TWO-TIME Olympian Jamie Nicholls insists Brighouse’s Katie Ormerod can still be a major force in women’s snowboarding after her disappointment in Beijing.

Ormerod, the first Briton to win a World Cup snowboard title in 2020, missed out on the finals in both the slopestyle and Big Air on her Olympic debut.

But the 24-year-old from Brighouse has bounced back from bigger setbacks and snowboarding cousin Nicholls said her Olympic dream is very much alive.

He told the PA news agency:“It’s the Olympics and at the last one she didn’t even make it to drop in.

“She wanted to go out there and compete at an Olympic Games, which she’s done. It’s incredible given where she’s come from, amazing.”

Ormerod burst on to the world scene as a 16-year-old when she was the first woman to land a double cork 1080 – three rotations and two inverted flips.

But her medal hopes at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang were shattered when she suffered a career-threatening injury in training, just hours before she was due to compete.

Ormerod split her heel clean in two, but after learning how to walk again she won the Crystal Globe as overall World Cup winner at the end of the 2019-20 season.

Nicholls, who finished sixth in the men’s slopestyle final at Sochi 2014, said: “For her to come back and win a World Cup season before the Olympics is pretty impressive because she never thought she would snowboard again.

“We’ve got to be positive. She’s young, she’s got time. She’s got the 2026 Games to look forward to and she’s got an Olympics under her belt now.

“She’ll want to keep working on those tricks, those top, top scoring tricks and she has that in her.

“She has the right facilities and the right people around her to do that. She’ll be focused now on 2026.”

Ormerod fell twice in three jumps in Big Air qualification on Monday to finish 25th after a 19th-placed finish in slopestyle on Saturday.

Nicholls said: “Yes, she’s got a bigger bag of tricks. She could have gone bigger, but I’m pretty sure Katie just wanted to put a run down and compete at a Games because where she’s come from it’s been difficult.

“She’s probably looking forward to going away now and working on new tricks as well. She’s already got her sights set on the Italy Games.”