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

The Geoff Henke Olympic Winter Training Centre opened almost five years ago and is a marvel of Australian sporting ingenuity. Its core feature is a 37-metre steel tower leading into a swimming pool, featuring seven different ramps that enable freestyle skiers to train without having to travel to the other side of the world – and without exposing their bodies to the unforgiving landing pad that is hard snow. Or the muddy, frog-infested dam on Melbourne’s outskirts at Lilydale, which for years was the country’s only alternative.

There are other ramps like it around the world, but this is the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, enabling year-round practice for elite athletes and an otherwise impossible talent identification platform to feed Australia’s thriving pipeline. Even the United States is planning to bring out its best freeskiers to train in Brisbane.

That medals have followed is not a happy accident, but the culmination of a long-term plan – one that has systematically dismantled Australia’s obvious disadvantages in winter sport and replaced what could have been easy excuses with sustained success.

“We’re quietly chuffed that what we thought we saw in the data, and what we knew about the culture of that program, has produced what we thought,” said Matti Clements, an AIS director.

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

“And I think the other cool bit is 54 per cent of the team are newbies, first-time Olympians – that shows a real pathway, I think, for future Games as well. I think the Australian public should have quiet expectations that this is going to keep going in this direction.”

To properly understand how all this has happened, and how it can continue, it’s helpful to briefly strain the alphabet soup of acronyms involved and identify which organisation is responsible for what. Somehow, they all appear 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, that number was $37.5 million.

The ASC also owns and operates the AIS, which delivers that money in different ways, including athlete development, infrastructure such as the Henke ramp, teams of engineers based in Canberra who work on bespoke equipment, and the AIS European Training Centre in Varese, on a lake in Italy’s north, a little slice of home where 225 athletes stayed between January 2022 and last month, using the facilities to break up long trips back to Australia and refuel their bodies mid-season.

“We live in a country that’s got 12 to 14 weeks of snow a year, compared to European countries that have got five to six months of snow,” Clements said.

‘If we want to keep bringing home medals in this discipline, we have to match [other countries] when it comes to facilities.’

Scotty James, Olympian

“I think we’ve got a dozen ski resorts in Australia; Italy’s got something like 300, some astronomical number. We are the underdogs by tenfold in terms of winter sport. So in order to be competitive, you’ve got to be innovative, but you’ve also got to be smart about what you’re prioritising.”

The AOC sits at the other end of the food chain and receives the athletes when they are ready for the Olympic stage, selecting and sending teams, and working in tandem with the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia that focuses solely on high-performance in winter sports.

Then there’s Snow Australia, the national body for snow sports, which looks after everything from grassroots participation, to interschool competitions (all of Australia’s medallists at these Olympics came through that program), to domestic pathways. Snow Australia decided to dismantle its federated model in 2017 and fold all state bodies into one national entity, ruled by one board with a singular strategy – and it’s probably no coincidence that Australia’s standing in winter sport has improved since.

“That was just a game changer because it took all the politics out,” Bosco said. “You just end up with these factions that pull against each other, rather than uniting to speak with one voice to government, to their spectators, to their fans.”

Using that united voice, Snow Australia convinced the NSW government to commit more than $10 million towards building a national training centre in Jindabyne, with the balance provided by a “significant private donation” from John Hancock, son of Gina Rinehart.

The facility was a vision and more than a decade in the making before it was finally brought to life. The key feature is a world-class dry slope airbag that enables snowboarders and freeskiers to try out their tricks risk-free, not unlike the Henke water ramp.

“Half these kids that are here wouldn’t even be here if they hadn’t had that airbag to train with,” Bosco said.

“We are most competitive in the sports that can be trained well off snow. Wherever an airbag and those sorts of things are important, then that’s where we can be competitive – aerials, moguls, all those things.

“Twenty years ago – that was when I was first starting to come into it – we sat back and said, what can we do to improve the sport? Infrastructure was way, way down [the list]; missing, totally missing. Everyone wanted to build this water ramp, and we had five or six attempts at it; all failed.

“Eventually, we finally got the Henke ramp up and running, and then this opportunity came up.”

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

Instead, in defiance of our climate, we have methodically built our own winter.

So, what now? How does Australia’s Olympic momentum keep rolling? How does the next giant thing get built? How do our snowboarders, for example, keep pace with the spectacular contingent of Japanese stars who are dominating their sport?

“For us to keep up in the next four years, we need to match them every step,” said Scotty James. “That’s the same in any sport. And that’s what we have to do as a country. If we want to keep bringing home medals in this discipline, we have to match them when it comes to facilities.”

Those conversations have already begun.

Snow Australia has asked all the disciplines that fall under its umbrella to submit 10-year plans, to define what success looks like at the end of that period, and what resources and infrastructure will be required to get there. If their proposals stack up, they’ll be backed in.

“If I want to start planning to have a medal in a sport that barely exists now, like skimo [ski mountaineering] … there’s no point saying I’m going to win one tomorrow,” Bosco said. “The athletes that are going to be winning those medals are probably eight years old right now.”

Decisions on how taxpayer money will be spent on the next four-year cycle, ahead of the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps, will be reached in coming months.

The AIS is “unashamedly” in the business of high performance, Clements said, which means tough calls will be made.

“We do not have endless pits of money,” she said.

“We can’t fund everything, and we do not fund everything. We have to make decisions because if we give $5 to one sport, one high-performance program, that $5 is coming off another. If you fund everything at $5, you’ll get beige.”

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