Simone Aubrecht - a rising talent in the ice rink

The Year 6 Faulconbridge Public School student is a talented figure skater whose increasing belief in her own ability is starting to produce impressive results, here and overseas.

Simone, 11, has mastered manoeuvres including the double axle and double salchow jumps — and a new one called illusion, involving a 1.5 revolution turn leading into a complex jump.

“It’s hard to describe, but the jump turns into doing the splits mid-air,” she said.

“Some moves take a few days to master and others take much longer.

“It’s a very good feeling when jumps and spins you’ve practised turn out to be good in tournaments.

“The key is to go into your moves with a positive feeling and to move confidently.

“The judges look for that and they are always watching figure skaters, even during the warm-ups.”

This year has been the most successful for Simone, who has been figure skating since she turned six under the watchful eyes of her parents Pavel and Linda (of Torvill and Dean’s Dancing on Ice and Holiday on Ice fame) and more recently under coach Yvette Dimitrov.

In April she came 11th out of 25 in the pre-primary ladies free skating category at an International Skating Union development trophy tournament in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and further improved by winning a tournament in Auckland, New Zealand in early May.

But her best result was to come.

Simone said she was elated to secure first place at the prestigious Hollins Trophy tournament held at Canterbury Ice Rink on June 6, as she was up against 21 competitors from Australia and Britain. It is one of the qualifying events for future international junior figure skating competitions.

“I felt pretty confident because I hadn’t done any mistakes and halfway through my 2.5 minute routine I just thought to myself, okay, I’m actually doing this,” Simone said.

“It just began to feel like a regular practice session out there.

“It was fun because I chose The Story of My Life [by One Direction] as the music and my mum helped me with the choreography.

“I made an error on the second last jump, but the rest of my routine was very good, so it was okay.”

The judges gave Simone a combined score of 33.03, ahead of Britain’s Chloe Fraser (32.29) and Australia’s Kitty Masters (30.03).

Simone trains at Penrith Ice Rink four to five times per week and in the winter school holidays she travelled to the Czech Republic with her dad to observe the latest training techniques at an elite training camp.

Mr Aubrecht said Simone is enjoying figure skating more than ever and that’s given her extra motivation and greater preparedness to take on more personal responsibility.

“I think that’s definitely the biggest factor in her success at tournaments now,” he said.

“Simone’s really started to own her performances, her training and her results in the last year or so.

“I could see that at the Hollins Trophy — she was starting to own her performance and had the self-confidence to really go for it.”