NZsnowboard.com

6th August 2008

New qualification criteria for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games just dropped and theyve been majorly overhauled since Torino.

The new guidelines require not only, as in years past, that riders nail a top-30 finish in a World Cup and 100 FIS points between July 2008 and January 25, 2010, but countries must also now lock in a Nations Quota of riders in the overall World Cup standings between January 18, 2009 and January 18, 2010. The number of positions that each country has in those rankings will determine the number of riders, up to four per event and a total team size of 18 (up from 16), that a country can send to the games.

This new system, which the IOC agreed to for logistical reasons, including to fix the field size, elevates the importance of World Cup attendance and is necessitating some serious schedule juggling already to lock in the Nations Quota by early December 09 so riders can focus on the Grand Prix, which will still be used to determine who fills the US spots regardless of the individual riders that sealed the quota.

We disagree with this system, says US Snowboarding Program Director Jeremy Forster. We were forced into this. We feel like the system that was used in 2006 worked really well for all the nations. We werent forced onto the FIS World Cup to earn our Olympic team size. Obviously FIS had their reasons for doing this. It conveniently forces everyone onto the FIS World Cup, which will help legitimize them and sell sponsorships. I think most nations agree. Look what happened in 2006. It was such a great show for the sport and for the Olympics and so I think there was universal agreement that the system worked and why would we try and mess with that?

All the nations are going to be pretty focused on the World Cup for the next 6-7months so thats going to mean pretty heavy competition, says Forster, whose team has not placed a great deal of importance on the World Cup, or its schedule and skier based culture in years past. Our goal is to figure out how we can get on there and seal up our Nations Quotas as quickly as possible and figure out how we get high enough up in the rankings that even if we miss a few at the end were not going to drop out of the top 40 for men and top 30 for women.

Debuting in 2010 will be a 22-foot pipe at the Olympic games as well as slopestyles first appearance on the World Cup. Adding slopestyle to the Olympics is a major initiative for us, says Forster. Slopestyle needs to be established within the FIS World Cup, then World Championships before it can be considered for Olympic inclusion by the IOC. We have been working for a couple of years to get this going, and slopestyle will be a World Cup event this season with the first World Cup taking place in Bardonecchia, Italy February 5-7. We also are proposing that the 2011 FIS World Championships include slopestyle. This at least sets up the time line for it to be included in the 2014 Olympics.