As I sit here beside my lovely wife Chris in our cottage in the mountains overlooking Lake Jindabyne, I reflect on the few weeks, the accident of being in the wrong place at the right time, that transformed my life, my wife's life, so many lives.
The turbulent, passionate times that I should have had in my early years had been eclipsed by the brief, intense period I had instead experienced late in my fifties. It is hard to imagine how such events could have turned me along the path to the peace of both mind and body that I now enjoy.
I remember the days after we had all embarked in Brisbane with a vague plan in my head and the faith my Ladies had had in me. A faith which had worried me: was their faith misplaced?
With no assurance other than my plan, my Ladies had bought land adjoining Kosciuszko National Park at what I thought was an outlandish cost. A much larger tract of land in north Queensland had cost much less. We had called the former Baikal to celebrate its cool climate and the existence of a lake. The latter had become known as Siberia for its remoteness despite its tropical climate, and the name eventually stuck.
We developed Baikal first, building a dormitory and gymnasium to suit fifty athletes. We lived in that dormitory for some months, forty four athletes and one old man who was making progress towards some degree of fitness. My lungs struggled with the altitude, but I had had plenty of support and encouragement.
While living in the dormitory, we built individual units for up to thirty of us at each location, and then Chris and I had taken half the Ladies to Siberia to develop similar facilities there.
That flurry of building in the first year after arriving in Australia had used up nearly all of our combined resources, and it wasn't long before the media took an interest in all this activity. It had been Slava's idea to tell them nothing at all, to stimulate such interest. And her idea worked: we were constantly asked what we were up to.
Once Baikal was complete and some of us were now living in individual accommodation and others had moved to Siberia, we took on our first customer. Despite the Ladies' specialties in other sports, we started with an Australian Rules Football player. Yulia took an interest in a player showing promise in grade football in Eden, a coastal town nearby. Ben clearly had great talent and commitment, but Yulia could see faults in his technique. I wasn't sure how she could know such detail of a sport she had never been involved with - her total experience had been to watch a demonstration match while in Australia for the Olympics - but the Ladies all had complete faith in her judgement, and so did I.
We invited him up to Baikal with his parents for two weeks and the Ladies all worked together to see where improvements could be made. His parents also got some attention, more to show them what we were doing with Ben than to develop their own abilities. However, the mother Beth was a social tennis player and we decided some progress could be made with that.
We maintained an exercise routine for the family to keep their fitness levels, but that wasn't the main focus. Yulia wanted to work with Ben on his awareness of what was happening around him and spent endless hours sitting in a corner with him, walking around him, waving her arms around. She seemed to have a definite idea where she was going with this.
Ben played in a trial match at the end of the two weeks. We all went to watch, making up nearly half the crowd. He wasn't named as best on ground, but his team coach Ron wanted to speak to us afterwards. He told Chris that he had noticed that Ben had developed a feel for what was about to happen and had several times been standing apart from a group of players going for a mark and had, apparently by mere luck, been standing exactly where the ball came out. The 'luck' theory did not appeal to Ron who thought there was more than coincidence at play.
Chris directed him to Yulia who explained that she had noticed a problem in this area and had decided to focus on it.
"When did you see him play?" Ron wanted to know from her. "I haven't seen you at any games before. I would have noticed you."
"I saw the football broadcast on the local channel."
"But they only showed the last quarter of a game six months ago, and Ben was off the field for half of that."
"Yes."
"And you could see exactly what was wrong and how to remedy it?"
"I had an idea and it may have helped."
Ron looked at her. "Hmmm."
This had been a case of dipping the toe in the water, but as it happened Ben was selected by one of the AFL teams early in the draft the following week despite having been ranked very low. The media interest now had a link between our community (which had been such a mystery to them) and something they understood - the Australian Football League, or AFL.
The articles which had previously been along the lines of "What are these people planning?" suddenly focussed on Ben's elevation. A picture taken at the trial match made it to the front page of several major newspapers.
While we were back focussing on development at Siberia another AFL team took an interest. The coach of one of the major teams paid us a visit in person, asking if we would look at one of his players. We got Slava to talk to him. She had noticed Peter, who was in the latter part of his career, and wondered if his repeated injuries were the result of a fault in his technique. She certainly impressed the coach by her knowledge of a player he was enquiring about with us for the first time.
