Geoff arranged an appointment with my parents and came to my house with a thoughtful and detailed plan for my future. His professionalism and reputation sealed the deal and I was signed up. For the next two years, I would spend every snowy weekend at Buller, learning how to be an aerial skier.
I was on my way and I couldn’t be more delighted. At last there was someone in my corner who could see where I was coming from and was willing to back me. Once I’d been recruited, Geoff wasn’t really a part of my day-to-day training but he did oversee my performance plan and program. His support has always played a massive part in my confidence as an athlete. His friendship has also been a huge feature of my life and we still speak on the phone on a monthly basis.
From the outside, aerial skiing looks pretty terrifying. Basically, you ski really fast, launch yourself off a four-metre steep jump, execute somersaults with twists in the air and hope that you land safely on your skis. Anything can happen up there. It’s a leap into the unknown. Flipping and twisting at the height of a three-storey building would scare most people, but not me! One major advantage I had was that my spatial awareness is acute; it’s like a sixth sense. When I was a kid doing acrobatics and trampolining, I didn’t feel fear and I never got seriously injured. Sure, I ended up on the trampoline springs many times, but I’ve always been comfortable taking risks.
Geoff once explained to me how he spots potential aerial ski champions. He says, ‘To be a champion aerial skier, you need to be the right colour.’ He said that if he asked ten sixteen-year-olds to somersault off a ten-metre diving board, most would turn green. They would be green around the gills, feeling sick to the stomach with fear and absolute worry about the height. He said that I was the right ‘colour’ because I would be thrilled and energised by the risk. He says a risky sport isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was clear to him from the start that it was definitely mine.
To become an aerial skier, you need to be three things: acrobatic, competitive and crazy.
Before I was recruited, I had never even seen aerial skiing. In 1989, when I started, the highest level an aerial skier could reach was winning at the world championships, which were held every two years. That was the pinnacle. Aerial skiing was still very much an underdeveloped sport, and it had yet to become part of the Winter Olympics.
Aerial skiers need to be able to ski fast. You need to be skiing at about 42 kilometres per hour to manage a basic single somersault on skis. When you are ready to move on to performing double somersaults, you will need to ski around 56 kilometres per hour. Then things get really fast, when you are skilled enough to train and compete triple somersaults; a speed reading on a radar gun of 70 kilometres per hour will give you enough height for a triple-twisting triple somersault.
Speed was never the thrill for me. Height was always my thing. When I saw someone somersault on snow for the first time, I couldn’t believe it. I thought the only place you could somersault was on a trampoline or on your parents’ bed. I was happy to somersault off anything – a steep sand hill, off the side of a boat into water, you name it – so when Geoff said that I could somersault on snow, it was a dream come true. Up in the air is where my confidence lies, and aerial skiing gave me plenty of height.
There were many challenges facing me when I started. I was in an elite ski program full of teenagers who had been going to the snow every weekend of every winter since they could stand. I had a strong heart and no fear, but I also had few skills and little experience. I was a misfit.
I was also doing Year 11 and 12 at school over this time, so there was a fair bit of pressure to keep up with the schoolwork. At Mount Buller on the weekends, I would train during the day and study in the evenings, so there wasn’t any après ski partying for me. At home, I didn’t have much of a social life, either. House rules continued to be limiting and I didn’t have a big bunch of friends. At school, I had always had the plan of one day becoming a vet and working with animals, but after I met Geoff, I was inspired by a new dream: a dream of being a world-champion aerial skier.
Unfortunately, my two years in the program involved very mild winters with low snowfall. Because of this, my skiing didn’t improve much and training was often cancelled. When I was there, I worked really hard but my greatest hurdle was that I was still a very bad skier. Sometimes I was so slow going down a run that it would have been quicker to take my skis off and walk it.
Another big problem was that I became a target for bullying. One of my teammates felt threatened by the interest that had been shown in my progress and she took it out on me. I guess she figured she could force the weak one out. My mum knew what was going on and she couldn’t believe that I kept going back to it every weekend. Someone just wouldn’t get away with that level of bullying now; she would be in court facing charges. But I’d made a commitment and I stuck to it.
Training in the early days meant full weekends: skiing at Mount Buller, trampolining in nearby Mansfield or somersaulting into a dam to practise jumps. Dad was probably very relieved to get me out of the house. I had always had far too much energy for him, and the training seemed a great solution. He wasn’t expecting me to latch on to the program and commit myself to becoming a world champion. He couldn’t see it happening, and because he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t believe it
I am not sure that Mum could see it either, but that didn’t stop her standing behind me and driving me back and forth to training each weekend – a six-hour round trip. She even took money out of her housekeeping budget for my ski gear. Mum saw that I loved it and that was enough for her. She would have been equally fine with me being a nanny or a cleaner or a corporate high-flier, as long as I was happy, healthy and stable. That’s all she cared about.
3
Jumping Jac
That day a Swiss girl called Evelyn Leu watched me become the first woman to execute a triple-twisting triple somersault on snow.
When I skied up to her afterwards she said, ‘That looked easy.’
‘It was,’ I replied.
The next year she did it.
WAY BACK AT THE BEGINNING, when Geoff first approached me about becoming an aerial skier, we formulated a plan together. According to his calculations and based on his experience, I would be world champion in ten years’ time. That’s a long time to wait when you’re a teenager!
My level of skill and the fact that I couldn’t ski meant that I was probably embarking on something that I had no business trying to do. But that ten-year plan was a golden beacon that kept me going. I was convinced that if I stuck to The Plan and worked hard through all the challenges and drawbacks, I would get there in the end.
I’m not sure when it was, but I made a decision not to go on to university after completing Year 12. I would rather stay committed to the plan and the dream of being the world’s best aerial skier by the time I was twenty-six.
My sisters and I had been good students and we had done well at school. As a reward, my father paid for us to go on our own little schoolies trip to the USA – but unlike on others’ schoolies trips, our brother and parents would come along too. Dad agreed to let me stay on longer in the USA and do an accelerated ski program in Colorado.
We left for the USA the day after my final exam, and we had a fantastic time seeing all the sights, visiting Disneyland and exploring New York City. Never one for family holidays, Dad went home after a couple of weeks, and then my brother and sisters went home after another six weeks, when university started. Mum stayed on with me until March, and the intensive ski program finally turned me from a snowplough into a decent skier. It was a huge boost to my confidence.
When we arrived back in Australia in March 1991, I knew I would need to get a job at Mount Buller for the winter to fund my training. I would be spending an entire winter up on the mountain. Here is where fortune smiled upon me once again. I needed a degree of flexibility so that I could ski and train during the days. One of the first places I tried to find work was at the local Mount Buller supermarket
. Dick and Loretta Armitage took me on as a ‘checkout chick’ and they became two of the most influential people – other than Geoff – in starting my career.
I was hopeless on the supermarket till. Anyone else would have probably fired me in the first week. There was no scanning of items back then, just two manual cash registers to key in the prices and work out change. Shoppers would crowd in at the end of the day to get their groceries and everyone would be in a hurry. I was never that great at arithmetic and I’d get really stressed and mess up the payments so that eventually someone else would have to take over. What use was a checkout chick who couldn’t do the checkout?
Still, Dick and Loretta kept me on and switched me to bagging the items for shoppers. I became a super-fast and efficient packer. I was also pretty good at friendly banter, and quite by accident an excellent opportunity presented itself.
Determined to raise extra money to help me get back overseas for the competition season, I had approached Mount Buller management to sponsor me. They donated a season’s pass worth $800 and I used it as the top prize for a raffle. Every day at the supermarket as I packed up purchases, I would chat to the customers about how I was raising money to train and compete overseas. Then I’d end with: ‘Would you be interested in buying a raffle ticket?’
People were very supportive and incredibly generous. Australians love a battler, and I was just starting out and had heaps of energy and enthusiasm. If I’d been working the till, I simply wouldn’t have been in the position to sell the tickets, but it became my main platform and Dick and Loretta were behind me all the way.
That USA trip before my winter in Mount Buller plus a side trip to Japan for two World Cup events were the only trips that my father ever financed. At Mount Buller, I saved as much as I could from my wages but the real money came from those raffles. In one year, I raised $17,000!
In addition, Dick and Loretta would regularly slip a little extra in my pay packet and they’d give me free groceries from the shop. Sometimes, if business was slow, especially at the end of the snow season, they would supplement my income by paying me to take their grandchildren skiing – anything to help me realise my dream. As if that wasn’t enough, they turned the little shop into a bit of a Jacqui Cooper shrine! Photos and newspaper articles were plastered all over the walls and when I was away competing they’d keep the support running high: ‘Did you hear what Jacqui won on the weekend?’
This is how the pattern went for three years: I’d hit the international World Cup circuit from November to March, come home to Melbourne for a few months and work on my fitness and train by water jumping (somersaulting into the safety of water), then it was back to Buller for the winter, where I would train and raise the money to go back overseas. Needless to say, any ideas about university were put permanently on the back burner.
Gradually, as my competition results improved, I began to get more attention and started to receive some funding and scholarships. Prize money also helped to build up the coffers, until finally by 1994 I was able to relocate to Utah for six-month stints for dryland training during the northern hemisphere summer, and then I would spend another four months zigzagging my way around the world, moving from one event to another. At long last, I was independent and I could concentrate all of my energies on fulfilling The Plan and becoming a world champion.
None of it came easy, though. I was working incredibly hard and steadily increasing my skill level, but it wasn’t enough. About six years into The Plan, I was finishing fourth, fifth and sixth in competitions, but I was finding it a huge struggle to break into the top three. I’d watch athletes who were at a lower skill level than me win medals and I’d think, ‘Why not me?’ I was doing more than anyone. I was hungrier than anyone. I trained more, I was more dedicated and it still wasn’t happening.
And then finally, in 1997, eight years after meeting Geoff, I won my first World Cup medal, and the next week I won another, and then another. Within six months, I was number two in the world. Something had just clicked and it was all coming together. I still say that winning my first medal was the hardest; once I won my first medal, I knew that everything I had been working towards and dreaming of could happen. Geoff’s vision was now my reality.
Aerial skiing has huge highs and devastating lows. Every time I fell down, I quickly picked myself up and got back to it. I got back on track and back to believing in me and my dream. That’s what I did every day. Every single day, I believed in me.
In March 1999, I stood at the top of the in-run at a small ski resort in Switzerland, not far from popular Interlaken. I was about to take my jumps at the world championships. It had now been ten years of wishing, willing and wanting a dream that only Geoff and I could see. I was moments away from fulfilling a commitment I had made to Geoff and, more importantly, fulfilling a commitment that I had made to ten pieces of paper – The Plan – when I was a skinny sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. I stood at the top of the jumps, confident, prepared and focused. Everything that I had done in the past ten years had prepared me for that moment. I had a ‘toolbox’, with all the skills needed to be world number 1. It was now up to me to perform. With Geoff standing in the crowd, I landed two multiple-twisting triple somersaults, and moments later I was announced as the new world champion. That day was the greatest day of my life. To share the moment and the achievement right then and there with the very man who had recruited me, guided me and believed in me was even sweeter than the gold medal. He had put his faith in a gangly, awkward teenager who couldn’t even ski and ten years later she was champion of the world. That victory taught me that with the right team and circumstances, and with an unshakable belief in what my body and my will are capable of, I can do anything that I set my mind to.
So I’d made it – I’d reached my goal. For some, that would have been enough: game over. To me, retiring at that stage would have been the same as taking years to build a business, investing in it heavily, having one great year with excellent returns, and then giving it all away. Besides, I was completely hooked. I was head over heels in love with what I was doing. I was pushing for another ten years.
Maybe it was greedy to want more, but the feeling of winning after all those years of intensive training was indescribable. I just wanted to go on and win another, and another, and another …
Despite the love affair with aerial skiing, there was a downside to all that globetrotting. In my quest to become a serious World Cup athlete, I had to remove myself from family and friends at home and make connections with people I met overseas. Friends became family, but even those relationships were difficult to engineer when I spent so much of my time in training. It was hard to develop genuine, close relationships.
A typical season consisted of roughly eight to twelve competition events, all in different countries. Every week I was travelling to a new location and the rest of the time I was training, either somewhere in the Arctic Circle, like Finland, or somewhere in the USA, Canada or Switzerland – basically wherever my current coach was located.
It was a bizarre gypsy-like existence. I called it the merry-go-round. Once you’re on it, you go around and around to the same places at the same time every year. The schedule is the same, the venues are the same and the competitions are the same. Not much changes. You know exactly where you’re going to be day to day and month to month, year after year. The big competitions happen at the same time in the same place every year so, for example, you always know where you’re going to spend your birthday. (For me, it was always Montreal or Deer Valley, Utah – both great places to celebrate!) Athletes get off the merry-go-round when they are injured or when they retire. While you’re on the ride, it’s fun and exhilarating, but every aspect of your life is mapped out.
All that travel sounds pretty glamorous, but you have to remember that our number one priority was training and competing, and there was little time and energy to explore our surroundings. It was hard to step away when all your focus was on an event you would be competing at in
a few days. Sightseeing can be very draining. If we got a day off, even if we were in a spectacular location, the chances were that we’d load a DVD into the laptop and hang out for the entire day. R&R is vitally important for an athlete, so you grab it when you can.
The upsides were many though; I can’t deny it. Returning to the same location year after year, I began to feel a bit like a local. It was wonderful to go back to the same stunning little Swiss village and know exactly where to get a great cup of coffee, or to stop for a layover in Chicago and know where to get the best burrito in the airport.
Sometimes you would get a block of time off and you could explore an area and get a taste for it. If I liked a place enough, I’d put it on a mental list of places to come back to later to spend more time there. Once, an event in Europe was cancelled so I took the opportunity to go down to Egypt with teammate Alisa Camplin and we had a brilliant little holiday. In China one time, I took some extra days off and went to see the Great Wall. When I was invited to a demonstration event in Korea, I seized the opportunity to experience a place I’d never been to before. And, of course, you get to see the most stunning ski resorts in the world and sample extraordinary luxury.
Even though we were all primarily focused on our sport, the social life could be fantastic. I had heaps of fun and made some lifelong friends. Entire national teams would be travelling to the different competitions, so you’d arrive at an airport at four a.m., for example, and hundreds of athletes would converge at the same time. There would be all the raucous excitement of a school excursion, with noisy reunions and the sheer buzz of us all being together in one place. Then, one by one, the teams would all peel off on their flights to the final destination. You had to feel sorry for the poor civilians booked to travel on the planes with us!
Frozen Hope Page 3
