Australia’s winter athletes try Olympics on for size
Melissa Woods |
Australia is on track for its biggest Winter Olympics medal yield in Italy next year as moguls champion Jakara Anthony looks to be the first athlete to win successive golds.
Australia clinched a record four medals at the last Games in Beijing in 2022 but recent world cup performances across the board have the team primed to eclipse that in the Milan-Cortina showcase next February.
Most of the country’s winter elite athletes gathered in Melbourne on Thursday for a team orientation and to be fitted for their Olympic kit.
Chef de mission Alisa Camplin said 60 athletes were predicted to make the final selection, which would match Australia’s largest ever Winter OIympics team, sent to Sochi in 2014.
There Australia won three medals but the forecast for Milan-Cortina is even brighter with the country a genuine chance to double that haul.
As well as Anthony defending her Olympic crown, the leading lights include snowboarder Scotty James, who is the reigning world champion, while aerial skier Laura Peel won five world cup rounds to take home the crystal globe.
Camplin didn’t want to put a figure on a medal target but said that results in many disciplines across the last season had been promising.
“I don’t really have expectations because it’s not my dream, my dream is that we have as many satisfied athletes at the end of the Olympics,” Camplin said.
“And if every one of them achieves their personal best, that could mean some pretty great things.
“Certainly the season that’s just gone past, we’ve had outstanding results … year-on-year in more sports, more people are showing up for themselves, getting top 10, top five, top three so we feel really optimistic about where the team’s at.”
In Beijing, Anthony became the country’s first female mogul gold medallist, breaking a 12-year drought since an Australian last topped the podium at the Winter Games.
Aerial skier Camplin won gold in Salt Lake City in 2002 and then backed up to win bronze four years later in Turin.
She said it was a tough task to defend an Olympic title.
“I can only speak from personal experience – it’s really hard to have that target on your back and try and defend,” Camplin said.
“Jakara just wants to go out and be the best athlete she can be and I hope the force of the nation will appreciate the vulnerability of her pushing those new frontiers and just having a go.”
Anthony isn’t thinking about the next Olympics just yet after she missed most of the international season, including the 2025 world championships in St Moritz, after fracturing her collarbone last December in a training fall.
Taking time to recover fully from the injury, the 26-year-old was back skiing in March and said she came close to competing in Switzerland but decided she wasn’t quite ready.
“That was my first time getting back on snow, just that week before so we were just planning on seeing where things got to and making the call at the time,” Anthony told AAP.
“It was just the time off snow – I hadn’t skied for three months and I’d only had a few days on snow prior to that, that was the main factor.
“But it was good to tick that box off, to get back on snow, and I was really happy with the outcome of the whole rehab process.”
AAP
