Discipline: Freestyle Aerials
Olympic Participation: Salt Lake City 2002, Torino 2006
Achievements: Gold Aerials 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, Bronze Aerials 2006 Turino Winter Olympics, Gold 2003 World Championships, 2003 and 2004 World Cup Crystal Globe
Medal awarded in: 2021

Like many Aerial skiers, Alisa Camplin OAM started her sporting career as a Gymnast. Her life changed when she attended a Melbourne trampoline demonstration in 1994, at a time when Geoff Lipshut, later CEO of the Olympic Winter Institute, was trying to identify potential talent for the new sport of aerial freestyle skiing. The idea was to turn gymnasts into aerial skiers. She did well, was recruited, and delivered pizzas and worked as a cleaner to raise enough money to ski.

Camplin’s passage to the Olympics involved seven years of hard labour, with a procession of increasingly difficult somersaults and some awful accidents. She broke her collarbone and a hand, separated her shoulder, dislocated her sternum twice, ripped her hip flexor out of her groin, broke both ankles, tore her right knee and cracked 12 ribs.

Her hard work paid off when she won the Gold Medal at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games and became Australia’s first Olympic skiing gold medal winner. 

In 2002/2003 she won the World Championship and the World Cup title. Her world crown defence was ruined by a snapped anterior cruciate ligament suffered in a freak training accident that kept her out of action for 10 months. In another water jump training accident Camplin re-tore the same ligament only months out from the Torino 2006 Winter Olympic Games. She had allograft surgery to repair the knee and resumed rehabilitation in a desperate attempt to defend her crown. Amazingly she was back on the snow on Christmas Day, just six weeks from the Opening Ceremony.

The ability for Camplin to stay focused in Torino and never stop believing was her most powerful weapon. Before the final began Camplin had led the 40-strong team in the Opening Ceremony, survived a nervous wait after back slapping a landing in a postponed qualifying, and then watched teammate Lydia Lassila’s Olympic dream end when her allograft knee failed in qualifying. 

Twenty-four hours later as her competitors went for greater degrees of difficulty, Camplin nailed her trademark triple twisting double somersaults and won the bronze medal and she became  Australian skier to win medals at consecutive Winter Olympics.

She has made a successful career post sport and works as a business executive, company director, business consultant and keynote speaker across the areas of resilience, mindset, goal planning, high-performance, mental wellbeing, and the achievement of repeatable sustainable success.
Camplin is the deputy chef de mission for the 2022 Australian Winter Olympic Team. She was Chef de Mission of the 2012 Australian Winter Youth Olympic Games Team.

She was awarded the Order of Australia and has been inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. 

She is also an OWIA director.