Speed skating news - Elise Christie confirms she won’t compete until 2020 in emotional message

Christie has been open about her battle with anxiety and depression, revealing that her mental illness was so crippling that she resorted to self-harm after a tough 2018 Winter Olympics.

In a message posted on Tuesday evening Christie confirmed that she would not race until January 2020 “unfortunately due to ill health for the most part.”

Christie said she was “disappointed in myself for not being able to do more, not being able to push harder through it and frankly, I’m disappointed in my body for being this weak.”

The 29-year-old, who fell in the 500m final and 1,500 semi-finals in Pyeongchang, also wrote “There’s only a few times in my life in which I’ve felt a complete failure... and going into 2019 after a horrific experience through self harm at the latter end of 2018, I had told myself this would be a better year...

“I weaned off the medication, stopped self harming and really started to move forward, moved myself out of the ‘darkness’, but I’ve been met the other side of the darkness by probably the most challenging and deflating years of my life.”

The 2017 Short Track world champion will now be aiming to make her return in 2020 with a few key dates early in the year.

The Four Continents Short Track Championships and the European Championships both take place in January before World Cup meets at Dresden and Dordrecht in early February.