Australia At The Winter Olympics

I came across this article by Christopher Clarey of The New York Times. In it he highlights the like between Australians and Whistler home of the current Winter Olympics.

“It was well after 1 a.m. Monday in this party town.

Another line had formed outside the Longhorn Saloon, and suddenly, above the buzz of a dozen conversations, there was a loud chant: “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oy-oy-oy!”

It is a common battle cry for Australian sports fans: at cricket matches, at rugby games, at swim meets, in the stands of Melbourne Park when Lleyton Hewitt is getting ready to serve. But these are the Winter Olympics, no traditional Australian stomping ground unless you happen to find yourself in Whistler.

“You mean Whistralia,” said Jono Brauer, an Australian Alpine skier competing here in the men’s speed events. “It’s like mini-Australia out here, and I’m loving it.”

Australia, though short on altitude and snow, does have ski resorts, including the New South Wales town of Thredbo, where Brauer has lived since he was 10. Across the Tasman Sea, there are the bigger, more spectacular mountains of New Zealand’s South Island.

But for decades now, globetrotting Australians have gradually turned Whistler into an outpost of their sunburned country. According to Casey Vanden Heuvel, Whistler’s director of communications, about 2,000 Australians come to Whistler every year for seasonal work, helped by the liberal work visa agreements between Canada and Australia.

Representatives of the resort of Whistler-Blackcomb even make an annual trip to major Australian cities to recruit talent, and the resort alone employs about 500 Australians each winter.

“They’re about 15 to 20 percent of our work force,” said Joel Chevalier, director of employee experience at Whistler-Blackcomb. “Australians and Whistler is a tradition that’s been going on for about 30 years or so. Australians do their walkabout, their gap year after high school before university where they go do some traveling. I don’t know who the first Australians were, but they obviously went back and talked to their friends. Every year, it’s kept growing and growing.”

Anyone who has taken a chairlift or ordered a beer (or two) in Whistler, could be excused for forgetting that these are Canada’s Games.

“It’s the closest we’re going to get to an Olympics at home in Australia, a Winter Olympics,” said Torah Bright, the star snowboarder who carried the Australian flag in the opening ceremonies.

That sounds right, considering that Australia’s only Winter Olympics bid to date was a mock bid by the Australian comedians Roy and HG, who proposed the hamlet of Smiggin Holes, a Snowy Mountains town in New South Wales lacking even a chairlift, as 2010 host.

But the Australians got Vancouver and Whistler instead. And while other Southern Hemisphere nations remain a token presence, Australia has won medals in each of the past five Olympics. They have done it with ample help from expatriate recruits like the former Canadian moguls skier Dale Begg-Smith, who learned to ski in Whistler and who struck gold in 2006 and looked none too happy with his silver here, which remains Australia’s only medal so far. The country does have more potential medalists in women’s aerials (Jacqui Cooper and Lydia Lassila) and in the snowboarding half-pipe (Bright).

Australians first competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics but had to wait nearly 60 years for their first medal: a bronze in the short-track speed skating men’s relay in 1994.

The country’s first individual medal came in 1998, when Zali Steggall, who had grown up in the French Alps, not the Southern ones, took a bronze in the women’s slalom. The first gold medal came — quite unforgettably — in 2002 when Steven Bradbury, a 28-year-old from the balmy city of Brisbane who had been part of the 1994 relay team, became an accidental hero.

In the final of the 1,000-meter short-track event, all four of the front-runners, including the American star Apolo Anton Ohno, crashed near the finish line, leaving a clean sheet of ice for Bradbury, who would become a celebrity at home and write an autobiography titled “Last Man Standing.””