Every Event. Every Medal in 4K.
Watch live & on demand.
When Susie O’Neill was mentoring Josie Baff in 2021, the Australian Winter Olympics gold medallist was still in high school – wrestling with high-school dilemmas.
“It was to do with year 12 and her exams,” O’Neill recalls. “I think she might even been doing year 12 over two years. I know she was talking about schoolies; whether to go to schoolies and things like that.”
The decision to go or not to go to schoolies does not initially sound like the kind of high-performance conundrum an up-and-coming snowboarder would bounce off one of Australia’s great Olympians. Until you realise this is precisely the nature of challenge an elite athlete who has sacrificed a lot of fun teenage stuff might face.
How much can you let your hair down like an 18-year-old when you’ve just won Youth Olympics gold and your sport demands everything you have? Could a good time now spoil something better in the future?
O’Neill can’t remember if Baff ended up attending schoolies with her friends, but she did communicate the importance of “enjoying life as well”.
“Enjoy your friendships and that sort of thing, and try and work that into your sport,” she says. “You can be really driven and lose out on a lot of that stuff, but I think it’s good to still keep in contact with your friends and other things that teenagers are doing. You probably can’t do everything that they’re doing, but you can certainly do bits of it.”
Josie Baff with her 2021 mentor Susie O’Neill.
O’Neill spent a year chatting with Baff as part of the Sport Australia Hall of Fame Scholarship and Mentoring Program, the two-decade-long scheme which has so far awarded 273 scholarships to athletes across 58 sports. As a Tier 1 scholarship recipient, she received a $10,000 sporting grant and allocated a personal mentor during the build-up to her Winter Olympics debut at Beijing 2022.
Naturally, a dual Olympic swimming gold medallist did not spend her time tutoring Baff on the intricacies of snowboard cross. The whole point is to pair a young athlete with a mentor from an unrelated sport to facilitate guidance across more general areas such as the delicate juggle of life and sport, living abroad, rehab, organisation, media training and even business opportunities.
Fellow 2021 alumni, 2025 world surfing champion Molly Picklum was matched with water polo champion Debbie Watson. Marissa Williamson, the first female Indigenous Australian boxer to compete at an Olympic Games at Paris 2024, had beach volleyball Sydney 2000 gold medallist Kerri Pottharst, golfer Jed Morgan had Ricky Ponting and Paralympic long jumper Ari Gesini had George Gregan.
Cooper Woods with John Eales.Credit: Instagram
The following year, Cooper Woods – the Milano Cortina 2026 gold medal-winning moguls skier and another contributor to Australia’s most successful Winter Olympics – received the same scholarship and was mentored by rugby great John Eales.
“He’s really an outstanding young man,” Eales says. “You could tell that from the start. He was so interested in whatever you said, he would call back and always try to apply the different things you’d tell him in different ways.
“I think the most important relationship an athlete will have is with their coach; that’s what will drive the ultimate success of the athlete or not. But I found through my career, I had many different mentors in different ways – there was not one person who taught me everything. There are different people who just had that little bit of information that would help you in a small way, and the accumulation of all those can make a big difference – if you’re prepared to listen and learn from it.
“You’re speaking with people [the mentors] who’ve been there in their own way and done it. As an athlete, you’re going through different thoughts, but perhaps it helps if someone can help you clarify your thought process and bring it to life in a more practical way.”
O’Neill says the young Baff, who has just missed out on a historic second gold after teammate Adam Lambert crashed in the mixed team snowboard cross final, was already “pretty switched on” and knew what she wanted to achieve.
It was a similar case for her latest mentee, Paris 2024 diver Ellie Cole, who mainly sought advice about whether to accept a scholarship at Stanford University (they discussed the pros and cons, and she accepted).
In this sense, O’Neill believes one of the best takeaways she can offer a young athlete is simply a realisation that the best of the best – the World Cup winners, world champions and gold medallists – are also “normal people” just like them.
“I wasn’t ever involved in a formal program, but for me it was meeting athletes like Jon Sieben, because he was the guy I watched when I was 10 win the 200m butterfly in LA (1984 Games). From that point, I wanted to make the Australian team, and then four years later I was training with him on camps and thought ‘if he can do it, I can definitely do it’.
“Sometimes when you’re younger, you have this perception of people who do really well that are untouchable, but they’re still normal people.”
Like Mary T. Meagher, the American who held the women’s 200m butterfly world record for 19 years until O’Neill broke it at the Sydney 2000 Australian Olympic trials. “I thought she was a complete freak, I thought there’s no way I’d beat her record,” she says. “And same sort of thing: I met her and she was just normal. So I think it’s just normalising success in your sport.”
Most Viewed in Sport
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
