Zoe Atkin was rooted to the spot as she looked down on the 22ft wall of ice. “I can’t do this,” she told herself. The halfpipe intimidated her.
Her older sister, Isabel Atkin, Great Britain’s first skiing Olympic medallist, was more free-spirited. She would jump from ridiculous heights, shouting “Come on!” at her younger sister. Isabel was fearless, Atkin thought. She was fearful. She felt it intensely, even as a child.
“For so long, I thought something was wrong with me,” she told The Athletic over video call before the start of the Winter Olympics.
But she went on to become one of the best halfpipe freestyle skiers in the world, a two-time X Games winner, and the top qualifier for Saturday’s freeski halfpipe Olympic final, which will pit Atkin, the reigning world champion, against Eileen Gu, the defending Olympic champion.
The fear has not gone away, it never will. But the British Olympian, born in Massachusetts to a British father and a Malaysian mother, has learned to embrace the fear.
“There’s a huge stereotype we’re all just crazy people, adrenaline junkies or we don’t think about it,” she said.
But fear has consumed her in all kinds of ways: The natural, biological fear of competing in a dangerous sport; the fear of injury; the fear of failure; the stubborn fear she felt when messing up a new trick. “I used to have anxiety around the fear itself,” the 23-year-old said.
Four years ago, she learned a new trick — an alley oop flat five. Atkin rotates uphill, alley oop, in the opposite direction to the natural flow of the pipe, and spins 540 degrees (one and a half rotations) before finishing with a mute grab.
She landed it consistently until one day she fell. “The fear wouldn’t go away,” she said.
Every time she tried the trick, she would become scared midair and pull out, landing on her side. She knew she could do the maneuvers, but she didn’t trust herself. She would suddenly lose orientation and fall. Again and again. She knew not committing to the trick would increase the chances of landing unsafely. But her brain was trying to protect her. “I had this mental block,” she said.
Zoe Atkin qualified in top spot for Saturday’s freeski halfpipe final. (Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)
Atkin took a break from the trick. Her 2024-2025 season still went well, she had three World Cup podium finishes but at the X Games, the pinnacle of the sport outside of the Olympics, in January 2025, she finished fourth. It was, in Atkin’s words, “the worst position.”
“I was upset,” she said. “It lit this fire in me.”
Since 2021, just before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Atkin has worked with a couple of sports psychologists. When she switched to her current one, she hoped she would fix her fear and the problem would vanish.
Instead, she has learned to lean into the sensation. “It’s not about getting rid of the fear,” she explained. “It’s about finding comfort in that uncomfortable feeling. I don’t want to feel this feeling but it is just a feeling. I’m scared but I can do it scared.”
A student at Stanford University, majoring in symbolic systems, Atkin has taken cognitive science classes, learning how the mind works. She understands the biological process of fear and how much control you have over your daily experiences, such is the power of the mind.
She recalls one particular class, “How beliefs create reality,” with professor Dr. Alia Crum who spoke about a study that had split people into two groups, one group felt stress inhibited their performance and the other believed stress enhanced it. When completing a task in a stressful situation, those in the group who had a stress-enhancing mindset performed better. The only difference between the two groups was their mindset towards stress.
Zoe Atkin won the women’s ski SuperPipe at the 2026 X Games on January 23, 2026 in Aspen, Colorado. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
Atkin now views stress as helping her be alert enough to hit all her cues to perform her tricks. She has learned to reframe other thoughts: she is anxious because she cares. She has learned to acknowledge her feelings, too — whether it be sensing anxiety about raising her hand in class, or when her heart is racing at the top of the pipe in an Olympic final.
Other tools, like meditation and mindfulness, have helped her stay present and prevent her thoughts from spiralling in stressful moments. She now chooses which thoughts to pay attention to. If her first one is: ‘I can’t do this,’ she asks how true that is. “That’s just fear talking,” she said.
For two weeks leading up to the 2025 World Championships, she started working on the trick again, practicing it over and over. She grew tired of thwacking her body on the icy floor. She felt stupid, she knew she could do the trick. But her brain’s safety mode went into overdrive.
One day in camp, she landed the trick and, day by day, grew in confidence. “It felt amazing,” she said. “I was doing things I was afraid of doing every single day.”
In the first run at the World Championships last March, she attempted the trick again and fell. She thought about playing it safe in her next two runs. But she knew she could do it, and she did, winning the world title.
“It would have been so easy to just not do the trick,” she said. “I proved that I’m done with this mental block.”
It was a huge turning point. Finally, she felt she had agency over her body again.
Zoe Atkin said she focused too much on results at the 2022 Beijing Olympics (Marco Bertorello / AFP via Getty Images)
Atkin has continued with that attitude into her training throughout the year and feels different going into these Games. In Beijing four years ago, when she was making her Olympic debut at 19, she focused on results. “It didn’t exactly go the way I hoped or expected,” she said of her ninth-placed finish.
She considered retiring from the sport. “It was a weird time,” she said, referring to the stringent measures that were in place around the world because of the covid pandemic.
But that Fall, just like Gu, her main rival on Saturday, she started at Stanford University and became a “normal college student not stressing about skiing.”
She took a break from the sport and when she returned to it that winter, she tried to just have fun. In January 2023, she won her first X Games. Now, she feels her identity is not just tied to her performance on the slope. “I feel so much more whole as a person,” she said. “Before, skiing results were everything that mattered.”
Over time, Atkin has realized it is not a weakness to feel fear, nor is it bad to feel it so strongly. When she hits that flow state, it is an unmatched feeling. “I feel like nowhere else,” she said. But she knows she will not feel like that all the time, that the fear will resurface and she will need to work through it.
Atkin leans on her sports psychologist a little less now. She still speaks to her around once every two weeks but only when she feels she needs a chat, confident in the processes they have developed together. “There’s only so much she can do,” said Atkin. “It’s just me up there. I’m the one that has to do the maneuvers.”
“Going into the season and the Winter Olympics as world champion and world number one, I have a lot of confidence,” said Atkin. “I feel really mentally strong. I’ve put so much work into this and I feel more established in my sport. I’m really excited to go and showcase to the world what I’ve been working on.”
When she stands on top of the podium on Saturday, Atkin will be listening to upbeat songs, a mix of hip hop, rap and pop.
She will feel the fear, but will do it anyway.
