickly discovered he didn’t have the same natural talent when it came to taking on the slopes. In fact, so much were his struggles, that he had to be helped off a ski lift with wife Kim keen to not be seen with him.
“The first two days were shocking,” Murray confessed on the Sporting Misadventures Podcast. “I couldn’t get off the ski lift. I couldn’t get up.
“They’re quite low some of the ski lifts. My wife refused to go on the ski lifts with me because it’s embarrassing isn’t it when I just couldn’t get up. So I was having to go on with strangers who were like having to lift me up. My brother-in-law (Scott Sears) was having to help me.
“The first day I got stuck up the mountain at the end of the day. We were on a beginners’ slope at the end of the day the ski lift to take you back up to the top was closing and there was another one slightly further down the hill. Me and my brother in law we’re like ‘let’s just go a little bit further and we’ll go up the other ski lift’.
“So we went down the mountain a little bit. I can’t ski. I don’t know how to stop at this stage. We’d been on literally a beginner green slope. We want let’s say four 400, 500m down the slope, got to where the ski lift was and the other ski lift had shut. The guy who was operating it said the only way to get down now is you have to get down the mountain. I was like, ‘I can’t ski’.
“He was like: ‘You should have gone up when you were told it was closing. The only way is you’ve got to go for it. It’s about 3km to the bottom’. It’s late in the day so it gets icy as well, it’s harder. I had no idea how to stop.
“I’d gone for about 500m, narrow slope and I’m like if I try to turn I’m going off the side here. I’m going straight down the mountain. I’ve gone past my bother in law and shouting to him: ‘I’m in trouble here, I don’t know how to stop here’.
“I throw myself on the ground and then started trying to go down on my arse which I couldn’t really do. I got to a restaurant eventually having picked up the skis and I’m now walking, and I had to get rescued on one of those skidoos. The people are snapping about that – the rescue team – are snapping because it is usually drunk British people at the end of the day who have got stuck up the mountain.
“That’s not really their job. They’re there to help people who are injured rather than just some idiot that thought they could get down the slope late in the day. That was a bit embarrassing.”
Murray also admitted he feared falling off the slopes. “When we went on wide, steep slopes, I was fine with that because I could pick up pace and I had space to turn,” he continued.
“But when you are going on the narrow bits of the mountain, when you see if you make too big a turn to the right, you are essentially falling off the mountain, you struggle a lot psychologically to go slowly.
“I didn’t really know how to control myself. My wife was really good at that part of it. It is pretty scary when you are picking up speed and you don’t really know how to stop. I would then end up going straight down the mountain picking up speed. The only way to stop was throwing yourself on the ground basically.”
But like he did so often during his tennis career, Murray is refusing to give up without a fight: “By the end I got quite into it and really enjoyed it. We are going to go again in April. It is an amazing holiday to have with the children. They all really enjoyed it and pick it up really quickly. Will try and do a bit more of that.”
Sporting Misadventures podcast with Chris Hoy and Matt Majendie is available on Spotify, Apple or Amazon music.
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