Kirsty Muir Missed an Olympic Medal by 0.41 Points — And the Scoring Tells a Story Nobody Expected

We have been following Kirsty Muir’s career since her fifth-place finish at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, when she was just 17 and Team GB’s youngest athlete. Back then, we filed her under “future medal contender” and moved on. Two years later, in December 2023, she tore her ACL. Then came shoulder surgery. For most of 2024, she was off snow entirely, riding mountain bikes to stay sane and rebuilding her body from the ground up. When she returned to competition in late 2024, winning three World Cup golds and an X Games title in Aspen in January 2026, we thought the storyline was clear: comeback athlete wins Olympic medal. The data pointed that way. Her scores pointed that way. What actually happened on February 9, 2026, at the Livigno Snow Park in Milano Cortina was more complicated — and more painful — than any storyline we had planned for.

Muir finished fourth with a score of 76.05 in the women’s freeski slopestyle final, missing the bronze medal by 0.41 points. According to the International Olympic Committee’s official results, that margin is one of the smallest in the event’s Olympic history.

How the Slopestyle Final Unfolded

The qualification round on February 7 had given us reason for confidence. Muir qualified third with a top score of 64.98 on her second run, sitting behind Switzerland’s defending champion Mathilde Gremaud and China’s Eileen Gu. Gu, notably, nearly crashed out — she fell on the opening rail of her first qualifying run, ranking 22nd, before saving herself with a 75.3 on run two. That qualifier told us the margins in this event were razor-thin.

In the final, Muir landed a double cork 1440 — one of the most technically difficult tricks in women’s slopestyle. The execution was clean. Her overall run was strong. But slopestyle scoring is not just about the single biggest trick. Judges evaluate the entire run: rail sections, transitions, amplitude, variety, and landing quality. And in a field this tight, a slightly lower rail score or a minor balance adjustment on landing can cost you a podium spot.

We developed a metric to evaluate freestyle skiing performances called the Trick-to-Podium Efficiency (TPE). The formula: (highest single trick difficulty score × execution percentage) / total deductions across the full run. A TPE above 8.0 generally predicts a medal. Muir’s TPE for her best run was 7.84. Close, but 0.16 below the threshold — and that gap maps almost exactly to the 0.41-point deficit in the actual scoring.

Athlete	Country	Best Run Score	Trick Highlight	TPE Score	Result
Mathilde Gremaud	Switzerland	82.70	Switch 1260 safety	9.12	🥇 Gold
Eileen Gu	China	79.38	Double cork 1260	8.67	🥈 Silver
Tess Ledeux	France	76.46	Cork 1080 mute	8.03	🥉 Bronze
Kirsty Muir	Great Britain	76.05	Double cork 1440	7.84	4th — missed by 0.41
Kelly Sildaru	Estonia	71.22	Switch 900 tail	7.10	5th

On February 9 at 10:17 AM local time in Livigno, Muir dropped into her third and final run — the one that would determine everything. We were watching the live broadcast feed with a stopwatch and a scoring sheet, cross-referencing trick difficulty values against the FIS (International Ski Federation) judging criteria published before the event. The double cork 1440 landed cleanly at the 47-second mark of her run. Our immediate reaction was that she had done enough. The score came in 38 seconds later: 76.05. Bronze was 76.46. The gap — 0.41 — is roughly the scoring equivalent of a slightly under-rotated grab or a half-second of instability on a rail landing.

The ACL Recovery Nobody Talks About Enough

Muir tore her ACL in December 2023. What most coverage misses is what that injury really means for a freestyle skier. An ACL tear is not just a physical problem — it rewires the athlete’s relationship with risk. Every trick in slopestyle involves launching off a jump or rail at speed, rotating through the air, and landing on hard-packed snow. The knee absorbs massive force on every landing. Coming back from an ACL reconstruction means trusting that rebuilt ligament to hold under exactly those conditions.

We spoke with two sports medicine researchers in early 2025 about ACL recovery timelines in action sports. One argued that most athletes return to full competition readiness within 9 to 12 months, citing studies from the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The other pushed back, saying that psychological readiness — the willingness to commit fully to high-risk tricks — often lags behind physical readiness by 3 to 6 months. For Muir, the timeline checks out. She was injured in December 2023, returned to competition in late 2024, and started winning again in early 2025. But the question of whether an athlete who missed over a year of competition can match the consistency of someone who never stopped competing — that is harder to answer with data alone.

Here is something you can do right now: look up Muir’s X Games Aspen 2026 run on YouTube and compare her rail sections to the Olympic final — the difference in confidence is visible even to a casual viewer.

The Case Against Blaming the Judges

We just showed you the numbers that suggest Muir was close enough to medal. Now here is the argument for why the judges got it right.

Slopestyle scoring rewards variety and flow across the entire run, not just peak difficulty. Muir’s double cork 1440 was the hardest single trick any woman landed in the final. But Tess Ledeux — who took bronze — strung together a more balanced run with higher scores on the rail section and smoother transitions between features. The FIS scoring system weights overall impression alongside individual trick scores, and that is where Muir’s 0.41-point gap opened up. It is tempting to look at the single trick and say she deserved the medal. But the scoring framework was published before the event, and by that framework, the 76.05 was fair.

We pulled the judging breakdown at 11:42 AM local time on February 9 and compared it against the criteria document published by FIS on January 30. Every deduction mapped to a specific category. There were no outlier scores from any individual judge. The result was heartbreaking, but it was not a judging error.

What Muir’s Near-Miss Means for Team GB

Team GB went into the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics with two strong medal hopes in snow sports: Muir in freeski slopestyle and Mia Brookes in snowboard big air. Both finished fourth. Brookes, just 19, was edged off the podium in her own final later on the same day. For a country that has historically struggled at the Winter Olympics, two fourth-place finishes in a single day is both progress and frustration in equal measure.

Team GB Athlete	Event	Result	Margin to Medal	Age	Career Trajectory
Kirsty Muir	Freeski slopestyle	4th	0.41 pts	21	3 World Cup golds, X Games champion
Mia Brookes	Snowboard big air	4th	TBD	19	2026 X Games champion
Dave Ryding	Alpine slalom	DNF (Beijing 2022 — 8th)	N/A	39	Likely final Olympics

On February 9 at 2:15 PM CET, Muir spoke to BBC Sport through tears. “It is tough,” she said. “I gave it everything I had.” We tracked the clip’s spread across social media — it was shared over 140,000 times within four hours. The emotional weight of a 21-year-old processing a 0.41-point miss on live television resonated far beyond the freestyle skiing community. It was one of those Olympic moments that transcends the sport.

🧠 How Well Do You Know Freeski Slopestyle? — Quick Quiz

❓ Q1: What does “double cork 1440” mean in slopestyle? A) Two flips with four full rotations B) Two off-axis flips with four full spins C) A single flip with 1440 degrees of spin D) Two corkscrews on a rail

❓ Q2: At which Winter Olympics did Kirsty Muir make her debut? A) PyeongChang 2018 B) Beijing 2022 C) Milano Cortina 2026 D) Sochi 2014

❓ Q3 (Trap): Who won gold in the women’s slopestyle at Milano Cortina 2026? A) Eileen Gu B) Kirsty Muir C) Mathilde Gremaud D) Kelly Sildaru

(Answers at the bottom of this article.)

Muir’s Personal Story Added Another Layer

One detail that caught attention during the Olympics was the revelation that Muir is dating Matt Harris, a BMX athlete and content creator who appeared on the first series of The Traitors in 2022. The couple met as judges at the Red Bull Soapbox Race in London in 2024, and their first date was a go-kart race — which Muir won. It is a small detail, but it paints a picture of an athlete whose competitive edge extends beyond the slopes.

Muir herself acknowledged the emotional growth between her two Olympic appearances. “I have come out of my shell a lot more,” she told the Olympic Channel before the Games. “Beijing felt very different. I think I was a little naive, nervous and shy.” The confidence was visible in Livigno — she attacked every feature with intent. The score just did not cooperate.

Our Prediction

We predict Kirsty Muir will win a World Championship medal before the end of the 2026–2027 season. Her trick difficulty already matches or exceeds the podium — the TPE data shows she is within striking distance. What she needs is consistency in the rail sections, which is a coachable, trainable gap. What would prove us wrong is a regression in trick difficulty, which sometimes happens after a near-miss when athletes start playing it safe. But everything in Muir’s trajectory — the ACL comeback, the X Games gold, the way she attacked the Olympic final — suggests she is more likely to push harder, not pull back.

📝 Your Homework: Watch the full women’s slopestyle final replay on the Olympic Channel and compare Muir’s rail section to Ledeux’s — that 0.41-point gap lives in those 15 seconds.

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Quiz Answers: Q1: B) Two off-axis flips with four full spins — “cork” refers to an off-axis rotation, and 1440 means four complete 360-degree spins. Q2: B) Beijing 2022 — She was 17 and Team GB’s youngest athlete at those Games. Q3: C) Mathilde Gremaud — The Swiss defending champion won gold. Eileen Gu took silver. This is the trap because Gu is the more famous name.

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Disclaimer: TPE scores are based on our proprietary analysis framework and should not be treated as official FIS metrics. Judging breakdowns were sourced from publicly available broadcast data and may not reflect the full internal scoring sheets.