Olympian Aimee Fuller on swapping snowboarding for running a marathon in North Korea

Aimee Fuller has filled our screens before. You may have caught sight of her backflipping over improbable distances in the snowboarding at the 2014 and 2018 Winter Olympics. You might remember when, after she had been eliminated from the competition, she was a pundit on the BBC coverage of the slopestyle final in Sochi in 2014. For it was she who, when Jenny Jones became the first Briton to win a medal on the snow in Winter Olympic history, burst into tears live on air.

“That was a magic moment,” she says of an incident that drew more than 500 complaints to the BBC from people insisting that cheering when a rival fell over was not exhibiting what might be termed Reithian values. “And it’s not something I’d ever change.”

Now the effervescent 28-year-old – who grew up in that hardly renowned winter sports area of Farnborough in south-east London – can be seen in a new and unexpected venture: fronting a documentary about this year’s Pyongyang Marathon in North Korea. Except she was not just presenting this fascinating insight into a closed country. She competed in the race, the first time she had run 26.2 miles.

“I just wasn’t used to running,” Fuller explains when we meet in a cafe in west London. “Snowboarding training was all about explosive plyometric work. I think the furthest I’d ever run before I did this was 5k. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone.” But that was precisely what she was looking to do.

On her return from the Winter Olympics in 2018, she had decided to step away from full-time snowboarding for a year. She had been scooting backwards down vertiginous slopes almost constantly since she was 16, and felt she needed time to pursue other interests (indeed, she has yet to decide whether she will re-enter the fray for 2022).

Invited by her sponsors to watch the London Marathon in April 2018, Fuller found herself seduced into the idea of taking part. So she and her mother decided to enter the 2019 race. Though she needed to put in some training.

“Actually, I fell in love with running,” she confesses, no more than a year after buying her first pair of running shoes. “I love the fact it is free and you can do it anywhere. And I discovered that it is the most efficient tool for improving everything: mental resilience, mindset, physical stability.”

This January, after she had been in Japan snowboarding, Fuller posted a picture on social media of her out for a training run ahead of London. She did not expect anything more than a couple of likes. But then she got a call from a documentary maker at the Olympic Channel, who had a proposition. He had been working for three years on gaining permission to shoot something about the Pyongyang Marathon. And he wanted an Olympian to front it. But they had to run it. He had noticed she was in training for London, so would she be interested? There was one caveat: Pyongyang was scheduled to take place just 10 days before London.

“So here I was, having never run anything close to a marathon distance, about to do two in ten days. What could go wrong?” she says.

In April, she set off, via Beijing, to a country few of us know anything about, beyond its oddly tonsured dictator, President Trump’s friend Kim Jong-un. The film details her journey, arriving a week before the race into a country unlike any she had ever visited.

“The first thing I noticed was there were no cars,” she recalls. “There are long straight roads that are empty except for people walking along the side. Our guide told us they were walking because they wanted to keep the air clean. The truth is, no one has a car. The biggest shock, though, was how little colour there was. Everything is very grey and brown. The only colour was in propaganda artwork.” This looks the oddest of places on the film. Not least because everywhere Fuller went to shoot – the hotel, the ice rink, the zoo – was empty.

Well, almost everywhere. Because of the Olympic connection, doors were opened to her that normally remain closed to Westerners with cameras. This is a country that respects Olympians. Especially those who have won medals for the country. In the film, Fuller meets the weightlifter who won gold in London in 2012, and the identical twin marathon runners so conjoined that they invariably hold hands across the finish line.

“We went to athletes’ homes, saw how they trained,” she recalls. “They are the elite. They are treated very well, far better than normal people.”

This, though, is not a country with a tradition of mass participation running. The 2019 marathon featured only 1,100 runners, of whom 900 came from overseas. This, Fuller discovered, is the peak of the North Korean tourist season. But the marathon newbie had no delusions about her chances of winning.

“I’ve spent the last 12 years of my life competing to win,” she says. “I found it really refreshing not trying to.” Once the runners had left the country’s main sports stadium (where the race began in front of thousands of spectators engaged in choreographed cheering), the route took her into parts of Pyongyang normally well away from the tourist gaze.

“We went past all the buildings they want you to see, through the main square, the parliamentary area, but eventually you head out into farmland. There are no spectators, nobody hands you jelly babies. I was followed by the car with the film crew in it, otherwise I would have been pretty much alone.”

But Fuller completed the race, on the film looking fresh and bouncing as she runs back into the stadium.

“I am so proud of the documentary,” she says. “It is a true testament to the power of sport, how it humanises the country. That’s why sport is so important: it’s a diplomatic tool for breaking down barriers.”

And if you want further evidence of the power of sport, 10 days later this marathon newbie was completing London with her mother.

“Running in North Korea” can be seen on www.olympicchannel.com