Frozen Hope

by Jacqui Cooper

  On that foggy night in Vancouver, I competed two multiple-twisting triple somersaults, and I landed them both. I was thrilled. I had, after twenty years, finally landed two jumps in an Olympic arena. I could not have been more proud of myself; it was a great effort. Everyone watched a 37-year-old veteran struggle that night – and I managed to pull a rabbit out of my hat. In the end, I didn’t win a medal. I came fifth. That fifth place felt like my greatest win ever, and Mario – the one person in the world who knew how much it meant to me – was right there by my side.

  On 12 April 2011, nine years to the day after our first date, we became husband and wife. Mario had proposed seven years earlier, on the balcony of my condo in Whistler, Canada, but we hadn’t wanted to rush off and get married between commitments. It felt right to start our new life together once I was no longer being pulled by my obligations as an athlete. I wanted to be free to devote myself properly to this precious partnership and to the future we would build together.

  Shortly after I retired, I had a wedding dress made while I was in Sri Lanka. We hadn’t named a date, but it occurred to me that I should take advantage of the beautiful fabrics for sale in the markets of Colombo and get a local dressmaker to make something special. The dress was gorgeous.

  When I got back and told Mario that I’d had a dress made, he said, ‘We may as well get married then!’ Shortly after, the ideal opportunity arose when I was offered a short speaking contract at a six-star resort in Bali. I wanted a holiday and, instead of monetary payment, I proposed they put us up for two weeks in a private villa with swimming pool. Mario was checking out the location online and discovered there were three wedding chapels at the resort. He said, ‘Hey, why don’t we elope?’

  If Mario had asked me to elope a few months earlier, I probably would have said, ‘No way.’ I love a celebration, and I knew both our families would want to be fully involved in our wedding. But we had the dress, and we were going to Bali, which is ‘Romance Central’, and staying in a beautiful resort. We had been engaged for more than seven years, and we were over the novelty of being ‘committed’. Besides, we’d already had a big engagement party back in April 2004, which had included all our family and friends. We’d more than done our duty.

  The idea of doing the whole thing simply and secretly was appealing. The resort had an online form, which we filled in together:

  Number of guests – zero

  Flowers – tick

  Wedding cake – sure

  Musicians – yep

  Intimate gourmet meal – you betcha!

  In the end, it took us ten minutes to plan our wedding! There was a little bit of paperwork to do at the Australian consulate in Denpasar and that was it. Done.

  Our wedding day was brilliant. I had a private bridal suite in which to get ready, and I had my makeup, hair and nails all done for the big day. Footy-mad Mario was watching a game on TV in the villa for most of the afternoon. Just before the ceremony, he put on his suit, was picked up in a golf buggy and then dropped off at the chapel. We had a fabulous dinner afterwards, serenaded by our own little band. It couldn’t have been better. Mario was especially happy with the low-key vibe. I’d pushed him into having a big engagement party and he’d had a good time, but the wedding was much more his thing.

  We flew back to Australia, rested and happy. I had some photo books made up with pictures of the wedding as a way to break the news to our families. My relatives got together for a big breakfast at my house on Mother’s Day. We were all sitting around the table together when I piped up, ‘Who wants to see some photographs from our Bali holiday?’ No-one was very keen, but I said, ‘Too bad’ and handed the books around.

  On the first page was a portrait of Mario and me at the wedding, with text that said ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ and the date, 12 April 2011.

  Well. I might have expected some disappointment, but we got way more than that. BANG! BANG! BANG! My mum and my sisters slammed their books down on the table.

  ‘I can’t believe you did this!’ shouted Fiona and she stormed off in a rage. A friend of my mum’s had recently passed and Mum turned on me, wailing, ‘This is worse than her death.’

  Suffice it to say, what we had done did not go down well with my family.

  After breakfast, we were heading to Mario’s mum’s place for lunch and to break the news to them. Can you imagine? This time, we were slightly better prepared for the reaction.

  Complicated family dynamics had meant that Laura, Mario’s mother, had yet to witness any of her other sons’ weddings. I muttered to Mario, ‘Your turn.’

  We finished lunch and Mario said casually, ‘Mum, Jacqui and I got married.’

  Laura thought he was joking around. He had to repeat it several times.

  ‘We got married in Bali, Ma. We eloped.’

  There was dead silence. Then she swept up the dirty dishes, hissed something very rude in Italian and stomped into the kitchen. Mario followed sheepishly and I was left at the table with his step-dad. A good-hearted and peace-loving man, Ugo turned to me, smiling warmly, and said, ‘Congratulations, Jacqui. I’m very happy for you!’

  5

  Hurry Up and Slow Down!

  The crystal trophies from my five World Cup title wins are carefully wrapped and stored in the linen cupboard. They’re beautiful, but I don’t need to put them on display to remind me of what I have achieved. Besides, they look a bit like they come from an installation in an art gallery.

  The important things I remember about my career are the people, the places, and the challenges that I overcame. I’m not alone in that – you’ll find that many athletes feel the same way.

  IN 2004, WHEN I LEFT Mario in Australia and got back on the merry-go-round, my emotional circumstances had changed. I had to come to terms with the fact that my body was different, too.

  Up until my Salt Lake City injury, I had been taking the biggest risks and performing the most complex skills possible for a woman in aerial skiing. I had spent thousands of hours in the gym as insurance, to safeguard my body, but it was a given that I would hurt myself at some point.

  Geoff used to say to me, ‘Put your head in the lion’s mouth often enough and you will get bitten.’

  Aerial skiing is a high-impact sport. To execute a triple somersault, you have to ski off a jump at speeds up to 70 kilometres per hour. That’s faster than you’re allowed to drive around the suburbs. You launch off a jump with nothing to protect you but a helmet and a mouthguard and if you don’t get the technique exactly right, you will inevitably crash. The question is, just how badly?

  Then there’s the fact that you’re doing this in a natural environment, at the mercy of the elements. The wind is a major contributor to the outcome, and learning to read a windsock is crucial. You have to predict the wind by watching the movement of the trees as all the little gusts come up the valley. You can hear them, too. You need to time your jump according to all these small clues.

  As an aerial skier, I developed quite an obsession with flags, watching them luff and droop. After I retired, I would be driving around the Melbourne streets and I’d see a flag and think, ‘I wouldn’t be able to jump today.’ I don’t think I’ll ever get out of the habit – it’s permanently ingrained in my mind.

  There is no textbook for this kind of knowledge: you have to learn through experience. These days, you might have a coach or an assistant warning you of what’s coming, telling you whether to go or to hold off. But when I started, I was more or less on my own and I had to read the signs. I’d be up there alone on the in-run, lining up in front of triple jump, listening to other coaches, looking at the trees and watching to see if there was any movement of branches and leaves. I could feel the smallest breeze on my ears. These were my cues to make a call on my next jump.

  In the back of my mind, there was always a nagging fear that I might misjudge. A bad fall can mess up a whole year (or a whole career), so even as I skied down the in-run I was thinking about the wind and hoping I got i
t right.

  Then, there’s the timing. As the sun goes down, the snow gets colder so the snow surface gets harder and faster. You need to review the progress and the position of the sun, minute by minute, when the afternoon is fast approaching. In those minutes, a start position at the top of the in-run can change by a metre, sometimes two metres, in response to the time of day.

  When I was training on water, I could practise up to twenty jumps a day. On snow, I could do between eight and fifteen jumps a day, depending on the conditions and the allowed schedule for my team. The average time-slot for training was only two hours, so there were days when I did no warm-up and went straight into a triple somersault to make best use of the time.

  Some days, I had what I called the willies – an intangible feeling that things weren’t right, even when conditions were great. Sometimes I felt the pressure to make the most of training so I ignored the willies and kept going.

  That fateful day just a few days before the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, I had the willies. The weather was terrible and a lot of other athletes held off from training. My instincts were telling me not to jump, but it was the Olympics and I knew someone was going to win that gold medal soon. I had it in my head that just one more jump would change my outcome – and it did, obviously.

  People ask me if I was superstitious about jumping during my career. I didn’t have a rabbit’s foot or special undies or anything like that, but I had my routines, my own flags and I always kept a watch on my belt. I always wanted to keep a check of the time. I was very specific and detailed in my preparation, especially making sure my head was right. I never forgot that every single jump carried a massive risk.

  The Salt Lake City crash robbed me of the opportunity to compete in the 2002 Winter Olympics. I’ll never know how I might have performed.

  Perhaps even more significantly, though, it marked the first of many times this would happen. From 2002 on, every time I had a significant crash something would shatter. Gradually, I had to accept the fact that my body was breaking down. By the time I finished my career, my body was a wreck. At thirty-seven years old, I was still physically very fit and healthy but the wear and tear I’d sustained was irreversible.

  The Salt Lake City injury was the first sign of long-term physical damage and, effectively, it was the beginning of the end of my career. In 2007 and 2008, I did win two more world titles, taking my career total to five world title wins, but looking back at my career, I spent 2002 to 2006 and then again from 2008 to 2010 heavily injured. That’s a lot of wear and tear on a body that had already had twenty years of impact through sport. In that first crash in Salt Lake City in 2002, I not only blew out my knee, but I also broke my leg. In the following years I had elbow reconstructions, shoulder reconstructions and multiple knee operations. I broke a hip and damaged my pelvis. In China in 2008, I landed on my face and mashed up my nose, fracturing multiple small bones in my face. A whole lot of the skin ripped off, too, and I looked like a burn victim – totally unrecognisable.

  In 2001 I had crashed during practice and the X-ray showed that I’d broken my back (a wedge fracture in the thoracic region). I rehabilitated over the next month and went on to win the final event in Finland and clinch my third world title. On other occasions, I sustained extensive cartilage damage in my knees, broke my tibia and had numerous concussions. Through it all, the pain was never more than a secondary thing. Every setback was just part of the process of seeing how far I could go and how good could I be.

  How much could I win?

  What can Jacqui Cooper do?

  How much could I leg press?

  How quickly could I rehabilitate myself after injury?

  How much pain could I deal with?

  How much isolation could I endure?

  I embraced it all and relished every minute.

  Aerial skiing was so great. That feeling I got from each jump – and the somersaulting and the landing – is indescribable. It’s an adrenaline rush of fear, excitement and accomplishment.

  As an elite athlete, I had to know my body well. I needed to understand the mechanics of my instrument, and the science behind it, in order to get the best out of it and fix it when it broke.

  Fortunately, I love all that stuff. I was intrigued by and actively engaged in all my medical procedures. I always read my charts, studied my MRI reports and examined all the scans. Over the years, I collected loads of medical books and, who knows, if I hadn’t been an athlete I might have chosen a medical career.

  I’ll save that for my next life, I suppose.

  Throughout my thirties, as the variety and extent of my injuries steadily increased, I was not oblivious to what might have been going on inside. But internal trauma is difficult to detect. When I dislocated my hip and damaged my pelvis, I was focused on healing the bones and ligaments so that I could get back on my skis again and ready myself for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. It hadn’t occurred to me that a jolt like that could cause immense trauma and scarring to my uterus, too.

  To be honest, I’d never given much thought to what was happening with my reproductive organs and my fertility. I had been a late developer, and I was skinny throughout my childhood and teenage years. I remember I had to beg my mum to buy me a bra to wear the Year 11 dance, even though I didn’t need one. It was just far too embarrassing to be the only sixteen-year-old not wearing one.

  As for periods, I had only a couple of light bleeds before sport took over and my periods stopped altogether. It’s not uncommon for female athletes to cease menstruating as they hone their bodies to the unnatural state that high-level performance requires, and I was no exception. Looking back, I understand now that my reproductive system never really got a proper start. It was as if my body decided that this was not a safe environment to nurture a baby and it never started ovulating. While I was an athlete, it just wasn’t an issue.

  But I didn’t ignore that side of my health. I was always careful with contraception, and I had been seeing the same excellent gynaecologist, Dr Ravi Kashyap, since 2002. For many reasons, I didn’t want to go on the contraceptive pill, so Ravi fitted me for an IUD and from then on he became part of my team of health practitioners.

  Then, in 2006, after the Torino Winter Olympics, Ravi casually asked me during one of my appointments, ‘So, when am I going to deliver your babies?’ He knew I wanted kids. I was thirty-three years old and I had been engaged to Mario for nearly four years. It suddenly struck me that this was something I needed to seriously consider, and it had better be sooner rather than later.

  Ravi and I discussed the fact that I had never had proper periods and that sport, stress, travel and injury were probably big contributing factors to this. Ravi believed that my periods would come back once I finally took my foot off the pedal and retired from sport. My body would shift into ‘female mode’, and I could relax a little and put on some weight. I would become a soft, curvy woman – no longer a lean, mean, jumping machine. But when would that be?

  So Mario and I began to talk about having children. For me, it was a no-brainer; I’d wanted kids since I was a kid myself and I couldn’t imagine going through life without them. Now I had this wonderful man who I loved to bits and the idea of creating our own family was definitely on the agenda.

  It wasn’t as simple as that for Mario. He’s a cautious man and a deep thinker. He likes to look at things from every angle, especially when it’s such a life-altering decision as starting a family.

  As potential parents, Mario and I were both incredibly busy people. Mario had only ever known me as an athlete wearing a ski suit, living a totally self-centred life. When I was in training camps and in competition, everything was organised for me: accommodation, travel, meals and training. How would I transition from a spoilt athlete, waited on hand and foot, to an ordinary woman, who might struggle to take care of herself let alone a small child?

  When you’re inside an athlete’s life, you don’t have a whole lot of objectivity about who you are as
a person. You’re a kind of machine, fixed on your goal, and Mario could see that. Understandably, it was hard for him to imagine me as a mum. I remember arguing with him about it. I’d accuse him: ‘You think I’d do a shitty job, don’t you?’

  Mario also knew of couples who were not coping with parenthood. He saw women who had been obsessed with having babies more or less fall apart when the reality of raising a child hit home. The husband would have to step in and take over and the relationship would falter, often permanently.

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Mario would say softly, shaking his head.

  In 2006 we talked it through and decided that, despite my advancing age, now just wasn’t the time for children. There was still so much I wanted to do in my career (and I went on to win two more world titles and represented Australia at a record fifth Olympics).

  Mario was in two minds about the whole thing. The idea of freezing some embryos – or ‘make now, bake later’ – came up. Freezing embryos sounded fine on paper; it would essentially be a combination of our DNA. As a couple we were solid right now, but in five years’ time what if we had split? Who ‘owned’ the embryos? The implications were huge and there were just too many unknowns to commit to the process. I thought a lot about it for several weeks, and then I went back to Ravi and said, ‘I’m going on to Vancouver – a tilt at my fifth Olympics.’

  Ravi suggested I could freeze some of my eggs to fertilise later, but my focus was now elsewhere so I let it slide. There are very few decisions I’ve made in my life that I’ve come to regret, but I wish that I’d taken Ravi’s advice back then. These days it is quite acceptable, but in 2006 freezing eggs to thaw and fertilise at a later date was not common. An unfertilised egg was less stable and the technology was less developed. There was no guarantee that a frozen egg was a viable prospect. It was also more expensive than freezing embryos, because in 2006 there was no Medicare rebates available, so it wasn’t often done.