In many ways Australia is punching above its weight on the world stage in winter sports. Our sports men and women have long enjoyed considerable success and those responsible for developing the winter sports program are doing their best to keep us to the fore, as BRAD WORRALL reports.
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STEVE Lee was two when he was first strapped onto a set of skis.
In the words of world renowned snowsport adventurer Glen Plake, he is a natural born skier — someone who can’t remember learning the craft, someone for whom skiing was like learning to walk — just something they did.
Lee went to three Olympics and was just the second of three Australians to claim victory on the Alpine World Cup circuit.
At one stage he was ranked 13th in the world, but he bristles if you suggest Australians are at a disadvantage in winter sports.
Lee admitted the size of the industry and its resorts was limiting but he doesn’t see it as an impediment to success on the world stage.
“I certainly don’t think it is harder for us because of our winter,” he said.
“In some ways the world cup circuit suits Australians, in the northern hemisphere summer we are back home training and when it comes to the racing season they need to pack their bags and go on the road — our skiers are seasoned travellers.
“When I started to race in world cups I found there was some advantage in being from the southern hemisphere.
“On average we have 100-plus ski days each season and that is about the extent of a season anywhere in the world, at least that is the limit for kids skiing in most of Europe and the US.
“Australians in general are good skiers — just recreationally, you can spot an Australian on an international ski field, they standout.
“And our facilities stack up pretty well against the best in the world.”
Lee is not alone as a product of the endless snowsport production line in the Kiewa and Ovens valleys.
Last January was the 50th anniversary of Australia’s greatest winter sports tragedy, when Myrtleford’s 19-year-old skier Ross Milne was killed in practice for the downhill at the winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
Mount Beauty’s Adrian Costa was one of four brothers to ski moguls for Australia and carried the flag at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games — the last of his four Olympics.
More recently Britteny Cox was the youngest athlete at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
At 15 years of age, Cox was also Australia’s youngest Winter Olympian since Aileen Nash, 14, competed in figure skating in 1960.
Cox finished just out of the medals in Sochi at her second Olympics at just 19.
Just last week Sochi downhiller and former Porepunkah girl Greta Small made light work of the giant slalom and slalom FIS races at Mount Hotham.
Cross country winter Olympians are almost exclusively from the upper end of the valleys.
This year at Sochi, Esther Bottomley became the first Australian woman to compete at three Olympic Games.
Lee learnt to ski as a two-year-old, by the age of four able to access most of the mountain.
“Obviously growing up at Falls Creek made me a better skier,” he said.
“The more you ski as a youngster the better you are going to be and of course there is the marker referred to in any sport, the need to have at least 10,000 hours of training or experience to compete at the elite level.
“That’s a fair whack of time and something you are not really going to get if you have to travel up and down the hill each day.”
But Australian cross country ski manager at Sochi Finn Marsland said there are no hard and fast rule on the skinny skis.
“Some in the current national squad started as young as three or four and then you have Paul Murray who was 13 or 14 when he first tried cross country and went to the Torino Olympics nine years later,” he said.
“But realistically if you come into the sport any later than early teens you will struggle to pick up the technical skills, the feel for the snow and the combination of dynamic balance and body awareness needed to compete at the elite level.”
Marsland said a love of the sport rather than riches drove cross country skiers.
“You have to love the sport because you’re not going to get rich from being a cross country skier,” he said.
“Most of the racing is overseas and a yearly training program will be somewhere between 600 and 800 hours on skis, bikes or running.
“That doesn’t include recovery sessions, stretching and other demands of training.
“But what is in our favour in Australia is the summer school holidays coincide with the major races overseas.
“It means that if you are at school or uni you can pack the bags and spend the 10 weeks in Europe competing against the best, and you have to do that if you are racing at an elite level.”
Falls Creek ski instructor Tim Creak said they limit their kids’ school to three-year-olds.
He said it’s part dynamics, part practicality.
“Put simply they need to be toilet-trained and any younger than that they can’t get through the rigours of a morning’s skiing,” Creak said.
“Some 2-2½-year-olds might be able to do it but in the daily program we start at 3.
“Anyone at age 5 or 6 can do a full day’s skiing and can even go back-to-back but they will sleep very well.
“I used to work in a restaurant at night and you saw some kids curled up in the corner after a day on the slopes, totally exhausted.”
Creak said learning had to be tailored to the individual no matter how young.
“If you start with a lesson you get expert tutelage, you get started the right way,” he said.
“We have instructors trained in how people learn, how different ages learn.
“Just because you are an intermediate skier doesn’t mean the lessons you get can be transferred to your kids.
“All the ski instructors here go through extensive training so that they can tailor the message for the individual and where they are up to in their skiing.
“There really is no substitute for professional teaching if you want to ski or snowboard.”