History

I am a profession skier competing in the Freestyle event of “Ski Cross”. After my fifth season, I am now ranked 7th in the world leading into the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games which will be held in February 2010. I grow up in Australia in Sydney's Northern Beaches. My parents were big recreational skiers so they started me skiing at the age of 4 at Perisher.

At the age of 6, I started going on bus weekends with a ski club (Southern Alps Ski Club) where I was selected to join some other good young skiers on a race camp week. I then joined up with Perisher Race Club at the age of 10 after a coach saw me skiing through their GS course! I won my first national Alpine event at 12 which then got me a scholarship to compete and train over in Europe representing Australia. I never realised what Alpine skiing was all about until I got to Europe and saw what a great sport it was. From then on all I wanted to do was to be an Alpine World Cup skier!!

I pursued my career in Alpine skiing for 14 years competing in Europa Cups, World Cups, 2 x World Championships and an Olympic Games in Salt Lake City 2002 where I finished 9th in the Combined event, reaching my goal which was to place in the top 10.

I retired from Alpine skiing mid season in January 2003 due to lack of support and funding. It was the toughest decision I had ever had to make and a really upsetting time for me because there was so much more that I wanted to do with my skiing career. Once I got past that, I lived like normal people do in Sydney with a 9am to 5pm job!!

It took me a long time to get use to working 9-5! I found it hard to find time to do things that I wanted to do. It was also hard getting used to being in the one spot for more then 2 months at a time. Although, it did have some great advantages, I got to have my very first full summer in 14 years! I was in Sydney for 18 months when I started to get itchy feet! I guess what it came down to was that I just wasn’t ready to retire from skiing. I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I wanted to try my luck at the more extreme side to skiing... Ski Cross.

Now that I had tasted the real world, it was time for me to go back to what I really loved. I’ve always been interested in Ski Cross but when I retired, I just wasn’t ready to take it on. I watched the Ski Cross World Cups on TV over summer and really thought about getting into it. I took off over to Europe and joined up with the Swiss Ski Cross team and they showed me the ropes.

I was quite successful for my first year, ending the season being ranked 12th.

My best ranking so far was in 2007-2008 season where I finished 5th on the world cup overall. This past season (2008-2009), I was a little disappointed. I had a few technical issues with coming out of my bindings so I missed 5 out of 10 world cup results because of it. We have now fixed the problem and I’m looking forward to the next northern winter leading into the Games.