Australian Olympic silver medallist David Morris not the ‘fifth female’ anymore

AUSTRALIA’S women’s aerial team has been so strong for so many years that rivals used to ridicule our lone male competitor David Morris.

THEY used to call him the “fifth female”.

Australia’s women’s aerial skiing team has been so strong for so many years, and our men’s team so thin, that overseas rivals used to ridicule our lone male competitor David Morris.

His rivals won’t be mocking him anymore, after Morris soared to Olympic silver at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park in the mountains high above Sochi.

Another man chewing a supersized slice of humble pie today is Geoff Lipshut, head of the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia.

After Morris claimed silver with four nerveless jumps, all of which he landed without a stumble, Lipshut admitted he had been wrong to deny Morris a place in the aerials program for so long.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I actually wasn’t the one who necessarily supported Dave initially. I made a bet with the staff that if Dave got a medal at the Olympics then I’d have to admit I was wrong.”

He was wrong, and to his credit, he admitted it.

The Morris family fought a protracted battle to have David accepted into the longstanding women’s aerials program.

It all started 10 years ago when Morris was 19 and met former aerials world champion Kirstie Marshall at an event at his local gym.

Marshall watched Morris perform some tumbling lines and asked if he’d be interested in aerial skiing.

Morris had skied since early childhood at the Victorian ski resort of Mt Buller and said he was.

Over the years, Australia’s consistently world-class aerial skiing squad had boasted just one male Olympian, Jono Sweet, who offered to coach the young Morris for nothing.

Sweet’s motivation was simple. As he told Morris’s father Shane, “I’m the only male aerial skier Australia has had. I don’t want to be the last.”

Under Sweet’s tutelage, Morris soon started achieving on the international stage. He won his first medal in an event sanctioned by skiing’s governing body, the FIS, in 2007.

But recognition from the Winter Olympic Institute took much longer to arrive.

“When you first join the aerials team you get your coaching paid for and your training facilities and accommodation paid for, but for two-and-a-half years I had none of that,” Morris recalled.

“I paid my way through training and trained with other teams, stayed on their couches and in their garages. They even helped me out with equipment.

“I’m actually quite grateful for that because it gave me a lot of connections within the sport.”

The problem for Morris was that the OWIA aerials program was set up for a women’s team but not a men’s team.

Taking Morris on board would have meant the OWIA had to spend extra money on coaches and training facilities. There would also have been issues with accommodation because of rules preventing male and female athletes rooming together.

“I don’t think they were willing to take a chance on Dave that would compromise the women’s program,” says five-time Olympian in ladies’ aerials Jacqui Cooper.

“There was resistance to the point where the coaches were told to have nothing to do with him,” adds Shane Morris.

But David’s international results kept improving to the point where his case became impossible to ignore.

Then one day, quite out of the blue, OWIA CEO Geoff Lipshut sent the Morris family an email inviting them to a meeting.

Lipshut said that “two years of persistence deserves a chance”, and spelled out a range of benchmarks that Shane Morris believes was much higher than anything any young female jumper ever had to meet.

Suffice to say David Morris met and exceeded those expectations long before Sochi.

And now he’s got that silver medal, just to really ram it home.

It’s lucky the medal is ours, not Switzerland’s or Canada’s. Shane Morris revealed after the Sochi event that rival teams had tried to poach Morris, in much the same way as mogul skier Dale Begg-Smith was enticed from Canada to Australia.

A proud Aussie, David Morris would have none of it.

Shane Morris and his wife Marg stumped up a lot of their own cash to support their son over the years.

When asked whether he had any ill-feelings towards OWIA or its chief Geoff Lipshut for making the road so tough, and what he’d say to him now, Shane handled the question with brevity and true class.

“I’d say Dave proved you wrong.”