Australia's moguls queen Anthony staying grounded before Milano-Cortina Games

MELBOURNE : A busted collarbone was not part of the plan for Jakara Anthony in the buildup to the 2026 Winter Olympics, but Australia's freestyle skiing queen is keeping positive a year out from her moguls title defence.

While top winter athletes are carving up northern hemisphere snow, the Beijing Olympic champion is recovering from the training injury in the warmth of a home summer while ticking off bucket-list items such as attending the Australian Open tennis.

On Thursday, though, the 26-year-old was layered up in a team parka next to an ice-rink in Melbourne, marking the one-year countdown to the Milano-Cortina Games with Australian Olympic officials.

The collarbone she snapped in Sweden before Christmas is a frustration for an athlete who took moguls skiing to new heights through a record-breaking 2023-24 season.

But she is in no rush to get back on the slopes and offers no targeted return date.

"While it's always very frustrating being injured, this is the biggest injury I've had so I've actually had a pretty good run," she told Reuters.

"Much as I don’t want it to happen, I can’t complain too much.

"They were fantastic over there," she added of her surgery in a hospital across the Norwegian border in Oslo.

"Got looked after really well.

"So I'm really grateful to do it in a country where the medical facilities are so great."

In the lead-up to her training mishap, Anthony won her 23rd World Cup event at the Swedish resort of Idre Fjall.

A week before she was second, behind France's Perrine Laffont, the 2018 Olympic champion, at the World Cup in Ruka, Finland.

That silver medal secured her 42nd World Cup podium, eclipsing the Australian record of aerial skier Kirstie Marshall and triggering glowing headlines back home.

For a