'Soak it all in' - Poole prepares for first Paralympics
· Yahoo Sports
Hester Poole believes she has "already won" as she prepares for her first Winter Paralympics.
The 18-year-old visually impaired skier from Bath only found out she was in the Great Britain team for the event at Milan-Cortina three weeks before the opening ceremony.
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She was selected as a wild card for a ski squad headed by Menna Fitzpatrick, the most-decorated British Winter Paralympian in history.
Poole says that the fact it had been uncertain whether she and her guide Ali Hall would actually be in to Italy has made it more straightforward in terms of her approach to the competition.
"For me, it's best that I go into this with absolutely no expectations," she told BBC Points West.
"I talked about this with my coach and my guide an awful lot - I'm 18, my guide is 23, this is our first Games, it was a long shot that we were going at all, so I'm looking at it that I've won already.
"I've had a really busy season so the fact I'm going and competing, wearing my national flag, is mental.
"I'm soaking up everything, I have a friend who says the first Games is pretty much just being overwhelmed by everything and trying to take everything in, so that's what I'm going to get from this Games, just soak it all in."
'It's a trust process'
Hurtling down an icy slope at speeds which can reach over 60mph is nerve-wracking for sighted people, but Hester was born with the rare eye disease Leber congenital amaurosis.
"You have to put a lot of trust in your guide and I use a combination of my functional vision and my guide. It's a trust process and that makes it a little bit more scary but at the same time it's a metaphor for life," she said.
"I've always had this level of vision and always been pushed to follow my elder siblings and do everything they did.
"My life is wandering about and if I hit a tree, I'll know it's there, so in that sense it's scary but I'm kind of used to it.
"I also can't see just how steep the slope is, or how icy, so it kind of works out.
"It's me skiing with my guide Ali, who skis in front of me and wears something very brightly coloured, very pink as per my request, so he's buzzing about that!
"We have radio mic headsets inside our helmets so he is yelling at me as we go down, telling me all the information I can't pick up visually, so it's quite a cool experience."