In the space of one minute, described by Carina Evans as “exhilarating, amazing, incredible but very scary”, history was made and a 90-year tradition was brought to a sudden halt.

Mrs Evans, a 41-year-old army reservist and mother-of-two from Oxfordshire, became the first woman to descend the iconic Cresta Run in Switzerland since a ban on females was lifted last year by the St Moritz Tobogganing Club (SMTC).

Built during the 1870s from natural ice, the Cresta Run remains the most famous and feared toboggan track in the world, with riders going down head first and using only rakes on the end of their boots to steer and brake. Speeds of more than 80 miles per hour are reached and the most recent of five fatalities on the run was only in 2017.

Mrs Evans, though, had been preparing for this moment for much of the past two decades. Her father, the late Lieutenant-Colonel Digby Willoughby, was one of a two-man bobsleigh team that broke the world record in 1961 and was later SMTC chief executive for 24 years.