Lindsey Vonn, Bode Miller named to U.S. Ski Team for Alpine skiing events at 2010 Winter Olympics
Ski racers Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller top the list of 22 athletes the U.S. Ski Team selected Tuesday for the Alpine skiing events at the 2010 Winter Games, which begin Feb. 12 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Vonn, the top-ranked skier in the world, was among nine skiers named that had previous Olympic experience. The 25-year-old has won every downhill race this season on the FIS Alpine World Cup circuit, and leads the standings in three of five disciplines on that tour.
Representing New York state is 23-year-old Andrew Weibrecht of Lake Placid, who will be making his first Olympic appearance. Weibrecht, a part-time student at Dartmouth College, grew up at the Mirror Lake Inn, a historic hotel owned and operated by his parents in Lake Placid. His parents and all four of his siblings plan to attend the Games.
“We’re absolutely thrilled for him,” Lisa Weibrecht, his mother, told the Daily News after the announcement. “We couldn’t be happier for him.”
Miller, 32, has slowly climbed back toward top form this winter after flirting with retirement last year. Despite a nagging ankle injury and perfunctory preseason conditioning, Miller won a difficult super combined race at Wengen, Switzerland, on Jan. 15.
An avid tennis player whose family has run a well-known tennis camp in New Hampshire for decades, Miller says after the season he will attempt to qualify for the U.S. Open through a new nationwide playoff system that was unveiled by the U.S. Tennis Association on Tuesday.
Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety, who each won gold medals at the 2006 Games in Torino, were named to the team, although neither has won a race yet this season.
Scott Macartney, a veteran of the U.S. Ski Team who battled back from a horrific brain injury at the notoriously dangerous downhill in Kitzbuehel, Austria, in 2008, did not qualify for the team.
Other men selected for the team included Will Brandenburg, Jimmy Cochran, Erik Fisher, Tommy Ford, Tim Jitloff, Steven Nyman, Marco Sullivan, and Jake Zamansky. The women’s roster includes Stacey Cook, Hailey Duke, Chelsea Marshall, Megan McJames, Kaylin Richardson, Sarah Schleper, and Leanne Smith.
The youngest member of the team is Colorado’s Alice McKennis, born Aug. 19, 1989. The youngest male athlete is 20-year-old Nolan Kasper of Vermont, who qualified just hours before the team’s announcement came, by finishing 24th in a brutally icy World Cup slalom at Schladming, Austria.
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