Thompson solidifies spot on Olympic team
Wins all four heats to stamp ticket
Making an Olympic Games team should be a challenge, right? But earning a spot on the powerful and deep Canadian freestyle squad that will go to Sochi next month is proving as tough a task as trying to get onto a UBC Dean’s list.
Consider the plight of B.C. skiers Georgia Simmerling and Andi Naude.
After a seventh-place finish Friday at a World Cup ski cross race in Val Thorens, France, Simmerling, a 24-year-old West Vancouver native, is a very solid seventh in the World Cup standings. Naude, a Penticton native who just turned 18, is eighth in the women’s World Cup moguls standings with a fourth and two eighthplace finishes this season.
Yet, incredibly, despite being top 10 in the world, both are on the bubble as far as making the 26-athlete national freestyle team. The Olympic qualifying period ends Sunday, with a handful of freestyle events on tap for the weekend.
With a quota of just 26 spots and restrictions that allow for no more than 14 athletes of one gender and no more than four athletes per discipline, it’s an ultracompetitive fight between teammates who you compete side-by-side with and those in different disciplines whose results you track on the Internet.
And it would be even worse if wasn’t a down year for Canadian aerialists. For the first time in history, Canada won’t send a single woman to the Olympics in the discipline, with nobody ranked high enough. And only one male — Travis Gerrits, a World Cup winner this season — is headed to Sochi after Olivier Rochon sustained a seasonending knee injury.
It’s a complicated formula to determine the 26 spots, one that is all about rankings and results, injury clauses and a three tier structure that accounts for World Cup and world championship results and whether they were accomplished last season or this season.
The ski cross team had a terrific day Friday in Val Thorens. Marielle Thompson of Whistler won her second World Cup of the season to widen her lead in the overall women’s standings and is definitely headed to Sochi along with former world champion Kelsey Serwa of Kelowna, who did not compete Friday. “I’m definitely skiing with a lot of confidence,” said Thompson, who won all four of her heats after getting the holeshot out of the starting gate.
Dave Duncan of Whistler, Brady Leman of Calgary and Chris Del Bosco of Montreal finished third, fourth and fifth, respectively, in the men’s event. Duncan and Leman already had Olympic spots clinched, while Del Bosco looks to have locked up a berth.
With six wins among his 18 World Cup podiums, the 31-year-old Bosco has been Canada’s most successful male ski cross racer. He was world champion in 2011 and second in the World Cup standings three consecutive seasons — 2009-2011 — and, notably, crashed off the final jump at the 2010 Olympics at Cypress while trying to move into third place.
But after missing much of 2012-2013 to injury and then starting this season with finishes of 45th, 50th, 29th and 15th, he was under the gun at the double event in France to make the Olympic team. He got credit for a win Thursday when he qualified second and won his heat in the round of 32 before high winds cancelled the rest of that day’s racing.
He didn’t crack the podium Friday, but after finishing last in the four-skier semifinal behind Duncan and Leman, he bounced back to win the consolation final to earn fifth.
“I did pretty much everything I could this weekend to give myself a shot,” said Del Bosco, who was second in last season’s test event at Sochi. “At the end of the day, that’s all I can really do.”
Whether Simmerling joins Thompson and Serwa in Sochi depends in part on how halfpipe skiers Megan Gunning and Keltie Hansen and slopestyle skier Yuki Tsubota of Pemberton, who was ninth Friday in the first of back-to-back events, perform this weekend at a U.S. Grand Prix in Park City, Utah.
Naude sits behind the three Dufour-Lapointe sisters — Justine (second overall on the World Cup circuit), Maxime (third) and Chloe (fourth) — as well as the injured Audrey Robichaud. She can potentially knock out Maxime if she secures a podium finish Sunday and finishes ahead of the Quebecer on Sunday. But she could also be late add for Robichaud if the veteran doesn’t pass a medical evaluation to determine her fitness for Sochi.