Former Winter Olympian Anna Willcox will be part of Sky Sport's team broadcasting from Italy next month. Photo / Sky TV
“We don’t want you to do this any more. You’ve got so much more life ahead of you.”
Those were the words Anna Willcox’s parents said to her after the Olympic freestyle skier broke her back on a skifield in France, just two months after suffering a debilitating concussion.
They were not the words Willcox, now a mum-of-two and a broadcaster with Sky’s offbeat sports entertainment show The Crowd Goes Wild, wanted to hear.
“I was in denial about it [retirement] for a long time,” she told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
“When I broke my back, the closest airport was actually in Barcelona, and I remember leaving my ski bag with a friend who lived there because I was adamant I was gonna be back in three months.
“I was like, ‘I’ll be back for the world championships, no worries’, and I literally left my ski bag there. That’s how adamant I was that I wasn’t gonna be retiring.”
But then came the “big turning point”, thanks to a difficult conversation with her parents.
“I had this really big concussion about September 2016, and then two months later, I broke my back,” Willcox recalled to Cowan.
“My parents have always been really supportive of my career and skiing – even though as a mum now, I’m like, ‘oh my God, please don’t choose a sport like this’.”
“But there was a big turning point around that time. They sat me down and were like, ‘we actually don’t support this any more, and we would kick ourselves if something really big happened that you couldn’t come back from and we didn’t have this conversation’.
“So they had a really blunt conversation with me where they were like, ‘we don’t want you to do this any more, you’ve got so much more life ahead of you’.
“At the end of the day, the decision had to be mine and I did come to it on my own, but that conversation hit me more than I realised.”
Just five years into her career, Willcox announced her retirement from sport, going on to launch a career in broadcasting and later becoming a mum.
But it coincided with a difficult period in her life, in which Willcox fell into depression on multiple occasions.
“One period was before my kids were born … it literally came out of nowhere and there wasn’t really anything significant in my life that had happened for me.
“I went to therapy, and that really helped. It took about six months of going to therapy, if not more, to come through that.
“For me it was like anxiety and panic attacks, which I’d never had before, and the therapy really helped manage it in some ways.”
Willcox also had “pretty severe” post-partum depression after the birth of her second child, and on this occasion she leant on medication to get her through.
“It was so bad. I laugh because I’m through it, thank God, and I’m not planning to have any more children… but that was the first time in my life I took [depression] medication and I really needed it. It was a game-changer.
“That was actually a moment where I got the Olympic rings tattooed on me because I just wanted a reminder of the fact I had done something really hard before and I could get through this as well.”
Now, nearly a decade on from the heartache of retiring, and 12 years since her Sochi Olympics appearance in 2014, Willcox is returning to the Winter Olympics next month - as a broadcaster.
She’ll be flying to Milano Cortina in Italy as part of the Sky team, covering the Games for The Crowd Goes Wild – an opportunity Willcox tells Real Life feels like a “full circle” moment.
“When I came into working for Sky it was 2018, and I literally had just started and the Pyeongchang Olympics was only a few weeks away… and then the next [Winter] Olympic Games in Beijing, I just had my first baby, so the timing was bad there.
“Now it’s like, okay, this is my time.”
Willcox says the New Zealand Winter Olympic team is full of medal potential, led by superstar snowboarder Zoi Sadowski-Synnott.
“It’s such a young team; she’s one of the veterans and she’s like 24-years-old, which is wild,” she told Cowan.
“Alice Robinson, she’s a bit of a vet, this is actually her third Olympic Games. She’s an alpine skier and she’s been on form the last year and a bit.
“And then in the park and pipe, you’ve got [freestyle skier] Luca Harrington, who’s had a big year; he’s the current Big Air world champion.
“And then you’ve got Fin Melville Ives, who’s just on fire right now in the half pipe, and also Luke Harrold too – so there’s two big medal hopes in the Olympic halfpipe. It should be very exciting to watch.”
The 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano Cortina kicks off on February 6 and runs until February 22.
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