World Cup skeleton resumes with Canada having shot at 3 Olympic sleds

At the halfway point of the World Cup skeleton schedule, Canada looks to have a shot at sending three sleds — two women's and one men's — to compete at the Beijing Olympics in February.

After four of eight races, Jane Channell and Mirela Rhaneva are the top-ranked sliders on the national team according to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation rankings.

Channell, from North Vancouver, is No. 10 while Ottawa's Rhaneva is No. 13. Rhaneva is fresh off a bronze-medal finish at Winterberg, Germany on Dec. 10. On the men's side, Kyle Murray is the highest-ranked Canadian at No. 33.

The team's next World Cup event is this weekend in Altenberg, Germany, with coverage on CBCSports.ca starting Friday at 3 a.m. ET.

Team Canada Skeleton won't know its official Olympic sled allocation numbers for Beijing until final points are tallied in the new year. Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton said it expects to name its team on Jan. 20, 2022.

If Rhaneva makes it to Beijing, she will at least have the advantage of having raced on the Olympic course. This past October, Rhaneva was part of the group of international sliders who spent three weeks at the Yanqing National Sliding Centre for a Beijing test event.

'We almost didn't need track notes'

She said she loved the course.

"The whole track is kind of like St. Mortiz, but mixed in with Winterberg and Lake Placid," she said. "The first couple of times we went down, [it was so forgiving] we almost didn't need track notes.

"It requires a lot of that very relaxed sliding style that St. Moritz demands, but it also has some funny characteristics, too — like the risk of hitting the roof in corner 2 and the first true 360-degree spiral curve of any track. It was really fun."

Channell has been testing equipment, which has allowed her to learn the tracks in different ways. Despite finishing in the top 12 at every race so far, she has also been struggling to find her form this season. Her last World Cup medal was a bronze at the Konigssee, Germany event last January.

Channell competed at the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, and that experience is helping her during this qualifying process as she says she is "just trying to stay in the present moment."

Canadian skeleton racers had great Olympic success in the early part of this century. Turin 2006 witnessed a one-two punch with a gold-medal performance from Calgary's Duff Gibson that was accented by a silver for Jeff Pain (and a close fourth-place finish from Paul Boehm, another Calgarian). Also in Turin, Mellisa Hollingsworth of Lacombe, Alta., won bronze in the women's event.

Just four short years later, 2010 gave Canadian skeleton racers two of the most memorable moments in both glory and heartbreak. Glory as Jon Montgomery captured Olympic gold and became the iconic athlete who chugged that beer in Whistler village during his victory walk. Heartbreak as Hollingsworth, who was sitting in medal contention after three runs, struggled in her fourth and final descent and dropped to fifth.

The following two Olympics in 2014 and 2018 resulted in no medals for Canada's skeleton racers.