Olympic Winter Institute boss Geoff Lipshut believes the Australian team has little to worry about despite Canada limiting foreign athletes using their facilities before the February Games in Vancouver.

Ron Rossi, the executive director of USA Luge had accused the Canadians of a "lack of sportsmanship" while other athletes south of the border also bemoaned having limited access to ski and other facilities in Vancouver.

But Lipshut believed the Canadians were within their rights to restrict the use of their venues in what he called "competitive edge maneuvering".

"The main issue has been with the sliding track but that has been the same for the past couple of Games," Lipshut said.

"The host nation has ten times more runs on the track than every other nation.

"Speaking to our coach Terry Holland, that has pretty much always been the case.

"We'll just be the same as any other country. We've always had a pretty good relationship with Canada."

Lipshut agreed there was some irony in the Americans' complaints given the short shrift they'd given a number of Australia's top medal hopes in punting them from on-snow facilities in Utah this year.

It forced the likes of aerial skiers Jacqui Cooper and Lydia Lassila to go straight to Switzerland and left the tightly budgeted Australian team out of pocket.

While the Americans claimed they had given the Australians enough notice Lipshut wasn't quite so sure.

 

"It depends what a long time is," he said. "Everyone knows the planning cycles and it is only our country that is affected.

"It is their facility, they have been generous to us in the past about training there but if we would have known a couple of months earlier we would have got ourselves organised.

"The bottom line is we had already committed to the facility and prepaid for everything prior to us being advised."

In good news for the Australian team Lipshut said snowboarding gold medal prospect Torah Bright had recovered well from shoulder surgery and was training strongly in New Zealand.

Cooper and Lassila were in Switzerland and also doing well practicing on water jumps before the start of the northern hemisphere winter.

Glenn Cullen
AAP