Ellie Soutter

Soutter was born in England and grew up in Oxted.[1] Her parents, Tony Soutter and Lorraine Denman, divorced when she was young and Soutter and her father moved to Les Gets in the French Alps when she was nine years old. She attended local schools until 2015, at which point she was home-schooled for two years.[2]

Soutter first learned to snowboard at the age of ten. She was a member of the inaugural British Europa Cup snowboard cross programme, and specialised in the freestyle, freeride and snowboard cross events.[3] She began competing in international events in the 2016 snowboarding season, coached by French Olympic snowboarder Déborah Anthonioz.[4]

Soutter won Great Britain's only medal at the 2017 European Youth Olympic Winter Festival, a bronze in the snowboard cross, and was also the team's flagbearer at the closing ceremony.[5][6] In 2017 she was nominated and shortlisted for the Ski Club of Great Britain's Evie Pinching Award, an annual award for young snowsports athletes.[7] Soutter had been selected to represent Great Britain at the Junior Snowboard World Championships in New Zealand in August 2018.[6][8] Prior to her death, Soutter had been training in New Zealand.[9]

Soutter was in a relationship with French snowboarder Oscar Mandin. It is unknown if they were still together at the time of her death.[10][9]

Soutter hanged herself in the woodlands near her French home on her 18th birthday, 25 July 2018.[11][2][12][13]

A few days later, her father Tony said he thought her "history of mental health issues", combined with the pressure of high-level performance expectations, contributed to her death, and called on sports authorities to provide better support for young athletes. He said "mental health awareness needs to be really looked at and made more public".[1]

The Soutter family set up a fundraiser in her name to help poor young winter sports athletes. A family statement read, "as a junior athlete coming from a family without substantial wealth, Ellie often had to miss out on competing and training through lack of funds".[14]