How Australia defied its geography to become a Winter Olympics medal machine

The Geoff Henke Olympic Winter Training Center opened almost five years ago and is a marvel of Australia’s sporting creativity. Its main feature is a 37-metre steel tower leading to the swimming pool; It features seven different slopes, allowing freestyle skiers to train without having to travel to the other side of the world and subject their bodies to the brutal downhill slope of hard-packed snow. Or the muddy, frog-infested dam at Lilydale on the outskirts of Melbourne, which for years was the country’s only alternative.

There are other ramps like this around the world, but this one is the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, providing year-round training for elite athletes and providing an otherwise impossible talent-spotting platform to fuel Australia’s developing pipeline. Even the United States plans to land its best freeskiers to train in Brisbane.

The medals that followed are not a happy accident, but the culmination of a long-term plan; A plan that systematically eliminates Australia’s obvious disadvantages in winter sports and replaces easy excuses with sustainable success.

“We were quietly pleased to see that what we thought we saw in the data and what we knew about the culture of that program produced what we thought it would,” said AIS director Matti Clements.

“Are we surprised? No, are we really pleased? Absolutely.

“And I think the other great part is that 54 per cent of the team are beginners and first-time Olympians, which I think shows a real path forward for future Games. I think the Australian public should have quiet expectations that this will continue in that direction.”

To properly understand how all this happened and how it might continue, it is helpful to briefly examine the alphabet soup of relevant acronyms and determine which organization is responsible for what. Somehow they all seem to be on the same page.

The Australian Sports Commission (ASC) is the federal authority that controls high performance funding and distributes it to sports based on data, results and future medal potential; For winter sports in this four-year cycle, the figure was $37.5 million.

ASC also owns and operates the AIS, which distributes this money in different ways, including athlete development, infrastructure such as the Henke ramp, Canberra-based teams of engineers working on bespoke equipment and the AIS European Training Center in Varese, a tiny slice of home on a lake in northern Italy, where between January 2022 and last month 225 athletes used the facilities to fly back to Australia and refuel their bodies mid-season.

“We live in a country where it snows 12 to 14 weeks a year, compared to European countries that see five to six months of snow,” Clements said.

‘If we want to continue bringing medals to our country in this discipline, [other countries] As for the facilities.’

Scotty James, Olympian

“I think we have a dozen ski resorts in Australia; Italy has something like 300, which is astronomical. We’re ten times weaker in terms of winter sports. So to be competitive you have to be innovative, but you also have to be smart about what you prioritize.”

The AOC is at the other end of the food chain, accepting athletes when they are ready for the Olympic stage, selecting and sending teams and working with the Australian Olympic Winter Institute, which focuses solely on high performance in winter sports.

Then there’s Snow Australia, the national body for snow sports, which deals with everything from public participation to inter-school competitions (all of Australia’s medalists at these Olympics have gone through this program) and local trails. Snow Australia decided in 2017 to disband its federated model and bring all government bodies into a single national body led by a single board with a single strategy – and it’s probably no coincidence that Australia’s position in winter sports has improved since then.

“It was just a game changer because it took out all the politics,” Bosco said. “Instead of coming together to speak with one voice to the government, their audiences, and their fans, you end up with these groups opposing each other.”

Using this united voice, Snow Australia persuaded the NSW government to commit more than $10 million to build a national training center at Jindabyne; The remainder was provided by a “significant private donation” from Gina Rinehart’s son, John Hancock.

The facility was a vision and was under construction for over a decade before it was finally realized. Its most important feature is the premium dry slope airbag, which, unlike the Henke water ramp, allows snowboarders and freeskiers to try their tricks risk-free.

“Half the kids here wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the air cushion to train on,” Bosco said.

“We’re most competitive in sports that can be trained well in the snow. Anywhere airbags and things like that are important, then that’s where we can be competitive; aerials, giants, all that.”

“Twenty years ago – that’s when I first started this business – we sat back and said, ‘What can we do to develop the sport? The infrastructure was very, very bad.’ [the list]; missing, completely missing. Everyone wanted to build this water ramp and we tried five or six times; They all failed.

“We finally got Henke up and running and then this opportunity arose.”

Taken together, these investments form an informed model. Australia hasn’t tried to compete with the mountains of Europe or the snowfields of North America because it can’t.

Instead, we methodically built our own winter, defying our climate.

So what happens now? How does Australia’s Olympic momentum continue? How will the next giant thing be built? For example, how do our snowboarders keep up with the amazing group of Japanese stars who dominate their sport?

“We need to match them every step of the way so we can keep up with them over the next four years,” Scotty James said. “This is the same in every sport. This is what we need to do as a country. If we want to continue bringing home medals in this discipline, we need to be on par with them when it comes to facilities.”

These talks have already started.

Snow Australia asked all disciplines under its umbrella to submit 10-year plans, defining what success would look like at the end of that period and what resources and infrastructure would be required to get there. If their bids stack up, they will be supported.

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“If I want to start planning to get a medal in a sport that no longer exists, like skiing [ski mountaineering] …There’s no point in saying I’m going to win a medal tomorrow,” Bosco said. “The athletes who are going to win those medals are probably eight years old right now.”

Decisions will be made in the coming months on how taxpayers’ money will be spent over the next four years ahead of the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps.

Clements said AIS was “unashamedly” in the high-performance business, which meant tough decisions would be made.

“We don’t have infinite money,” he said.

“We can’t fund everything and we can’t fund everything. We have to make decisions because if we give $5 to one sport, a high-performance program, that $5 will come from another. If you fund everything with $5, you get beige.”

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