IT is hard not to feel affected by the tale of Ellie Soutter. For anyone who hasn’t been on social media these last few days, Ellie was a promising young British snowboarder who is believed to have taken her own life in remote woodland near the French resort of Les Gets last week on the occasion of her 18th birthday.

Team GB’s only medal winner from the European Youth Olympic Winter Festival in Erzurum, Turkey, she was recently selected to represent Team GB at the Junior Snowboard World Championships in New Zealand and was seemingly on course for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Instead, her funeral will take place today, her ashes being quietly scattered on Mont Chery, her favourite mountain.

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Without wanting to intrude any further on the private grief of this family, the post-script to it all was provided by her father Tony. In an interview with BBC South East, he pointed to his daughter’s history of mental health issues but suggested they had been compounded by the pressures of elite performance and high-level sport.

Ellie recently missed a flight, which had cost her the chance to go training with the GB squad. “She felt she’d let them down, felt she’d let me down,” he said. “Tragically it just takes one silly little thing like that to tip someone over the edge, because there’s a lot of pressure on children.”

It should be stated, of course, that suicide and mental illness is no less affecting when

it afflicts others who aren’t world class sportspeople of the future. It’s quite possible there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent this tragedy, but there was still something in this episode which made people pause for an instant. Do we – either wittingly or unwittingly – heap too much pressure on our young folk, or for that matter, established heroes? And what, if anything, can we do about it?

You can probably hear the counter argument right now, which runs roughly along the lines that the wealthy prima donnas of the English Premier League lead a pampered life, not a pressurised one. They aren’t exactly working down a mine, wondering whether the next pay cheque comes from to provide for their families. But the psychology of sport isn’t spoken about enough and some of Scottish sport’s great and good certainly weren’t shy about saying how the affair had affected them.

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It certainly struck a chord with Callum Skinner, a Scottish track cyclist who knows what it feels like to stand on the top step of an Olympic podium. “Athletes give everything to their sport,” said Skinner. “It can become your life, the basis of your self-worth. When it’s good, its great, when its bad you suffer. No-one is a harsher critic on us than ourselves.”

Jen McIntosh, five times a Commonwealth champion, agreed things can get out of hand. “At the end of the day it’s just sport, even at the very top,” said the shooter. “Somewhere along the way I think we lost sight of that. And I don’t just mean UK Sport or other governing bodies, or even the coaches or the support staff or team-mates. I mean everyone. The media, society, all of us . . . there’s so much pressure on athletes to succeed, so much fear of failure and all that’s associated with it.”

Bill Shankly famously spoke about football “not being a matter of life and death . . . it’s more important than that”, even if the line was delivered with a glint in his eye. Beneath that, you will get every nuance going, from youth coaches who think Under-13s should act like fully-grown professionals to those who feel youth football should be non-competitive.

I’m not exactly sure what the answer is, but I have met plenty of young sportspeople who felt suffocated by the pressure to succeed, even if their stories thankfully don’t have the tragic end which Soutter’s tale does.

Whether you are the football fan on the terracing prone to comedy overreaction at every success or failure, or on the sideline as sometimes over-eager parents kicking every ball on their children’s behalf, all of us should take a step back at times when it comes to projecting our own hopes and aspirations on to others more talented than we are.

I am reminded of a story Gary Neville once told about how even the uber competitive Sir Alex Ferguson succeeded in releasing the pressure on him ahead of Merseyside derbies against Liverpool. “What’s the worst that could happen, even if we lose?” he asked. “Well, I’ll probably go out and get a Chinese meal tonight,” mused Neville. “Exactly,” said Ferguson. “Now go out and play.”