'Definitely possible': Global superstars could be lured to Australia in ambitious plan to cash in on Milano Cortina 2026

LIVIGNO: Life comes at you fast when you become an Olympic Games gold medallist.

For the first time ever at a Winter Olympics, Australia is sending home at least three of them, with an outside shot of a fourth (fingers crossed for 16-year-old prodigy Indra Brown, whose freestyle skiing halfpipe final has been postponed to Sunday night AEDT due to heavy snow fall).

Moguls champion Jakara Anthony went through the monumental life change four years ago but for Cooper Woods and Josie Baff this is new territory. Baff got her new life started on the right foot by declaring she'd "love to be a Weet-Bix kid". Already Weet-Bix has indicated it's keen to talk turkey.

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Woods changed his plans for the end of the Games and is heading back to Australia "to figure out what the next steps are".

Lydia Lassila, who won aerials gold at Vancouver 2010 confirms to Wide World of Sports "they're in for a whirlwind".

While brands like Olympians and love Olympic gold medallists, Lassila stresses that opportunities don't just land in your lap. Like Baff so cleverly did with a witty throwaway line to a group of Australian journalists, you've got to be prepared to chase them.

And this time around, it's not just the medal-winning athletes who have a rare opportunity to strike "while the iron's hot" as Lassila puts it.

Australia's greatest ever performance at a Winter Olympics, with six medals - three gold, two silver and one bronze - gives the Australian Olympic Commission and Snow Australia the best chance it has ever had to capitalise on a once-in-four-year event by selling winter sports to Australia.

Never has there been more people in the island nation talking about skiing, snowboarding, skating and sliding. Nine's audience figures have been astonishing, with more than 14 million Australians tuning in to watch Milano Cortina 2026.

Invest in the right areas and this could be boom time in a nation whose history has overwhelmingly been tied to summer sports.

Wide World of Sports sat down with two of the key decision makers, the AOC's chief executive, Mark Arbib, and the chair of Snow Australia, Daniel Bosco, to find out how they plan to capitalise on a gilt-edged opportunity.

Watch the Winter Olympic Games Milano Cortina 2026 live and free on Channel 9 and 9Now. Plus, every event live & on demand, every medal in 4K, and exclusive international coverage on Stan Sport.

KEEPING WINTER ATHLETES IN THE SPOTLIGHT

One pillar in the plan is to try to keep their new stars in the limelight. Both Arbib and Bosco concede that most Australians only think about winter sports for a couple of weeks every four years. To continue the growth trajectory Australia needs more athletes with serious profile, like Scotty James and Jakara Anthony.

"I mean, Cooper Woods, who just won, he's so relatable, right?," Bosco points out.

"He's a knockabout kid. He loves a beer. Yeah, he's going to be the [American pin-up boy of the 90s] Bode Miller of Australian snow sports."

How to keep Woods, Baff and others in kids' social media feeds is the enduring question.

A missing piece of the puzzle at the moment is that the World Cup season might as well be in another universe, it is so far below the radar in Australia.

After Baff won her gold medal she spoke about her determination to win the 2025/26 snowboard cross Crystal Globe - the prestigious prize awarded by the International Ski and Snowboard Association (FIS) to the overall points winner. Just about every year Australia has at least one athlete hoisting aloft a Globe but barely anyone would know.

Perhaps one way to solve this problem would be to bring a World Cup event to Australia, or perhaps even an X-Games. James spoke about this as one of the last boxes in his career that he wants to tick and if a showman like James is pushing the idea behind the scenes, serious corporate support is probably not far behind.

Kayaking did this kind of thing perfectly to double down on the euphoria surrounding the Fox sisters' heroics at Paris 2024, hosting a World Cup event in Penrith the following year that was broadcast on Nine and was the hottest ticket in town.

You get the sense that a line-up of Australia's best snow sports athletes competing on home soil - the likes of Scotty James and Valentino Guseli, or Woods, Matt Graham and Anthony, or Danielle Scott and Laura Peel, or even Baff and current World Cup men's snowboard cross leader Adam Lambert - would have a similar impact, potentially driving the halo effect of Milano Cortina 2026's wild success further into the Olympiad.

But is it a realistic goal?

"It's possible. It's possible," Bosco assures.

"It's really hard to get interest from government in hosting a World Cup but definitely possible.

"I mean, we were running a moguls competition through 2012, 2018, which was World Cup level - had pretty much all your World Cup skiers there, just didn't have the tag of a World Cup on it.

"It costs about half a million dollars to host an event like that. And it's pretty hard to find people who are going to be willing to chip that sort of money in, in Australia.

"I think there's still hope. I think we can do something, particularly with, you know, athletes like Eileen Gu and, you know, Chinese aerial team and stuff, because we're on the same time zone as China, I think there's real opportunity there for us to maybe host something that would then have international appeal."

Speaking in her wrap-up press conference on Saturday, Australia's chef de mission and Salt Lake City 2002 aerials gold medallist Alisa Camplin also spoke of the importance of Australia becoming closer partners with Asian countries like China and Japan.

Both are winter sports powerhouses and share a similar time zone with Australia, potentially making shared events more financially viable.

"Yeah, I think we're seeing a little bit of a united approach from south-east Asia, you know, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, like in this region of the world, we could do some pretty spectacular things together, but those things cost a lot of money too, you know, to run big events," she said.

AUSTRALIA'S TRAINING FACILITIES

One thing that Australia has already started to get right is the infrastructure build.

In his press conference at the start of the Games, James spoke passionately about the two-year-old training halfpipe at Thredbo - a project he collaborated on with Charles Beckinsale.

Prior to that pipe being built Australia didn't have one, forcing ambitious kids like James to go and live overseas in their early teens to be any chance of making it at the top level.

It's a similar story in most winter sports. Australia has no curling ice, so to get involved in curling seriously, athletes need to regularly get on a plane to New Zealand or further afield.

Even in aerials, a sport Australia has a rich heritage in, athletes only recently got a facility - Brisbane's Geoff Henke Olympic Winter Training Centre, which was opened in 2021 - to fast-track their development.

Speaking earlier in the campaign, Camplin waxed lyrical about the enormous impact the Henke centre was having in attracting potential aerials Olympians and developing them to compete at an elite level. She credited the facility for helping Scott finally achieve her dream of winning an Olympic medal at her fourth Games.

Camplin built on that point in her press conference to close the Games, hinting that the Henke centre had arrived just in the nick of time, with Australia struggling to build depth in aerials, despite the success being enjoyed at the elite level.

"Our aerial team have, you know, finally got to that point where we have all the pieces in play, we just need 30, 40, 50 more kids," she said, adding that Australia was still sorely lacking in facilities for some winter sports.

"I did talk about how cool it would be to have a curling centre and a sliding start for our sliding athletes, but we also still have a lot of kids nicking off to New Zealand because they've got a world-class halfpipe there. It's great that we've got a smaller one to start on, but you know, I'd like to see everyone in the world coming to Australia.

"I've gotta say our ski resorts just make so many opportunities available to us, and in some ways that's also been a secret weapon for us, but you can see hubs like Japan who have invested in so many of the big air sports and, you know, if we can get a few more facilities of that nature and and the right coaches, I think we could become a little unstoppable."

Bosco acknowledged there was more to do to drive targeted investment.

"We started looking at the NSTC (National Snowsports Training Centre) back in 2014, so that was a 10 year project, and what I've said to all of our discipline committees now - so we have different committees for each discipline, for snowboard, park and pipe - give me your 10 year plan," Bosco adds.

"I want to know what success looks like in 2035. And then I want to know what we need to get there, what resources, what infrastructure, what people, we need, because it's a multi-layer thing.

"Often people get caught up looking at the top, right?

"And look, that's really important. And here on the ground over the last two weeks you've seen that we've taken most of the opportunities [to win medals] we've had, right?

"We've been very well organised in being able to do that.

"But, you know, if I want to start planning to have a medal in a sport that barely exists now, like ski mo (ski mountaineering) I have to have a 12-year plan for that.

"There's no point saying 'I'm gonna win one tomorrow', right?

"You know, the athletes that are gonna be winning those medals are probably eight-years old right now."

ATHLETE SUPPORT

The AOC is also spending more money on the athletes to make sure that they are able to stay afloat while competing in sports that turn very few into millionaires.

For every Eileen Gu, who netted more than $30 million in endorsement deals last year, there are hundreds of cross country skiers sinking personal funds into training, equipment and competition in an effort to become an Olympian.

It is, however, becoming a little easier.

As well as a gold medal incentive, which pays anyone who stands atop the podium $20,000 if they continue in their sport afterwards, there is now a team selection grant of $5000 that is paid to every Australian Olympian, a retirement grant of $32,000 for every Games an athlete competes at, and a $10,000 return to sport payment for Olympians who take a sabbatical to have a baby.

These are real and important steps for attracting and retaining Australia's elite-level athletic talent. Particularly those who harbour an Olympic dream.

WHAT ABOUT THE COACHES?

Another standout theme to come across in these Games has been the coaching.

Australia is clearly blessed in this department, with moguls coach Pete McNiel, who has now got his fingerprints all over three gold medals, a prime example. The world is envious of McNiel and others, and if Australia isn't careful they could be poached.

McNiel was only half joking when he said after Anthony's dual moguls gold medal that he was going to ask for a raise.

Importantly, the need to support and reward Australia's snow sports coaches and bring more of McNiel's calibre through is well and truly on the radar.

"If your kid comes home and says, 'I wanna be a ski coach', you're gonna go, 'well, when are you gonna get a real job?' Most of the time is the answer, right?," Bosco points out.

"But there are so many kids going into, you know, sports sciences that aren't related to coaching through university courses. We're leaving ourselves short."

In the background, Matti Clements, who is the Executive General Manager of AIS Performance at the Australian Sports Commission, is working on a university degree specific to sports coaching, Bosco reveals, "so you can actually get a legitimate degree in coaching".

"It's going to help football, it's gonna help cricket, it's gonna help everybody across the board because look at all of our sports, right, you look at all of our sports, coaches kind of pop up out of nowhere," Bosco says.

"There's no system for them. We have all these programs to create pathways for athletes, but we have no pathways for coaches. So it's not legitimised as a career path."

Bosco admits that McNiel's career success has almost happened by accident.

"I'd like to say there's a system behind it and how it works, but you've just got some really passionate people who have got into that sport, learned everything about it, lived and breathed it 24/7 for the last 20 years of their lives, and who've become the best through that, not because they did a university course or because the government gave them any particular funding or training," he concedes.

"In fact, they'd probably sit here and complain they haven't received enough of that, right? But, you know, if we can have a bigger pool of coaches coming through the university course, you're gonna find five or six people over a period.

"And then if they have a 20-year career, then suddenly you've got real momentum across multiple sports, and it's not just the gold medals then, it's also providing coaches who then understand child protection.

"You know, how to deal with parents, how to deal with themselves, psychology, out on the road, the stress and the anxiety of high performance, so there's so many skills that you end up building for these coaches, and I think we can be world best in that area in a short period."

With athletes starting to get better funding and more opportunities to develop on home soil and the development of coaches front of mind, it feels as though Australia is in a better position than ever before to build on its success in Milano Cortina.

IS BRISBANE 2032 AN OBSTACLE FOR WINTER SPORTS?

However, with Brisbane 2032 on the horizon, is there a danger that the funding and support becomes more concentrated towards creating an environment for an historic result on home soil?

Arbib is adamant that won't be the case, saying the AOC is hellbent on creating a better future for athletes and staff involved in both winter sports and summer sports.

"From the Team Australia perspective, it's all connected," he says.

"The road to Brisbane 2032 started in Milan and now moves to LA 2028 then French Alps 2030. It's all about the power of our incredible summer and winter athletes to unite Australians and bring joy.

"And we're going to work with our member sports, governments, commercial partners, and philanthropists to ensure our athletes and coaches are supported and valued, summer or winter- the games and Team Australia are always on now."