Anna Asheshov

Anna Asheshov was the daughter of a naturalised Russian and an English mother. Both of her parents were doctors, and her father was a bacteriologist who worked on preventative medicine. The family lived in Canada during World War II, and in 1948 they moved to England and Anna attended Malvern College Boarding School.

Asheshov started skiing from the age of ten on family skiing holidays and took up the sport competitively when she was 16. She represented Great Britain for the first time in 1960 and was a reserve for the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics that year. Asheshov was runner-up to Wendy Farrington in the 1962 British Women´s ski championship and won the women´s downhill title in the second edition of the Commonwealth Winter Games at Sankt Moritz. The following year Asheshov won the British title and then, in 1964, made her Olympic début at Innsbruck when she finished 38th in the downhill. As part of her regime to maintain her fitness level, Asheshov used to train with Eastbourne and Whitehawk football clubs, close to her home near Brighton.

In 1970 Asheshov was part of the three-person crew on Atlantic rower John Ridgway´s expedition to the Amazon. It was the first navigation of the Amazon from source to mouth. A few years later, Asheshov organised her own expedition to Peru (where her brother Nick lived) and later wrote about it in the book “The Gold in the River: A Journey in the Jungles of Peru”. Being adventurous, she also tried her hand at rally driving with another fellow former Olympic skier, Gina Hathorn, in 1975. By profession Asheshov was a fashion consultant.