As attention shifts from Australia’s best-ever Winter Olympics to what’s next, and how to keep the athletes who helped deliver it front of mind for the general public, bright ideas like that are a must for the powers that be.
For the uninitated, the FIS World Cup – run by the international federation for skiing and snowboarding – is the sport’s official competitive circuit and Olympic qualification pathway, which also determines world rankings, and is staged across a variety of ‘stops’ in Europe, Asia and North America each winter.
X Games chief executive Jeremy Bloom and Scotty James in Aspen last month.Credit: Getty Images
The X Games, on the other hand, is a privately-owned, invitation-only showcase, founded by ESPN (who sold it a few years ago, but still broadcast it) with a much greater cultural reach. The Winter X Games have been held almost exclusively in Aspen, Colorado since 2002, with the exception of a few spin-off events in other countries.
So, what would it take to bring it to Thredbo?
For starters, a minimum of $5 million in funding just to build a proper halfpipe, according to Snow Australia president Daniel Bosco – or at least that’s what it cost a few years ago. Getting anything done is difficult because ski resorts don’t actually own the mountains they exist on, but not impossible.
“Anything is possible,” Bosco said.
“I mean, we’ve achieved a lot more in the last 10 years than probably what anyone would have backed us to do 10 years prior.
“Someone will bring us a proposal, and then we’ve got to get government investment. Trying to build stuff in the national parks is incredibly difficult. The resorts in NSW, they don’t actually have a development application or control over the entire area; they control a small strip under their [ski] lifts. Any time you want to develop something outside of that, you have to annex out that piece of land, include it into the resorts and then put in the development applications.
“That’s a multi-stage process to be able to get that kind of work done. It’d [take] a few years, quite a few years.”
What may assist any bid for government support to underwrite winter sporting events in Australia events is the skyrocketing profile of our winter athletes.
By any measure – not just medals won – this has been the biggest Winter Olympics in Australian history. Cumulative ratings on Nine, which also owns this masthead, have surpassed 14 million viewers, while the Australian Olympic Committee has had over 100 million social media impressions – more than three times the number from Beijing 2022, which took place in a much friendlier timezone.
Indra Brown.Credit: AP
The challenge for those involved in Australian winter sports is to make sure the public follows those athletes during the four-year Olympic cycle, and doesn’t just forget about them until the next Winter Games in the French Alps in 2030.
“Our Australian winter team has momentum. When you get momentum, you don’t want to waste it,” said Australian Olympic Committee chief executive Mark Arbib.
“Australians have embraced the Winter Games and the joy that the Olympics brings. We’ve got an Australian winter coming up, and we need to work with Snow Australia, to ensure that the green and gold are on the snowfields. our Olympians are the best possible role models and mentors, we need to find ways to engage them more with Inter schools and commercial partners. The AOC recently signed a partnership with the snow resorts who have been a big part of the team’s success. It’s time to have a strategy in place to maximise the opportunities.
“There’s a real opportunity for us now to bring more money into our winter programs and our athletes and our coaches. These games have shown [the government] what we’ve been arguing: that our winter athletes can inspire and unite the nation. We need to keep backing them.”
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Another option – and not necessarily an alternative to the X Games, but in addition – is bringing a FIS World Cup event to Australia, and leveraging the popularity of Chinese superstar Eileen Gu and other Asian athletes, Bosco said.
“We’ve been talking about hosting World Cup events now for decades. It’s really hard to get interest from government on hosting a World Cup, but definitely possible,” Bosco said. “Because we’re in the same time zone as China, there’s real opportunity there for us to maybe host something that would then have international appeal for sponsorships.”
The Winter Olympic Games is broadcast on the Nine Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.
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