High Achiever
Jacqui Cooper is the most successful aerial skier in history. One thing still eludes this high flying Australian, however, and she’s not ready to ground herself just yet.
As the waiter hovers near our table, Jacqui Cooper agonises over what flavour jam to have. She’s just spent months wrestling with the biggest decision in her life – whether to retire while there’s still an Olympic medal–shaped hole in her trophy cabinet, or to put her personal life on hold for another two years and become the oldest competitive aerial skier ever by competing in Vancouver in 2010. She isn’t in the mood to rush anything now, not even a toast order.
Life is full of Sliding Door moments, chance meetings that send people spinning off in a radically new direction. Jacqui’s life-defining moment happened when she was 16, bouncing on a garden trampoline in the heart of suburban Melbourne.
“Someone saw me and thought that I’d make a good aerial skier,” she recalls. “There were two trampolines about three metres apart with rocks in the middle and I was somersaulting from one to the other with my school dress over my head.
“I was always fascinated with acrobatics. When this man began talking about doing somersaults over snow…I just fell in love.” As it turns out, this man – Geoff Lipshut, later to become CEO of the Olympic Winter Institute – knew what he was talking about.
“I’d never even been to the snow,” she continues, “so first I had to learn to ski. They got me an instructor and told me: ‘If you listen to us, and follow our program, we’ll be toasting your world number one status 10 years from now.’ That was in 1989. In 1999 I became World Champion.”
It takes a special kind of person to shoot off a ramp at 70 km/h and to perform acrobatics 20 metres up in the air in a frantic three-second window before landing on hard ice. Lipshut recognised raw talent when he saw it, and Jacqui has repaid him by winning five World Cups – more than any other aerial skier ever, male or female.
Jacqui believes she was born into it…literally. “I’m a triplet,” she says. “There wasn’t much room, and I spent the entire pregnancy upside down, and I still love it. But I need to be in control. I once won a bungee jump, and I was too scared to do it!”
Jacqui spends summers in Utah in the US, where her passion for controlled adventure is supplemented by mountain biking and climbing. Mainly though, she’s there to jump.
“I need to be in control. I once won a bungee jump,
and I was too scared to do it!”
“We train on a wooden ramp, jumping into a swimming pool,” she explains. “The difficult part is getting your landing right. There’s a big difference between landing flat, like on water, and landing on a slope. Some people never master it, but I’m a natural lander.”
Sometimes, however, even natural landers come down to earth all wrong. Jacqui’s injury list reads like a triage report on Humpty Dumpty. She’s broken her back in three places, shattered her knee, had elbow and shoulder reconstructions and suffered multiple concussions, but the doctors keep putting her back together again, and she keeps jumping.
And physical pain is only the beginning. A veteran of four Olympics, injuries and incidents have scuppered Jacqui’s medal chances each time – most cruelly in Salt Lake City in 2002, when her status as favourite was smashed along with her knee in a last-minute training accident and she was a spectator as teammate Alisa Camplin topped the podium.
At 35, Jacqui has been jumping for longer than many of her competitors have been alive. “I won a World Cup event in China recently,” she says, “and when they read out my birth date the whole crowd went ‘ooh aah!’ The girl who came second was 16. I could have been her mother…easily.”
Her body aches, she really wants to start a family and, as Jacqui knows only too well, two years work and dedication could all be undone by one crash, but she has made up her mind to give the Olympics one more crack.
“I was given this rare opportunity and now I’m living this beautiful life,” she explains.
“The places I’ve seen and the cultures I’ve experienced just because of what I do for a living – it’s amazing. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the ski run like there is in a lot of sports, but I get to travel and look at amazing views every day. Basically, there are a lot of things I want to do as a 35 year old, and I’m sure all of them could go on hold until I’m 37.”