RICHMOND alpine skier Sam Clissold was beaming from ear to ear after an impressive European Youth Olympic Winter Festival debut in Liberec.

The 15-year-old began his Olympic adventure with the giant slalom and ended the first run just over four seconds behind the leader, after clocking 52.90 seconds to sit 32nd in the rankings.

The North East youngster bettered that time with his second run as he clocked 51.14seconds, with Sweden’s Henrik Kristoffersen taking gold with a combined time of 1:36.92minutes.

Despite dropping a place to 33rd overall, the former Richmond School pupil was delighted, having arrived in the Czech Republic ranked 63rd.

“I’m just really happy with my perfor-mance in the giant slalom and I really can’t believe how well I have done,” he said. “I made 30 places up on my ranking on the first run and held it together in the second to finish much higher than I expected to.

“Even though we are all of a similar age I’m still young at 15 and I’ve done really well in my age group, as I’m third overall for those born in 1995.

“The surface was really hard as it’s really icy but at the top I did pretty well and stood strong even though I was bouncing around a bit, and overall I’m very happy.

“I’ve always tended to rise to the big occasions like last year when I was doing an international race when I hoped for a top 30 result and I ended up tenth – but this beats that hands down.”

Clissold’s Czech dream isn’t over yet as he still has the slalom competition tomorrow to look forward to.

“After such a good giant slalom result I just can’t wait for Thursday now and the slalom so I can get back out there and try and follow this up,” he added. “I am hoping I can have some more cheering to do.”

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