Winter stars no longer oddities

Ski cross competitor Anton Grimus with a bushranger beard similar to our gold diggers of yesteryear. Source: Adam Taylor / News Limited

TODAY, Australia will name it largest ever Winter Olympics team.

You might think sending 56 young Australians to compete in Russia is a bit of an indulgence for a summery nation like Australia.

You might think it's all very nice for the athletes, but are they really any good?

You'd better believe they are.

Australia has now won medals at each of the last five Winter Olympics. Our team has grown progressively stronger each year but this year's lot is something else again.

Our team to the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics includes three Olympic gold medallists and no fewer than 17 athletes who have finished on the podium at the highest level of their chosen sport in the past year alone.

In short, we are no longer a novelty like the Jamaican bobsledders. Australia has matured into a highly-competitive winter sports nation across a wide range of disciplines.

In one very real sense, we're the oldest competitive winter sports nation of all.

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It might surprise you to learn that Australia lays claim to having formed the world's first ski club. Founded in 1861, the Kiandra Snowshoe Club was started by diggers on the Kiandra goldfields of New South Wales.

Kiandra, just north of Cooma, is a ghost town these days. But the spirit of those alpine pioneers lives on today in those who seek gold medals instead of gold nuggets.

One member of this year's Australian Winter Olympic team, ski cross competitor Anton Grimus, sports a bushranger beard that bears an uncanny resemblance to those gold diggers of yesteryear who had fence palings for skis.

But Grimus is actually a child of the second important wave of development in the Australian snow sports scene.

In the second half of the 20th century, postwar European migrants moved to our snowfields to start businesses in our burgeoning ski industry.

Anton Grimus, right, competing at a World Cup ski cross event in Alberta, Canada Source: AP

Grimus grew up in his parents' Austrian-themed hotel at Victoria's Mt Buller. At the bottom of the same mountain, dual snowboard cross world champion Alex "Chumpy" Pullin grew up in the residence above his parents' ski hire shop.

These two medal hopes are but two Sochi team members who are the products of a domestic industry said to be worth $1.8 billion, employing an estimated 18,000 people, mostly in regional Australia.

The Australian sporting identity might be based around cricket, footy and watery sports of the unfrozen variety, but these modern day men and women from Snowy River are no less quintessentially Aussie.

People who are into snow sports are often classified as toffs, but our team in Sochi is not comprised of society's elite.

Some, like the highly marketable Torah Bright, have admittedly become wealthy. But virtually every member of our Sochi team has the same hard-working self-sacrificing Mum and Dad behind them as any Olympic swimmer or sprinter.

Like any Australian sporting team enjoying prolonged success on the global stage, this team has now developed its own character. Condensed into one word, you could do a lot worse than "humble".

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That might sound a little corny, but our Winter Olympians know how lucky they are to live the globe-trotting lives they lead.

Nate Johnstone is a 23-year-old who won the snowboard halfpipe World Championship in 2011. He lives in a granny flat under his grandparents' place on Sydney's northern beaches, and most of his childhood mates are local tradies or city office workers.

With his sun-bleached hair and surfie drawl, Johnstone says he reminds himself every day just how lucky he is to be living the dream. And like any Aussie sportsman, there's a seriously competitive beast inside.

"Australians are generally quite competitive and are a great sporting nation, and that mentality has been transferred over into winter sports," he says.

That, right there, is why you should care about our Winter Olympians. That's why you should be excited about these Games.

Not because you love winter sports, but because you love sport full stop.

And because you love Australia.

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