How innovations in sports science can help identify Australia’s future gold medal winners

Five years ago, the Australian moguls team did some testing in Jindabyne, near the ski fields in alpine New South Wales. Sports science is an advanced discipline and elite athletes are often being poked and prodded, or put through their paces on treadmills hooked up to elaborate machines. But this testing was different. The scientists were not measuring physical output, nor requiring athletes to push themselves to the limit. Instead, they were seeking to ascertain less tangible characteristics: spatial orientation and movement control, including proprioception – the so-called “sixth-sense”.

It was new technology and, in the sporting context, largely unproven. Jakara Anthony was one of the athletes to participate in the testing. At the time still a teenager, Anthony was a recent addition to the national mogul squad. She had not yet won any major competitions, but on that day, Anthony scored off the chart.

“It was really interesting data, with each athlete ranked according to the testing – and Jakara topped the list,” says Peter Topalovic, long-time Winter Olympics coach and manager of the winter sports program at the NSW Institute of Sport. Gordon Waddington, the Australian Institute of Sport Professor of Sports Medicine at the University of Canberra who undertook the testing, recalls that Anthony was “very, very good. Substantially better than the broad group she was tested with at the time.”

The following year, Anthony finished fourth at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Earlier this year, she won the moguls category in Beijing – Australia’s first gold medal at the Winter Games for over a decade. The promise she had shown on that testing day had come to fruition.

The irony was the data had not initially been put