It has been a downhill struggle for Chemmy Alcott to prove that there is more to British skiing than middle-class holidays in padded clothes and the indelible image of Eddie the Eagle soaring as a stuffed turkey. It has involved banana-shaped bones, welding her toes and comedy cameos in French hospitals. To cap it all, she had her hero ruin a myth. “I idolised Alberto Tomba and then he slipped me his phone number,” she said. “That destroyed my image of him. It wasn't like I was special. It happened a lot with him.”

Alcott, from Twickenham in Middlesex, shatters the image of the British skier as plucky loser. Last month she won the second leg of the giant slalom at the World Cup event in Sölden, Austria, finishing tenth overall. It proved that she could beat the elite ahead of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in little more than a year. The life story of Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards, the ski jumper, may be in production, with Steve Coogan, the comedian, playing the lead, but this time it is serious.

The 26-year-old is doing it on her own. She describes her lottery funding as peanuts and survives through sponsors and being a dab hand with a begging bowl. It costs £300,000 to bankroll the travel and the support team suggested by Sir Clive Woodward, the director of elite performance for the British Olympic Association. Alas, that no longer includes Tag Lamche, who once played drums for Ian Dury and the Blockheads before becoming a sensory motor skills guru.

“I'd work with him again in a heartbeat if I had the money,” Alcott said. “He'd get you juggling and kicking a ball because it was about tripping your system so your body thinks for itself.”

Still there is Joanne Elphinston, the performance movement coach who restored the feeling to Alcott's nerve-damaged feet after an operation to straighten her misshapen “flippers” in 2006. “I was born with very wide joints,” Alcott said. “They cracked the bones and realigned them. The alternative might have been having my little toes amputated. I sat with Joanne for an hour a day for six months waggling my little toe. It drove me crazy.”

The risk of losing her career because of the operation is one of a myriad of obstacles she has encountered. “I have a strange connection with fear,” she said. “I used to never sleep before a race. I had a terrible fear of underperforming because I had a lot of labels stuck on me about being the new generation. The happiness other people got from beating me made me feel physically sick. If I went up at a prize-giving nobody would clap; if someone else did, it would be rapturous applause. I thought, 'Don't hate me.' I have really struggled to distance Chemmy the skier from Chemmy the person.”

The skier has broken her neck and back. The person carries her X-rays, in case she is knocked unconscious and surgeons try to operate, not realising that she has two vertebrae fused together. “I woke up in France in a hospital with four grannies [in the ward] when I was 12,” she said. “One kept trying to escape, so I was always pressing the panic button. It was very funny.”

Apart from the broken neck, that is. The back came six months before her first Winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City in 2002. She still finished fourteenth in the combined. In Turin in 2006 she was eleventh in the downhill. Now she wants to win gold.

“I don't want to say skiing is a dangerous sport, it's just I'm a dangerous person,” she said, but then flicked open her mobile phone and showed pictures of her mangled toes. Any friction can reopen the gaping sores. “I have a laser now,” she said. “It cost €4,000 [about £3,400] and is a bit sci-fi, but if it gets bad I go to the car, put my goggles on and weld my feet. It helps the skin recover. I'm the world's biggest fan of second skin.”

Alcott has been portrayed as a “ski babe” and has modelled to boost the coffers. However, she exhibited a lack of vanity by saying that she has her rugby-playing father's “glutes” and then showed off a mini hearing aid that she enthused “is a bit MI5”. She added: “I'm deaf in one ear.” A ski accident? “No, my brother hit me round the head with a tennis racket.”

It is hard to evoke sympathy from the layman when Alcott says that she has been training in Argentina and Chile all summer, but no one could accuse her or the other British skiers of having it easy. “I'm the only one bringing in funding and it gets spread because we're a team,” she said. Alcott can race because of the Witan Investment Trust, a financial company that sponsors her. Last week she flew to the United States, where she will compete in the next World Cup event in Colorado, in a fortnight's time. She will see her boyfriend for two days before April. There is no vestige of doubt in her make-up. “I'm worried what will happen when I win and I feel it's going to happen soon,” she said. “The blokes in the pub, who say they'll race me because they go skiing once year, will say I've come out of the blue, but I've been working, guts and glory, for years. This isn't a trashy Jackie Collins novel.”

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