By NATALIA HAWK
Here’s a fun fact to bring up at your dinner party tonight: there are only 200 days to go until the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics. Get ready for Sochi 2014, everybody.
And to celebrate, the Australian Olympic Committee launched the official 2014 Sochi website, naming all 120 athletes that are hoping to compete at the games. Only 50 of those athletes will actually make it to Sochi, and the next 200 days will be determining who qualifies and gets to hop on a plane to Russia.
But there are some athletes that have already made it onto the team. And one of these athletes is Anna Segal – a brilliant skier and the subject of this week’s Sport on Saturdays interview.
Anna and I have a bit in common. We’re both females in our mid-20s. We both have K2 skis. We both have blonde hair.
But that is where the similarities end – because Anna is ridiculously talented when it comes to skiing. Born and bred in inner-city Melbourne, she grew up being dragged to the slopes every weekend by her ex-ski-patrol mum.
“We’d go up every weekend after mum finished work on Fridays,” Anna explains to me. “Four kids into the car and we’d drive three hours up the mountain, stay there for the weekend, ski and then she’d drive us home. I don’t know how she did it, after a full week of work.”