If, like this weather and snow lover, you sat up late watching Australia's Jakara Anthony win gold in the moguls at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics on Sunday night, you might be wondering how much training they do at home.

In other words, was this a win not just for a fine young Australian athlete, but for Aussie snow and our own humble mountains and the limited winter sports training facilities they provide?

The short answer is yes.

GOLD MEDAL ALERT 🥇🥇🥇

Jakara Anthony has just WON the Women's Mogul Final! 🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/C39nXpMU3e

— 7Olympics (@7olympics) February 6, 2022

It's a pretty common narrative to hear TV commentators gush about how Australia punches above its weight because we have so little snow compared to countries like Norway and the USA which tend to top the Winter Olympics medal tally.

But Australia did something pretty clever a couple of decades ago. It started the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia after the Nagano 1998 Games. The Institute's funding targeted sports in which Australia could compete on our terms.

We're talking about sports like freestyle skiing (which includes the discipline of mogul skiing) and certain snowboarding events which only require moderate-sized hills rather than giant Alps. As in, the type of snow-covered terrain that we have.

That approach has yielded medals at every Olympics since Nagano in sports like moguls, snowboard cross, snowboard halfpipe and aerial skiing.

Australia now has a world-class moguls course at Perisher, underneath the Ridge Quad Chairlift at Mt Blue Cow, on which the world's best come to compete in their off-season most years. The course is called Toppa's Dream, in honour of pioneering Aussie moguls coach Peter Topalovic.

The really great thing about Matt Graham’s medal is that moguls is the one Winter Olympic sport where Aussie athletes do lots of on-snow training at home thanks to the fantastic course @PerisherResort.

For the last time, here’s Matt training at home last August #pyeongchang2018 pic.twitter.com/p5bnOBE430

— Anthony Sharwood â�„ï¸� (@antsharwood) February 12, 2018

There's also a smaller training course on a nearby slope called Mogul Matt's, named after Aussie mogul skier Matt Graham, who won silver four years ago at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics.

Australia also employed one of the world's best coaches as moguls head coach – American Steve Desovich – who competed in moguls in 1988 for the USA but who has since spent more than 20 years in Australia.

We also have a new, purpose-built $6.5 million training centre in Brisbane where mogul skiers, aerial skiers and others can practice their jumps off-snow on ramps that end up in a large pool.

So while our Aussie mogul skiers (and other Winter Olympians) must still live and train overseas for many months of the year – which puts them at a disadvantage compared to northern hemisphere athletes – they still get plenty of training time at home in both summer and winter.

Jakara Anthony grew up skiing at Mt Buller, near Melbourne, so her Beijing gold medal was a victory for the sunshine of Brisbane, the snow of Victoria and New South Wales, and good old Aussie ingenuity and smarts.

Let's be clear, it was also a win for Anthonys everywhere (see the byline atop this story!)