Forget the rough and tumble of Pyeongchang: Winter Olympics is no match for skills needed to be a new parent

Gliding over the white surface, launching off the ground and executing a perfect landing, the judges have every reason to be impressed with this performance from the competitor from Great Britain.

It’s slick, fast and perfectly executed. It’s an outing on to the rink from someone who belongs on the medal winners’ podium.

The discipline requires strength, perseverance, patience and the ability to work miracles under pressure.

Sadly, much though you may have assumed I was, I’m not talking about figure skating in the winter Olympics, rather I’m talking about my own form of endurance sport — caring for a newborn.

It’s 2am and our little bundle is screaming for food. But silly mum has left the medicine required before each feed on the kitchen counter, which is a perilous four rooms away from the nursery over slippery white tiles, the way lit only by moonlight.

You name any sport featured at Pyeongchang, I can promise you my husband and I would give the gold medallist a run for their money.

So begins our event, with our sleep-deprived gold-medal hopeful double-toe looping over the dog, performing a triple axel over the baby gym carelessly strewn in the hallway and turning a near-slip on water left over from the kitchen-sink bath into a slick lutz.

It’s just one of a slew of winter sports inspired by events my husband and I have become pros at during the first month of our daughter’s life.

As we sit, eyes propped open with matchsticks, watching the various events on television each evening, we remark on just how good we’d be at most of them with our new found parenting skills.

You name any sport featured at Pyeongchang, I can promise you my husband and I would give the gold medallist a run for their money.

Take the biathlon, for example. As any parent would tell you, nothing requires endurance like the 4am pacing around the local park with the pram at a precise speed to ensure your little bundle remains asleep for the precious minutes required to keep them that way for at least an hour. Eat that, you cross-country skiers from Austria.

Then, once that blissful moment is reached, the painstaking skill and precise targeting required to transfer said bundle from pram to bassinet without shaking, disturbing or waking the fussy thing. Those shooters have nothing on this Pom nursing a newborn.

The biggest difference between raising a child and the Olympics, however, is that, alas, there are no actual medals for parenting. But our little Aussie’s smiles are worth so much more than gold.