Freestyle Community Update

After a record breaking International 2024 FIS season for Australian Freestyle Snowsports there was a great deal of optimism looking towards the 2024 Australian Domestic winter. Pleasingly the beginning of the season saw a significant amount of fundamental technical work and skill assessments completed across our pathway club programs. Winter conditions and snow arrived late July which saw the hosting of some fantastic events with the JNats at Mt Buller, the NSW Junior Series events at Thredbo and Perisher and the Hotham Mogul Youth event.

Favourable course building conditions saw the National team commence training on Toppas Dream in Perisher from the start of August. Beginning in the second week of August mother nature decided to turn the hair dryer on two months early with a host of very windy days. State Interschools events were successfully hosted despite these consistently warm and windy conditions. This three-week period in August was super challenging for all programs, resulting in the disappointing cancelation of the ABOM Mogul Challenge at Mt Buller. The Australian National Championships at Perisher were once again affected by extremely windy and warm conditions. Great efforts were made to host two Australia New Zealand Cup single mogul events in wild conditions on the one day. These events are critical for various levels of our sport and a very big thank you goes out to the event organisers and Perisher resort for making things happen despite significant challenges. With snow disappearing before our eyes, it was great to see the National Interschools mogul events successfully conducted on Mogul Matts at Perisher in early September.

Club, Emerging Talent and National team water ramp, acrobatic and strength and conditioning training has been in full swing since the end of season 2024. With some great work across the pathway in these areas it is exciting to see what the Northern winter 2024/25 will deliver in terms of skill acquisition, athlete development and performance.

On a personal note, I have been a member of the Snow Australia Freestyle Committee since 1994 and Chair for the past 20 years. I will be stepping down from the role as Chair of the Snow Australia Freestyle Committee. I am enormously proud of what our Committee and the Australian freestyle community has achieved in this time. At the highest level the Australian National Mogul team has evolved from occasional appearances in World Cup top 16 finals to producing some of the best mogul skiers in the world with 2 Gold, 1 Silver and 1 Bronze Olympic medals, 11 World Championship medals including 3 Gold and over 115 World Cup podiums from 9 individual skiers.

At a domestic sport level we created and delivered our own Freestyle coaching qualifications starting in the late nineties and built extremely successful grass roots engagement at Interschools and club level. In recent years the last piece in our high-performance pathway was to develop our Emerging Talent activity so that we as a nation became better at delivering Institute ready development athletes. I am very proud of the work that our committee and sport has done in this ETP area as well as the development and roll out of the mogul Skills Assessment across our pathway club programs. I thank all of those who have contributed to these achievements and look forward to watching/supporting the new Chair in this next chapter for our sport.

I wish our athletes at all levels the very best of luck in this upcoming northern winter and look forward to seeing many of you on mogul courses soon.

David Speirs