Seven operations, four years and one Crystal Globe later, Katie Ormerod is ready to take her Olympic chance.
And it feels like until she does, she will have to answer questions - whirling within herself and posed by others - about her first, bitter experience of the Games.
Three days before the slopestyle competition at PyeongChang 2018, Ormerod came off a rail early, breaking her heel bone and her heart clean in two.
“It sucked,” admitted the 24-year-old. “I still think about it quite a lot.
“I was gutted to miss out. I wasn’t expecting my first Olympics to be followed by a year of rehab and seven operations.
“I was watching my team-mates on TV from a hospital in Seoul, I was supportive of them but devastated I couldn’t be there competing myself.”
Ormerod actually fractured her wrist in a training run a day earlier and would have ridden through the pain were it not for her horrific heel injury.
Emergency surgery was needed but there were complications with the snowboarder’s skin.
There was no guard of honour or champagne reception on her return to Britain - just an instant trip to a skin specialist.
Due to the broken bone killing her skin from the inside out, she needed grisly skin graft surgeries and a machine plugged into the back of her heel to produce new tissue.
For an athlete who had already snapped her ACL and broken her back, the challenge was to bottom out, physically and mentally.
“I think because it was so bad, it was almost easier to come to terms with,” she said.
“It was like, okay, it just wasn't meant to be this time round. I just had to remain positive and focus on my rehab, so that I can get back to snowboarding as quickly as possible.”
“It’s always been my dream to compete at the Olympics, but in any sport, injuries do happen.
“Injuries suck but I still love what I do. I have to just do everything I can not to get injured.”
On snow the Yorkshire star came roaring back in 2019, clinching the Crystal Globe for slopestyle, the first British woman and first snowboarder to win an overall World Cup title.
She plans to double up in Beijing, also competing in the big air discipline.
Having withdrawn from her intended big air season opener in Chur last month, Ormerod will open her Olympic season this weekend in Steamboat, Colorado.
“When I was eventually able to snowboard again, I was just so appreciative that I could and that I was not in any pain,” said Ormerod.
“Since getting back on I've just been having fun and working on my snowboarding and progressing.
“I had the most successful season of my career so far in my comeback season.
“I’ve been doing a lot of hard work, a lot of visualisation, I’ve wanted so badly to come back and do well. And it all just came together.
“I'm going to Beijing in the best position that I've ever been in.”
The Olympic Games mean the world to Ormerod but her universe is the sport that has given her pain and pleasure in equal measure.
“As British athletes, I think that we're so successful because we absolutely love what we do,” she said.
“For me, getting into snowboarding, big air and slopestyle weren’t Olympic events at the time so it wasn’t about that. I just loved it.”
Sportsbeat 2021