Early Life
Alcott is named after Sophia Loren's character in the film El Cid. She started skiing at 18 months old on a family holiday in Flaine, France and first raced at the age of three.
In 1993 Alcott won the Etoile D'Or French Village Ski Championship, becoming a member of the British Junior Alpine team in 1994 and won the 1995 Sunday Times Junior Sportswoman of the Year award. Every British summer from the age of eleven to nineteen, Alcott travelled to New Zealand to train in the antipodean winter.
She was a talented athlete as a youngster, not only representing Richmond in dry slope skiing, but also in tennis at the London Youth Games. Her achievements as a junior and senior were recognised when she was inducted in to the London Youth Games Hall of Fame in 2011.
Aged twelve, Alcott broke her neck in a skiing accident, recovering with two of her vertebrae fused together. She still carries X-rays of the injury so that if she is ever in an accident, the hospital will know not to prise the vertebrae apart.
Read more about this topic: Chemmy Alcott
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)