Alpine skier Toby Kane has won Australia's first medal of the Sochi Winter Paralympics with bronze in the super-combined at Rosa Khutor.
It has taken until the seventh day of competition for Australia to get onto the medals table as a combination of poor runs, bad luck and the inexplicable circumstance that led to the disqualification of Melissa Perrine put it at risk of its worst performance in 26 years.
However, Kane has looked the most likely skier to earn a podium and was fourth in then men's standing classification after the first component of the super-combined, the slalom, but he then had to wait three days for Super-G element that was postponed from Tuesday because of heavy snow and fog.
He was able to leapfrog Adam Hall when he posted a time which was more than half a second faster than the New Zealander, despite making what he thought was "a pretty decent mistake".
With a combined time of two minutes 14.40 seconds he then had to wait for the final skiers to complete their runs with Russian star Alexey Bugaev picking up his second gold and fourth medal with 2:09.72 and Matthias Lanzinger snatching second (2:10.82).
"I thought it was going to be tough," Kane said.
"I was pretty disappointed with my slalom run the other day. That was probably my worst run of the games and I thought the distance to third was going to be hard to get so I'm just amazingly happy."
Teammate Mitch Gourley finished fifth with a combined time of 2:14.38, giving Antipodean competitors claim three of the top five positions, an impressive result when they do not have a training facility for the speed event in the region. He will now go into his pet giant slalom race on Saturday confident of living up to his No.1 ranking.
"I'm just really excited for Tobes," Gourley said.
"Obviously you look at it and you go '0.2 behind, woah what could have been' but it's awesome to see Tobes and for Adam to be fourth and me to be fifth, you've got three people from Australia and New Zealand in the top five and we don't really have a Super-G.
"It's my best-ever result in a Paralympics and I've got my best event (on Saturday) so it certainly gives me a huge amount of confidence and I think it will life the spirits of team. Hopefully it will stop everyone talking about the lack of medals."
