More than 5,500 athletes from 80 countries will compete in 86 disciplines in 15 different sports. The Canadian Olympic Team features 206 athletes including, counting 35 B.C. athletes who have the distinct honour of representing their country at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games on home soil. Of these, 12 athletes call the Sea to Sky Corridor home.
Ma毛lle Ricker (women's snowboard cross)
Squamish's Ricker is Canada's best hope for gold when women's snowboard cross hits Cypress Mountain on Feb. 16.
The 31-year-old Olympic veteran won the Crystal Globe as overall World Cup winner in 2008 and is ranked No. 1 after five races this season.
Ricker placed fourth when the sport made its Olympic debut at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, but had to recover from injury after crashing in the final.
She also placed 23rd in the halfpipe that year after placing fifth in the event at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. She missed the 2002 Salt Lake City Games due to knee injury.
Ricker has 11 career World Cup gold medals and 22 career podiums in World Cup snowboard cross. She is also a two-time X Games gold medalist.
Nicknamed Mighty Mouse, Ricker enjoys riding fresh powder, biking and hiking when she's not competing around the world.
Rob Fagan (men's snowboard cross)
Fagan, 33, has been on the national team for eight years and has recorded three of his best five World Cup finishes in the last year, including a silver medal in December's event in Telluride, Colorado.
Although the 麻豆社国产boarder has never competed in an Olympic Games, Fagan is having a breakout season and is ranked No. 4 overall after five World Cup races.
When he's not competing, Fagan can be found mountain biking, rock climbing, skateboarding or surfing.
Justin Lamoureux (men's halfpipe)
Lamoureux has a degree in mechanical engineering but chose to travel the world with his board.
The 33-year-old became the first snowboarder to qualify for the 2010 Olympics by recording two fifth-place World Cup finishes at Cypress Mountain and Quebec City's Stoneham Resort last season.
Lamoureux placed second at the 2005 World Snowboard Championships in Whistler and has experience at the 2006 Turin Winter Games, where he placed 21st.
He enjoys traditional 麻豆社国产activities like mountain biking and climbing, but is also into woodworking.
Megan Tandy (women's biathlon)
Tandy has experience at two World Championships but is entering the Olympic realm for the first time.
The 21-year-old Prince George native moved to 麻豆社国产to be closer to the Olympic Nordic venue in the Callaghan Valley and has since posted personal best results at World Cup races in Slovenia, including a 21st placing in a 7.5-kilometre sprint field of 108 competitors in December.
Robbie Dixon (alpine skiing)
Whistler's Robbie Dixon has served noticed of his strength and skill on the World Cup circuit over the last few years, with four World Cup top-10 results so far this season. The 25-year-old has eight World Cup top 10 results to his credit, and he's driven to reach the same heights as his teammates have: Dixon is hungry for his first podium.
After suffering a concussion in Austria in January, Dixon has been training hard and returning to form. He says he's been skiing the way he was before his off-hill accident - and his skiing then was earning acclaim from teammates and coaches.
Dixon will be making his Olympic debut on a track that he calls one of his favourites to ski, and he's looking forward to the once-in-a-lifetime experience of competing in a hometown Games. One of the first faces he'll see when he reaches the bottom of the track in training runs is his grandmother's: She'll be collecting racer bibs.
Britt Janyk (alpine skiing)
Whistler's Britt Janyk, a past World Cup winner, is a determined racer and Canadian team veteran, a member of the national team since 1996. The 29-year-old has proven her toughness time and again. She powered to her first World Cup victory in a December 2007 triumph in Aspen, Colo., winning a downhill race amid challenging conditions to make her the first Canadian woman to win a World Cup downhill since Kate Pace-Lindsay in December 1993. Janyk earned a bronze medal in another downhill event just one week before that in Lake Louise.
Named Alpine Canada's female athlete of the year after her medal-winning season, Janyk has sped into the World Cup top 10 an impressive 25 times in her career, in downhill, super G, giant slalom and combined events.
This season hasn't been easy for the Canadian women's team, as a strong start in Lake Louise was undermined by injuries to teammates. But Janyk wrote in a recent blog post that she could feel wind filling their sails again with just weeks to go before the Games, and she herself was feeling strong and having fun.
Michael Janyk (alpine skiing)
Whistler's slalom specialist is heading home for the 2010 Games with top-15 finishes in every World Cup race except one so far this season, including two fifth-place results. The 27-year-old is also backed by his history-making performance at the 2009 FIS World Ski Championships, where he became the first Canadian man to medal in a world championship technical event by winning bronze in the slalom race.
Having fallen out of the world top 15 due to a back injury, Janyk started last season ranked 55th, but went on to achieve four top-10 results last January and rolled onward to his medal-winning performance on a very tough race hill. Janyk finished 17th in the slalom race at the 2006 Olympics, and he sits 10th in the men's World Cup slalom standings.
The Vancouver-born racer moved with his family to Whistler at age 14 so he and sister Britt could pursue their skiing careers, and Janyk has said he can't wait to race on his home hill in the Olympics and welcome the world to Whistler.
Ashleigh McIvor (ski cross)
Last season, Ashleigh McIvor booked an early berth on the Canadian Olympic team by showing she can deliver under pressure. The ski cross star became the women's world champion last March with a gritty performance in Japan, and she sped onto the World Cup podium four times last season, including her silver-medal win in the future Olympic venue at Cypress Mountain.
The 26-year-old Whistlerite and Pemberton resident will surely be in the spotlight as her sport of head-to-head racing makes its Olympic debut at Cypress. Fortunately, she says she's skiing better than she ever has. That's after winning a silver medal in the Winter X Games, at the ski cross last race before the Games, and reaching the four-person finals in five of seven World Cup races this season.
McIvor has won four World Cup medals this season, including her first gold, and doesn't seem to be slowing down at all.
Julia Murray (ski cross)
A birth announcement for Whistler's Julia Murray, daughter of legendary Crazy Canuck ski racer Dave Murray and world champion freestyle skier Stephanie Sloan, offers a beautiful harbinger of the ski cross racer's future. It says that "the only question now is, 'Will she be a freestyle skier or a downhill racer?'" The answer seems to be that she'll combine a bit of both, and do it well.
A former alpine racer, Murray made the Canadian freestyle ski team for the 2010 Olympics as a top ski cross threat after a successful start to her season, where she won the second and third World Cup medals of her career with silver and bronze in early events. Last season, the 21-year-old cracked the World Cup podium for the first time by winning bronze in the second-last race of the season.
Murray is currently rehabilitating a knee injury she sustained in training runs for the Lake Placid World Cup race, but continues to work toward racing in her sport's Olympic debut on Feb. 23.
Mercedes Nicoll (snowboard)
Mercedes Nicoll's prior Olympic experience taught her that she really wanted another shot at the Games, after she fell in a run at the 2006 halfpipe snowboard event and wound up finishing 27th. The 26-year-old Whistlerite has been feeling more confidence this season than she did last year, and she's been honing the smoothness and consistency of her runs.
The six-time World Cup halfpipe medallist had a strong summer of training leading into this season, further improving her riding and finding herself more excited to snowboard than ever. A former skier and figure skater, Nicoll saw all her friends snowboarding in Whistler and thought to herself that she wanted to do that, soon finding herself charging the pipe as a young teenager.
Riding in Cypress, she's looking to focus on her run and feel happy about what she's put down in the pipe.
Manuel Osborne-Paradis (alpine skiing)
Winner of three World Cup medals already this season, including his victories in the Lake Louise super G race and the downhill event in Val Gardena, Whistler Mountain Ski Club alumnus Manuel Osborne-Paradis is someone who has shown he can deliver when it counts. The speedster's increased experience and confidence has been showing through on the World Cup circuit this season, and he has worked hard to lay out a game plan for every course.
The 25-year-old - who turns 26 on Monday (Feb. 8) - says his family tells him he's been a "fuel-injected kid right from the start." Osborne-Paradis is known for his sense of humour and relaxed nature off the hill, but also for his focus and commitment to his racing.
Osborne-Paradis has won nine World Cup medals thus far in his career, all in downhill except for that super G victory at the start of the season, and he currently sits third in the men's World Cup downhill standings behind Switzerland's Didier Cuche and Carlo Janka. He finished 13th in the downhill and 20th in the super G at the 2006 Olympics.
His goal, as stated on his website, is "to be the fastest downhill skier in the world."
Kristi Richards (freestyle skiing)
This Pemberton resident is a 2007 world champion for women's moguls who opened her season with an absolute bang. Richards rocketed to the top of the standings by winning gold and silver medals in the first two World Cup moguls events of the season, making a decisive statement after struggling with her World Cup results in the previous season.
She has finished sixth, seventh and ninth in events since then and sits fifth in women's moguls standings, with teammate Jennifer Heil leading the way.
A nine-time World Cup medallist, Richards closed last season with a major achievement, digging deep to deliver a fifth-place finish in the world championships in Inawashiro, Japan. At this point, she says her skiing is where she wants it to be.
The 28-year-old finished seventh in the 2006 Olympics, and stood fourth overall in the World Cup standings after the 2007-08 season.
