(June 28, 2021) – For our fifth athlete profile of 2021 (and the 27th in the “Getting to Know…” series) we chat with Australia’s Jackie Narracott! Jackie has been on the IBSF World Cup circuit since the 2014/2015 season and is looking to qualify for her second Olympics after sliding in the 2018 Winter Games, where she finished 16th. Most recently she spent the bulk of the COVID season training and racing in Pyeongchang, with one stopover in Igls for an eighth place effort in her lone World Cup race of the season.
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Slider: Jackie Narracott
Team: Australian Skeleton
Home track: Lake Placid
Hometown: Brisbane, AUS / Chippenham, UK
Sponsors: Olympic Winter Institute of Australia, Queensland Academy of Sport, Mum & Dad
What would you consider your favorite track, and why?
St. Moritz doesn’t count because it’s everyone’s favorite track! You just can’t compare it to anything else because it’s absolutely like nothing else, so that’s its own separate category. So other than that, I think Königssee is up there, Lake Placid obviously, Park City is fun…but I think Königssee and Placid are the two.
Do you have a favorite part of either track?
The S curves in Königssee are the most fun set of corners on any track! Especially when they’re going right! They’re just so smooth and so flowy and when you get them right you’re straight down Bendaway…usually.
When you come out of S4, if it’s going wrong how soon do you know?
You know pretty much immediately out of S4 if it’s going right or wrong!
Aside from the track, what would you consider your favorite town to visit on the schedule?
Whistler, for the food! There’s no really one specific place though. Pure Bread is a must on every single trip! But also, Park City has Campos which is an Australian café, so whenever we get back to Park City again it’s number one on my priority list. I can get a proper coffee and proper breakfast with poached eggs and chili flakes and everything. It’s just like home.
With not a lot of traditional winter weather at home, how does an Australian get involved in skeleton?
Our Olympic committee started with Talent ID, prior to Torino they looked at the winter sports and figured they could get the best bang for their buck out of women’s skeleton. They sent out this talent ID program, and that’s how Michelle Steele, Emma Lincoln-Smith and everyone else really got involved. I got involved through bobsled. My uncle was a bobsledder, and I was in the right place training with one of our brakemen and they were like “we need a spare, do you want to come across?” I was like “Obviously!” I went to Europe, and with my uncle being a bobsledder it’d always kind of been in the back of my head that I’d like to try it at some point. Before I even stepped foot on ice in Igls I met our skeleton coaches and they were like “You’re too small to be a bobsledder,” which was true then and is still true now! I came home, and curiosity got the better of me. My mom let me go off to Lake Placid for skeleton school in March of 2012, and after two runs for Corner 9 I was like “Alright, I’m done, I’m switching sports!”
This season you spent a lot of time out in Pyeongchang sliding. What was that experience like?
That was the best decision I could have made! Because I got to spend three months just sliding, aside from the couple weeks of quarantine. I got to work on everything that I hadn’t exactly been neglecting, but I hadn’t been able to just sit there and work on it without the stress of everything needing to be perfect because I’m going to be racing in three days’ time. It was nice to just slide and completely disconnect from the whole competition side of things, which it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to spend a good chunk of time just sliding. I got to spend that time with Ash Werner’s team of bobsledders, and we got in the ice house and everything and the Koreans were just great. At least until it got to -30C (-22F) and they had to cancel training! And then it snowed, so at one point we got completely snowed in! We walked to the track because everything else was snowed in, got to the track and then had to hike from the bottom of the hill to the very top of the track to where the gym is so we could do something. So aside from the various sessions being canceled for quite legitimate reasons and then some head scratching reasons, it was really great. It got me out of the stress of being on the tour with COVID, too. I was going to be on my own, I didn’t want to have to worry about which country was closing next, could we get to the next race, how we’re getting home, all on top of trying to race. I went to Igls, checked the box of having eight races for next season [the Olympic qualifying standard] and then was like “Bye!”
That one race that you ran, did you show up just wanting to get two runs in, or was there anything else you were trying to do?
Basically it was “I am going to Igls just to get a race,” but it worked out quite well! Five runs, eighth place and two personal bests!
You had to sit out a bit for head injuries, how has that experience changed how you slide?
It has completely. I’m very much more conscious about what my head is doing and feeling. I will continue to sit out races where the track is too bumpy, like in La Plagne. The major reason La Plagne is tough is that it’s so bumpy and such high pressures, I didn’t want to risk the rest of that season and potentially this season because of another issue. So now if I don’t feel quite right I won’t slide, which is hard at times when everyone else is like “Oh no, it’s fine!” But it’s not for me, I need to be healthy and I need to make it through Beijing and afterwards. I need to be in one piece once I’ve finished sliding.
Tell me about your dog!
Luna! She’s a four month old German shorthair pointer! She’s gorgeous, and is growing ridiculously quickly. Every time we turn around she’s another inch taller, and chewing just about everything! She’s growing out of some of that though, if you put something down she won’t immediately go for it!
Did you get her as a puppy?
It was one of those things where we’d been talking about it for a while, and when we moved whatever place we were looking at needed to be pet friendly because we were going to look for a dog. I started looking for breeders, and three days later we had a puppy!
You’re now married to Olympic bronze medalist Dom Parsons: Did you see each other much on tour while you were dating?
We hardly saw each other on tour! If we were lucky we’d get to go to dinner once a week, usually the night we got to a different place. More often than not we weren’t in the same session, so we’d see each other in passing at the track after race day and that was kind of it. So everyone would comment that we were on tour together, but we really hardly ever saw each other: We stayed in different hotels, were on two very different teams, and we just really didn’t see each other.
Does Dom ever try to coach you some now that he’s retired?
Coaching-wise it’s REALLY nice that he’s not an athlete anymore, because it means I can pick his brain and there’s no conflict of interest and he can be a bit more open, which has definitely helped me some!
You’ve worked with the Canadian team some over the last couple of years, what has that experience been like?
It was great, I had teammates! That was the biggest thing, really: I had people to travel with, people to talk through lines and to a certain extent equipment. And I had people to just go through it all with. I had coaches with video, and it really it took a lot of stress off of me to be the athlete, coach, manager, physio, and the whole team on myself. I could just be an athlete and just a manager to a certain extent.
What is your post-season/pre-preseason like?
Usually for a couple weeks I do absolutely nothing. Then I start to move a little bit, playing tennis with Dom, going for walks and generally trying to stay moving. I will avoid the gym as much as possible, I spend enough time in there as it is! I just try to make sure that things don’t get too “stuck”, so when we do go back it’s not quite as big of a deal on my body.
When you play tennis with Dom who wins?
Definitely Dom! Post-career it could get interesting, but for now it’s definitely Dom.
If you hadn’t gone into sliding, what would you be doing with yourself?
Well I wouldn’t be married to Dom, I’d be in Australia probably doing sport science since that’s what my degree is in. If I hadn’t gotten on that plane to Europe things would have been a whole lot different.
A lot of athletes have to figure out what to do when they’re done sliding. Has your outlook changed at all having seen Dom go through the retirement process?
I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had that part of things there from the beginning. Everyone’s been telling me that I need to have a backup plan, and COVID actually helped a lot with that. When things shut down in March I was thinking about what I was going to do when sliding ends. I’m getting to that point where it’s getting closer, and I went through everything from dietician, massage, and eventually decided that I would start studying interior design. It’s a complete 180 and it’s the best thing ever, I love it! That’s the plan for me post-sliding, going down that career path and it’ll mean starting from the bottom and that’s scary! I always grew up being an athlete and being involved in sport, and it’s going to be nice to step away from that completely. I don’t have to be an athlete forever, I can have other interests!
What was it about design?
It’s always been in the background for me. All of those interior design/home improvement shows I’ve loved since I was a kid, I’d be redesigning my room and everything. Then when we moved houses, finding all of the furniture and making sure everything was going to fit is something I really liked and it dawned on me that maybe I’d like to take a course!
How far along are you in your coursework?
It’s a twelve module course and I’m currently on the eighth module, and it’s all online so once you submit one module you get access to the next one. I’m doing a landscape design module on top of that though, since I’d really love to know more about that kind of thing and bridge the gap between indoor and outdoor spaces. Here, people just use outdoor spaces in the summer, but me being an Aussie, if it’s sunny you want to be outside!
What has been your favorite sliding sport memory?
My seventh place in Lake Placid was pretty cool, mostly because it came a little out of the blue. Going down Pyeongchang the first time was pretty cool, too. John [Farrow] and I were the first ones off for that first international training period so that was really cool.
Also, Winterberg World Championships sticks in my head. It was so loud, and the support was epic! And I don’t know that we’ve gotten close to that since. To be around that environment…of course it was all for Jacka [Lölling], but still…they were still super loud the entire time! I just remember warming up, and the whole atmosphere was electric. They were loud, it was fun, the sun was out for once, it all really helped!
In that Lake Placid race, did you know you had a top ten run at the end of your second run?
Second run not so much, but the first run I did. I was sitting in fourth after that first run and I remember that run feeling good and feeling quick but I didn’t realize how quick until I looked up at the screen and thought “cool!” The second run still felt good, but I wasn’t sure where it put me. Dropping three spots was kind of disappointing, but considering it was my second year on World Cup it wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination.
What’s been the toughest thing you’ve been through in sliding?
The concussion, hands down. To have to pull out of so many World Cup races was so hard, and then was also scary. Because I had to pull out, and I wasn’t go Lake Placid, wasn’t going to Park City, and wasn’t going to Whistler World Champs, two tracks I know I’m really good at and one that I was getting better at, it was horrendous. But I couldn’t walk around town without feeling drunk, so it was scary in not knowing if I’d get back or not. It took me four months to be given the green light to get back to training, and even coming back to that, starting from Corner 6 in Whistler to start the next season was a bit hit to my pride. Everything that kind of went with that, like what happens if I get off my first run and am dizzy, is my career over or do I try again? How does it all play out? My first couple of seasons on World Cup were hard, but nothing compares to that concussion.
Is the concussion still in the back of your mind while you’re racing?
On certain tracks I’m more aware of it than I am others, but that was one of the other good things about Pyeongchang last season: I regained some trust in my head and regained some confidence that I had been lacking. It’s still there, and I know I need to be super cautious of it, but I know it’s okay to push it. If there’s a bump I’ll be fine.
Question from Chris Mazdzer (USA Luge): As someone who’s done a lot of traveling from Australia for skeleton what are some of your travel hacks/tips?
Do it as fast as you can and just get it over with! It’s going to suck, but you just have to do it. The fastest way to get over jetlag is to just get on with it and get stuff done. So coming from Australia we’d land at like 7 in the morning after not having really slept. But if you just get on with your day and get into your routine you kind of get over it quite quickly!
