Meet the Stanford University scholar going for gold for Team GB on the Winter Olympics: Zoe Atkin on baffling her professors together with her high-flying antics, ‘fearing’ the halfpipe – and her Beijing nightmare

It is a reasonable assumption that the professors of Stanford University don’t get stumped by much. Yet Zoe Atkin is a riddle few of them have been able to solve at first glance.

A significant chunk of her life is given over to their revered lecture theatres, where she has spent the past four years working towards a degree in symbolic systems.

That is a heavy course, studying the intersection between the human mind and machines, going to all sorts of places from artificial intelligence to linguistics, psychology and statistics. But every so often Atkin has to disappear to accommodate her other interest and that has caused a recurring scene.

‘I’ll be emailing them, saying “I’m gonna miss this week” and they’re like, “Oh, whatever”, and have no clue of what’s happening,’ Atkin, 23, tells Daily Mail Sport.

‘When I come back, they’ll then ask, “What were you doing?” I show them a video and they’re like, “What the hell?”.’

Atkin is a freestyle skier and will contest the halfpipe for Team GB in the Winter Olympics this month. If it goes to form in Italy, she will return to Stanford with a gold medal. But again, that footage. It isn’t the kind upon which you would place a safe bet.

Halfpipe skier Zoe Atkin is one of the favourites in her event at the 2026 Winter Olympics

Atkin, 23, balances her skiing with studying for a degree in symbolic systems at Stanford

The halfpipe can be a wild place — plenty can go wrong when you fly the height of a three-storey building with the aim of turning somersaults before returning down one side of a tube and back up the other, over and again. Back fractures, concussions and organ damage have come into play.

‘I definitely feel fear very acutely,’ Atkin says.

Thankfully for her, the worst of it has been a broken toe and the best has been very good indeed. Last year, she became world champion and last month won gold at the X Games for the second time.

On paper, she is in an enviable position. But ice is not paper and the Winter Olympics is nothing if not the most gloriously absurd lottery in sport.

I first encountered Atkin at the 2022 Games in Beijing, where she arrived as the hyped younger sibling of an Olympic medallist and went on to endure a multi- faceted ordeal. She missed her flight to China, slept through an alarm on one of her qualification days and then crashed twice in the halfpipe final. After finishing ninth, she broke down in tears.

So this is an athlete whose scars are more mental than physical — in fact, China was so bad she considered quitting.

‘I’ve tried to block out some of the memories,’ she says. ‘It was definitely an amazing experience in one sense, because it’s the Olympic Games. But it was also really tough for me.’

Her confidence required plenty of fixing. When Atkin enrolled at Stanford in 2022, there was no guarantee she would return to elite sport. In 2026, she competes as someone who does not fit the devil-may-care stereotype of the Winter Olympian.

Atkin broke down in tears after finishing ninth in the halfpipe event in Beijing in 2022

The conventional impression would sit closer to the free-spirited mould of Billy Morgan, who won bronze for Team GB on his snowboard in 2018 and was returned to his room in a shopping trolley.

He had spent a good portion of his celebratory night wearing a toilet seat around his neck, having previously told a few of us that his dad, ‘Mad Eddie’, once accidentally shot himself while rigging a boobytrap for burglars. Atkin, Massachusetts-born to a British father, is not like Morgan.

‘There’s a misconception that we’re all crazy adrenaline ­junkies who don’t think about what we’re doing,’ she says.

‘It may be true for some, but I definitely feel fear. Halfpipe is scary and for good reason. But I try to embrace the fear — it’s something I’ve learned a lot about on the psychology element of my degree. When I’m feeling afraid, it helps me lock in to do what I need to do.’

Doubtless there is more than one way to ride a halfpipe, but as an interesting quirk, one of Atkin’s prime rivals in Italy, the defending champion Eileen Gu of China, also studies at Stanford. They bring towering brains to a sport of madness.

Asked if they interact on campus, Atkin says: ‘Actually, no. I feel like we’re strictly on that competitive grind. If I see her in competitions, I’m like, ‘You’re going down!’.’

Unlike Team GB’s other strongest hope for gold, skeleton racer Matt Weston, Atkin has not set bold targets of victory. She talks more about the ­process, while conceding she is keen to escape the shadow of her elder sister Izzy, who won slopestyle bronze in 2018.

‘I would love to have a medal at the Olympics, because that’s the one thing she has that I don’t!’ Atkin says. ‘That would feel good.’

That much is certain. But the shopping trolleys of Italy will likely go undisturbed.