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 country with short winters and unreliable snowfall, Australia has produced some brilliant athletes and six Winter Olympic gold medallists.

None, though, has managed two Olympic titles.

Freestyle skier Dale Begg-Smith came close with the 2006 moguls gold at Turin and silver in Vancouver four years on, while snowboarder Torah Bright, the halfpipe champion at Vancouver, took silver in her title defence at Sochi.

BACK-TO-BACK GOLD?

Hopes are high in Australia that Anthony, already rated the country's best-ever winter athlete by some pundits, could be the first to go back-to-back.

"Of course I would love to achieve the double but everyone’s going into the event trying to win it so I’m going to have to work pretty hard and put a good performance in on the night," said Anthony.

"We're going to be doing everything that we can control to give ourselves the best opportunity for that."

Anthony pushed the boundaries of moguls when she became the first woman to land a "cork 720 mute" at an Olympics, pulling off the trick in the 2022 Beijing final to secure the gold ahead of American Jaelin Kauf.

Rivals have since become proficient at the trick, which involves a full flip with two rotations and a mid-air ski-grab.

Anthony said it would probably take another game-changing move to secure a second Olympic gold at the Livigno Snow Park in a year's time, but she was keeping her plans to herself.

"I think you have to continually push the boundaries," she said.

"When you do, everyone else realises they can do that, too, and they step up their game.

"We’re working on all sorts of things. But so is everyone else."