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Jakara Anthony fell so hard she had to go home. She was training on the Swedish slopes, misjudged a landing and ploughed shoulder first into the snow. The force of the impact shattered her collarbone.
“I actually landed a drum, and then just got my skis crossed up and, yeah, I put my shoulder into a mogul, which turns out doesn’t go so well for you,” she says.
“I knew I’d done something good, I just didn’t know what at that point.”
“Something good” turned out to be something bad, a serious break that needed surgery, a titanium plate and three months to recover.
The debilitating injury wiped out her skiing season, but it had an enlightening side effect – she got to know her family again.
For the next three months, from mid-December 2024 until March 2025, Anthony, now 27, lived with her parents, Darren and Sue, and her brother Matt and his fiancee, Chloe, in their Barwon Heads home, on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula.
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Now, as she prepares to defend her Olympic moguls gold medal at the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, she reflects on the aftermath of her injury with a sense of fondness.
“It’s not that often I get to see them,” Anthony says. “I normally come home for a week or two at a time, so to actually get that longer period with them was pretty special.
“It probably won’t happen again in our lifetimes now.”
Initially, it was a harsh adjustment for Anthony.
Jakara Anthony with her Olympic gold medal in Beijing in 2022.Credit: Getty Images
Used to travelling the world, she had to rely on her parents to be carers and chauffeurs, while calling on her brother to help pass the time – they spent hours playing Stardew Valley on Nintendo Switch.
“You never want your child to be broken. However, it was a fantastic time for our family,” Sue recalls.
“We all got to live together and spend every day together, which has not happened for a very, very long time and probably will never happen again. So it was a really special time for us. She lost independence but I loved it.
“It is always such a nice thing to be in the car together and driving. You don’t have to make eye contact, and you can talk about all sorts of things that you don’t usually have one-on-one time for. You are just stuck in the car together. I certainly relished it.”
There was an odd symmetry to Anthony’s injury. Her journey to the top of the world in mogul skiing started with family. For one term every year of her childhood, she grew up on the snow.
The family would uproot from their Victorian Surf Coast home, take time out from her father’s building business, and migrate four hours north-east to the high country for the winter months.
“Mum and Dad met at Mount Buller way back when they were seasonal workers (he was a taxi driver, she worked in a ticketing office), and then when they had my brother and I, they were like, ‘We are going to do winters at Mount Buller’,” Anthony says.
“We’d go to the local primary school, and they’d work on the mountain, and we’d do a ski program on the weekends ... because skiing would be something that we could do as a family forever.”
Anthony on a family holiday in the Maldives with her brother Matt and her parents, Darren and Sue.
Anthony’s ability on the slopes flourished. She was identified as an elite talent in her early teens and by the time she had turned 16, she was living with a host family at Jindabyne and training with the national team at Perisher.
“She loved skiing from the very start,” her mother recalls. “She has that personality where you can do something well but continue to get better at it. She was always very focused on it.
Anthony clinches her fourth World Cup title in January 2024.Credit: YouTube
“Having kids in the snow when they’re young is a bit of [an endurance] thing – wet gloves, having to walk everywhere – and sometimes it can be really tough, but she was tough. She just loved doing it, no matter what.”
The family had to adjust to having a budding Olympian in its midst.
“It came as a big learning curve to find out that your child is identified and that you have to start finding income to pay for overseas camps, and you are sending your 13-year-old or 14-year-old child off over to the other side of the world,” Anthony’s mother says.
“However, on the flip side, it has enabled us as a family to travel to many, many places that we would not normally have done if she wasn’t doing what she was doing.”
Competing in the women’s World Cup freestyle moguls in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, on January 16.Credit: Chris Hocking
Schooling presented another challenge.
“She pretty much homeschooled herself the whole way through high school. Year 12 was the only time we kind of ever put our foot down,” Sue says.
“It was like, ‘Year 12, you are not skiing, you are just going to go to school. Just knock it out, get it done; it’s too hard for everybody.’
“And it was also nice for her to be home and have that year, and also see that you can miss out on a few things and still achieve other things, so that was good, too.”
Anthony in action at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.Credit: Getty Images
Anthony admits she struggled with school at times, juggling homework with the demands of skiing, but she was able to finish her VCE at Christian College in Highton, Geelong. She is now studying part-time for a bachelor of business degree.
As she began to conquer the world of skiing, she also had to conquer self-doubts.
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“I think that’s just the nature of competing in elite sport,” she explains of her ongoing battle with performance anxiety.
“You have abnormal pressure situations. There’s a big fear factor with the sport – it’s extreme, there are consequences, and I’ve had them now.
“It was definitely a bit challenging getting back on the snow [after breaking her collarbone], but we’ve gotten through all that.”
Sue says the nature of her daughter’s sport means she will always need to work on her mental game as well as her physical health.
“There’s not many elements of what she does as a sport that doesn’t worry you, unfortunately,” she says.
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“As a parent, it is not so nice to watch sometimes. The end result when you are standing up there with a gold medal, yeah, we like that bit. But it is definitely a very big roller-coaster of emotions and trials and tribulations to get there.”
With her collarbone “back in one piece”, Anthony returned for a two-day World Cup competition in Ruka, Finland, last month and almost ended back where she started.
She fell during the last training session and came down heavily on the same shoulder. She was left battered and bruised, but, thankfully, unbroken. Incredibly, two days later she won moguls gold.
“It is probably the most nervous I have been for an event,” she says. “But I was keen to get in the start gate and get that first one off the ranks.
“I knew after the first day that it was all there. It is pretty exciting to know that I am back where I left off, and I think a bit better. I think I have got more to give.”
As Anthony ramps up competition in her quest for back-to-back Winter Olympics gold, her family expects to be trailing along in support.
“That was the catalyst of us buying a motor home [in Europe],” her mother says. “We want to travel around and follow her a bit. So we will definitely be in Milan with some other members of our family, and some of Jakara’s friends.”
Sue says spending last Christmas with her daughter in their family home only reinforced what she already knew.
“She is lovely to be around. She’s fun,” she says. “She works really hard, as every elite athlete does, but especially with the mental side of things, controlling her mind. We are in total awe of the things she is able to achieve.
“We do not have that skill set that she has, which is amazing when your child outshines you in that sort of area. She’s amazing.”
The Winter Olympic Games will be broadcast on the Nine Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.
