Jackie was a Brisbane girl who started out as a sprinter, then switched to the long road less travelled for a dream not a lot of Queenslanders held at the time – hoping to become the eighth Australian skeleton Olympian ever.

Her love for hurtling down the ice face first at more than 100km/h was a shared one with Parsons, also a former runner from London, which brought the pair from opposite sides of the world together.

After first meeting in 2012 it wasn’t until Jackie became a regular on the World Cup tour when the two started getting to know each other. Parsons was further along in building up to his Olympic debut for Team GB at Sochi 2014, and continued to strive for greatness at PyeongChang 2018.

The relationship grew stronger in 2015 and Jackie made her Olympic debut for Australia at PyeongChang 2018, finishing 16th. While Parsons in South Korea became Great Britain’s first male athlete to win a skeleton medal (bronze) at the Olympics in 70 years.

Their engagement shortly followed the Olympic competition and Parsons took a year off from Skeleton, during which they got married.

In early 2020 Jackie was in a bind, COVID-19 had engulfed the world and it was just months after Parsons announced his retirement from Skeleton. Jackie was looking for a new coach.

“She would ask me about various bits and to help out here and there. Then going into the Olympic season she was a bit screwed in terms of having a coach to help her out,” Parsons said.

“She did have an agreement with the Canadian (Skeleton) team, who at the time had a great coach (Eric Bernotas), he coached the British team up until PyeongChang (2018) so I knew him quite well and he’s one of the best coaches there is in the sport. But then the funding just stopped for Canada.”

While the Canadians were looking for a coach, so was Jackie, and an individual’s funding going up against a team’s funding is always going to be an uphill battle.

“So instead she went looking for a partnership where she could just get someone to film her and then analyse the footage herself. Which I helped with through the Olympic season (2020-onwards),” Parsons said.

“She’d basically send me the footage and I’d chat on the phone with her over various lines and what I knew. I spent 10-11 years in the sport obsessing over it so I picked up a fair bit of information during that time. It helped guide Jackie remotely through most of it.”

Jackie found his contribution invaluable and she became eager to formally lock him in as her coach.

“Then for the 2020-21 season, that first COVID season, when I spent three months in Korea we got some good practice at coaching via FaceTime,” the Beijing 2022 silver medallist said.

“St Moritz (in 2021) was the first event where I said ‘you’re actually going to coach (exclusively)… please.’

“Dom is so good at the plotting of tracks, which is probably the number one reason I wanted him as coach.”

Back at St Moritz in Switzerland 12 months, later Jackie had done what no Australian had done before, win a Skeleton World Cup event.

Her previous Personal Best World Cup finish was seventh at Lake Placid, USA in 2016.

"I knew today I had the potential to go fast but didn't think quite that fast," Jackie said at the time.

"This has been going for so long … it's a perfect day in a perfect place.”

Parsons had a feeling this kind of result was in store for Jackie.

“Right from the start of the season Jackie had some great speed in some training runs, then some training runs with not as much speed,” he said.

“There were just little bits I think were learning experiences for Jackie as well. Maybe it was top five in training and maybe this race could go really well, then setting her expectations and getting a bit too tense and messing up the race.

“[St Moritz] is a track built from scratch every year, not like the concrete tubes that are iced up and pretty set in terms of the corner geometries. They ship in all the snow and calve it out by hand each year.

“One of my strengths from when I was an athlete was being able to read the ice, understand track character and being able to predict how a corner is going to behave before actually going through it. That was quite an advantage in terms of being able to quickly dive into the track in St Moritz, where the traditional more old-fashioned way is to bring last year’s track notes – which obviously isn’t as effective.

“We both love that track as well, it's such a beautiful track to slide.”

Jackie proved she belongs in the top echelon of skeleton athletes when she won silver at Beijing 2022. She credits her time being isolated in South Korea navigating a forced break from competition during the beginning of the pandemic as massively important.

“It put a bit of a halt to the whole comparison thing. It took me out of constantly comparing myself to everyone else, but also the day-to-day of ‘they are doing this, so I should be doing this,’” Jackie said.

“Being on a completely different track in a completely different time zone doing something completely different was the best thing we could have done for Beijing in the end.”

Olympics.com.au sat down with Jackie and reflected on her Beijing 2022 memories through a series of photos.

Olympics.com.au: This is one was taken moments after your fourth and final run. Did you know you had a guaranteed medal at this point?

Jackie: That point was the realisation ‘have I actually done what I think I’ve just done?’

In Beijing the out run has three different levels to it. The first level you come up and you just try to sit up and calm down from what just happened. On the second rise there is a clock, and the clock has your rank and then your combined time. So coming up on that second rise I’ve seen the number one and then known immediately that I had at least a silver medal. So I’ve gone ‘YES!’ Then on the third rise, that’s when it kind of sunk in where I went ‘Wait, was that clock right?’ So I’m trying to find the other clock to read that right so I wasn’t missing numbers.

Olympics.com.au: Now over to the athlete moment screen before the medal ceremony, who was that you could see? What did you say?

Jackie: That’s one of my best mates from school. There was no audio. I could kind of see and hear her, but I don’t think she could hear me. Mum and dad were being interviewed by Channel Seven so they were no longer on that screen. 

And I was being yanked away to go get ready for the medal ceremony. We were being yanked left, right and centre and that was just chaos.

Olympics.com.au: Describe how you felt in that moment when jumping on the podium.

Jackie: It’s the most uncoordinated jump I have ever done.

I was still kind of processing what had happened. There were eight minutes between when Hannah, who won, got off the sled and when we were walking up for that medal ceremony. So I was still calming down from the adrenaline from the run while dealing with everything else that was going on.

Being in spikes didn’t help either, everyone else was in shoes. I was thinking ‘I know I should jump, but I don’t want to stack it!’ It just turned out to be that.

Olympics.com.au: How would you describe kissing the medal to someone who has never done it before? Was the medal freezing cold?

Jackie: No it wasn’t [freezing cold]. That was just your mind going ‘nobody is taking this off me… I get to keep it.

‘Finally I have one of these.’

After the Olympics Jackie took the opportunity to see her parents at home in Brisbane for five weeks and reflected on her achievement.

“They were stoked, they still are. It was nice to just hang out with them, do normal stuff and everything that we missed.

“They watched the entire race, so they knew a lot more about what happened from the actual race itself than I did.

“They had seen how much airtime I managed to get after day one (of her competition) had happened. They were amazed people wanted to talk to them, not just me.

It was her first visit back home since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Jackie visited a couple of schools to share in her Olympic journey.

Through Olympics Unleashed she spoke to 150 students from years four to six in Deception Bay and passed around her medal.

"Being back in the classroom, seeing the kids and getting that instant feedback and connection was so fantastic," Jackie said in Brisbane.

"Especially when they got to hold the medal.

“I also got to go back to my primary school two days before I left. My old PE teacher is still there so it was nice to show them the medal and give her a big hug.”

Jackie is back in the UK and enjoying the off-season.

“I’m starting to do a bit more activity, but it’s more leisure focused and just making sure I’m still moving.

“I finished my interior design course so I’d like to get at least a foot in the door with that.

Parsons is enjoying the change of pace, happy that coaching has taken a back seat.

“As we got closer to the Games I was more a coach (role) than husband. It was nice to go back to being a husband afterwards,” he said.

That doesn’t mean he’s off the hook, as Jackie doesn’t want another one of her coaches being poached.

“The Brits have nicked every single coach I’ve ever had! It was nice to finally get one back.”

She already has one eye on the 2023 Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Championships taking place in St Moritz.

Jeff Dickinson-Fox