Lydia Ierodiaconou Lassila just won the Women’s Aerial skiing Gold Medal for Australia.
Australia ??
… Lassila took a congratulatory phone call from Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and showed her same knack for twisting and turning on the slopes by urging him to increase funding for better facilities at home.
“I was trying to persuade Kevin, my mate Kev, to build us a water ramp so that we can spend more time at home and also encourage some other youngsters to get involved with this sport,” said Lassila, who spends more than nine months a year training abroad. …
Lydia was an Artistic gymnasts as were the Silver and Bronze medalists from China.
The judging I find quite confusing. Many of the athletes do similar jumps with similar performance. Here Lydia tries to explain the rules for the rest of us.
Click PLAY or watch it on Olympics.com.au.
1 comment so far ↓
Contrary to popular belief, we do get snow in parts of Oz, but don’t have proper facilities to train aerial skiing. I was under the impression that they had (at least) a pool to train their jumps into, but don’t have the right kind of ramp going into it that would simulate the necessary conditions…
The Australian aerials team spends a lot of time in Utah, working on the slopes over there.
Despite the lack of proper facilities, Australia now has three Olympic medals (two of them gold!) in aerial skiing, plus numerous World Cup golds.
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