Freestyle aerialist Alisa Camplin has won Australia’s second Winter Olympics gold medal in less than 36-hours after pulling out a brilliant second jump at Deer Valley.
The 27-year-old from Melbourne had a nervous wait after completing a high scoring full-double-full, with favourite, Belarussian Alla Tsuper and outsider Russian Olga Koroleva still to jump.
But World Cup champion Tsuper failed to land her jump cleanly and Koroleva could not score highly enough with her degree of difficulty – handing Camplin her first ever competition win.
“It hasn’t sunk in. It doesn’t feel real, Camplin said afterwards.
“I’ve never won anything in my life and now I have an Olympic gold medal. I can’t believe it.”
Most of the competition upped the ante for their second jumps and while Camplin was placed third after her double-full-full, she knew she had to lift a level.
“I was conscious that people were doing good jumps and I was trying not to think about the outcome,” Camplin said.
The Canadian pair of Veronica Brenner and Deidra Dionne, who finished second and third respectively, put themselves in the running with brilliant second jumps but Camplin scored 99.75 to claim the title.
In another excellent result fellow Australian Lydia Ierodiaconou finished eighth.
“I really made a point of keeping my mind clear,” Camplin said.,
“I’ve done these jumps thousands and thousands and thousands of times and visualised them in my mind and iif it wasn’t going to work out today there was nothing I could do about it.”
For Camplin, it’s been an emotional few months, struggling with a knee injury and missing most of the World Cup competition. Then she was dealt another blow when pre-event favourite, fellow Aussie Jacqui Cooper, ruptured her knee in training for Salt Lake City.
But “Little Buddy” fought back to finish fifth in the last World Cup event, put the shock of the Cooper incident behind her and went on to claim Australia’s second ever gold medal.
