If I was in a burning building then I could run, but any more than 30 seconds and it hurts like hell,” Zoë Gillings says on a lustrous day in Bath. It is a remarkable admission for an athlete making rapid strides towards the top of the Olympic podium, but it is clear that snowboarders are different and the white stuff hurts.

Gillings has star quality. She is a home-schooled, unicycle-riding adrenalin junkie who exudes bohemian spirit and medical problems. Her trouble with running is a relic of the time she landed badly when jumping a car on her board.

“Silly idea,” she says. “All the weight went on one foot and it shattered. The bones were like a bag of Cornflakes and the surgeon said I’d never snowboard again. He said he’d only seen one injury like it, when an 80-year-old woman was hit by a car. At least I missed mine.”

The 24-year-old from the Isle of Man proceeds to catalogue her mishaps. “Four concussions,” she says. “A trapped nerve in my right heel, which still isn’t right. A broken collarbone. A torn ligament in my shoulder. A torn ligament in my knee. Too many twisted ankles to count. Too many undefined back problems. It helps if you don’t have much fear.”

She ignored the surgeon’s pessimism to reach the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. She sent him a postcard. “It wasn’t a gloating one,” she says. “Just a thanks for helping me. Did I hear anything back? No.”

Severely hampered by her injuries, she finished a modest fifteenth in the snowboard cross event in Turin, but in Vancouver next year it could be different. She is ranked No 5 in the world.

“We’re aggressive but not illegal,” Gillings says after finishing a training session at the University of Bath. “Boardercross”, as she calls it, is nevertheless one of the more brutal of winter sports because the competitors race around gates and over jumps at the same time.

“There are rules,” Gillings says. “You are not allowed to push people or whack them over the head, but what gets me is when someone gets away with something, like putting a hand on a rival’s leg and pulling them back. If they do it in a dip where the video can’t see, well . . . mentioning no names, Lindsey Jacobellis.”

As Jacobellis is the five-times X Games champion and silver medal-winner from Turin, that rivalry is simmering nicely, compounded when the American fell in the opening World Cup round in Argentina last month and Gillings unavoidably crashed into her. The competitive streak is usually healthy, but things have got out of hand in the past. “An Austrian guy did try to punch the race director for disqualifying him for missing a gate,” Gillings says. “But I haven’t seen any fisticuffs.”

It is more brutal in terms of the damage done to herself. She admits she cannot even walk for too long and that she feels pain whenever she lands.

Another problem for the Manx maverick is money. Snowsport GB, the governing body, suspended funding over the summer as it hit a cash crisis. For Gillings, who says she made £250 profit in 2008, the freeze was calamitous. “Nothing was released until September but the season started in August,” she says. “I’d planned five weeks’ training on glaciers. I got three days.”

Snowsport has a budget of a little more than £1 million and salvaged a lifeline by brokering a four-year loan worth £350,000. It is chicken feed when placed alongside the billions being invested in 2012 and means Gillings and her peers live a hand-to-mouth existence for elite athletes.

She was raised to love winter sports because her parents owned a chalet in Albertville, France. Her mother used to be a teacher and so she was home educated, allowing her to spend extensive periods abroad.

It has been ups and downs ever since, literally and otherwise. In Canada, someone would be put on moose watch as they drove into the wild, while on the slopes she almost hit a squirrel. “I did an emergency left,” she says. “I stopped and it was hidden under my board. I checked it was all right and it ran off.”

She is about to start her travels again, hoping that it will end on the podium in Vancouver in February. “I think I have the skill but a medal is not guaranteed because this sport is so unpredictable,” she says. Faced with the daily dilemma of wanting to make a big impression while wincing at every impact, she knows that if she can rise as high as her pain threshold, the gold is in the bag.