Winter Olympics 2022: Unique jump has Jakara Anthony eyeing a mogul medal
Aussie mogul star Jakara Anthony‘s signature trick is so dangerous no other female competitor will attempt it at the Olympics.
There are some sports at the Winter Olympics where it pays to be out of control.
Mogul skiing is one of them.
Moguls is not a sport for the faint hearted because it involves skiing down a steep, icy slope that is covered in bumps.
Competitors not only need to get to the bottom quickly, but they also pull off a series of crazy tricks to impress the judges.
But to be the very best, they also need to take risks, even when it frightens the life out of them.
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“That’s definitely mogul skiing for you,” said Jakara Anthony, one of Australia’s top medal prospects at the Beijing Olympics.
“When you ride on that edge is when you’re going to do your best skiing.
“It’s a very scary place to get to, but it’s a pretty awesome feeling too when you get there.”
Life on the edge is an occupational hazard for Anthony.
Just 23, she has a fearless approach to the sport plus a new trick that she started this season and hopes will get her on the podium in China.
It is called a Cork 720 mute - a full flip with two rotations and a grab of her skis in mid-air - and is so outrageous that hardly anyone else in the world will even attempt it.
“In the women’s field, in competition right now, I am the only person,” she told News Corp.
“There are some other girls that I’ve seen do it in training, but not competed it yet. And in the men’s field there’s a couple of men that do it as well.”
If she lands the jump at the Olympics it’ll go a long way to getting her on the medal podium as it scores so highly because of the extra degree of difficulty.
But that’s not the only thing she has to nail because the judges also take into account speed and style on the turns.
That’s easier said than done under the suffocating pressure of the Olympics but if her first appearance at the big show is any guide, she’ll cope just fine.
Anthony was still a teenager when she competed at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics but took it all in her stride to finish fourth, just missing out on a medal.
“I was so excited to get that fourth place. That was a personal best result for me at the time so I wasn’t disappointed at all,” she said.
“There was no doubt about it that I wanted to go to another Games after that.
“Obviously, it’s been four years so I’ve done a lot of training, physically and mentally, and I’ve learnt a lot about myself.
“The main thing I’ve learnt is that I am capable of a lot more than I give myself credit for so I just need to really let myself live up to that.”
Anthony has been doing that and more since the last Olympics.
She won the silver medal at the last world championships and has placed in the top three in six of this season’s seven World Cup events and can’t wait to get started in Beijing.
“It’s such a unifying thing, the Olympics,” she said.
“It’s so special to be a part of it. It is everything it’s made up to be.
“Just having the opportunity to represent Australia and just show the world mogul skiing is.
“The situation with Covid the last couple of years, it’s been tough for everyone.
“It’s really challenged our team a lot and I’m really proud of the way we’ve been able to tackle a lot of the things that have been thrown at us and overcome it and be doing such a great job this season.”
WHY DROPPING MUM COULD EARN CURLING STAR GOLD
It wasn’t until mixed doubles was added to the curling program for the Winter Olympics that Dean Hewitt started to think about splitting with his long time playing partner.
But there was a hitch.
Curling in Australia is very much a family sport and Hewitt’s teammate just happened to be his own mother.
A champion curler herself, Lynn Hewitt had taught her son everything she knew about the game she learned growing up in Canada, before she married Steve Hewitt and moved to Victoria.
Steve represented Australia at the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics when curling was a demonstration sport so it was only natural that Dean joined his parents in sliding and sweeping rocks from an early age.
Together with his mother, they represented Australia in mixed doubles in two world championships, finishing 18th both times, but qualifying for the Olympics meant being in the top 10 so something had to change.
“It was the end of 2017, and I wanted to make a run for the next Olympics and worked out that mum would have been about 63-years-old,” Dean told News Corp.
“So we said, I think it’s probably time to look for a younger team and develop a younger team going forward to both this Olympics and the next.
“It was definitely a mutual thing. We were both in agreement.”
Dean had already had a new partner in mind.
Tahli Gill was a rising star in Queensland curling, learning the game from her mother Lyn, who also represented Australia.
She was also thinking about the Olympics when Dean approached her and asked if they could join forces.
“We both started playing in juniors at pretty much the same time, so we knew each other and had that connection,” she said.
“A few years later, we both sort of met up again at mixed doubles nationals at the time. Dean was playing with his mum and I was playing with a different partner then Dean called me.”
The pair were an instant success, finishing fourth at the 2019 world championships, giving them the belief they could make it to the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
Then Covid came along and everything went haywire, throwing all the qualifying into chaos.
With not a single proper curling rink in Australia, they were already up against it but when they arrived at last year’s qualifying event, they were faced with a daunting task, to win seven matches in a row.
They won their first six but in the last, against the higher ranked South Korean, it all came down to the last throw, which Gill nailed to win the match and secure Australia’s first spot in curling at the Olympics.
Now, with their spot assured, they’re not putting any limits on what happens next.
“We’re going in as the underdogs for sure,” Gill said.
“I think we’re the only country in the history of curling at the Olympics not to have a facility but we’re going to give it our absolute best to try and knock off as many top teams that we can out there.
“We’ve done it before and hopefully we can do it again. The lack of facilities back in Australia doesn’t mean we can’t train and put in as much effort as we can.”
Only 10 teams made the cut for Beijing so the competition is red hot. Each team will play each other once, starting on Wednesday, two days before the Opening Ceremony, with the top four advancing to the semis with three medals up for grabs.
It’s a sport that few Australians know much about but Hewitt is convinced they will fall in love with it once they see it.
“Hopefully it does wonders for the sport in Australia because the membership is fairly low at the moment,” he said.
“It grows every Olympic year but with an Australian team now, that’ll be even bigger.
“There’s so many aspects to curling; the precision of throwing the rock, the physical side of sweeping, and the strategy involved, it’s almost like chess on ice. I think people are going to really like it.”
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