19 year old skeleton athlete Michelle Steele will have her final race this weekend before the start of the Winter Olympics and could write her name in the record books.

Steele from Bundaberg in Queensland returns to Igls in Austria for the world junior skeleton championships. She has excellent form on the ice at Igls finishing fourth in a World Cup event in December, her best World Cup result.

If she reproduces that form she could become Australia’s first world junior champion in skeleton.

This time the three women who finished ahead of her in that World Cup event are not competing.

With the world junior title restricted to athletes under 23, Steele and fellow Australians Melissa Hoar and Emma Lincoln-Smith are all strong chances to make the podium.

Steele was relegated to fourth place in the December World Cup in Igls by Carla Pavan and Melissa Hollingsworth-Richards of Canada and Maya Pedersen of Switzerland.

But those three, who will face the Australian again in Torino, are all outside the junior ranks.

Melissa Hoar finished in fifth place in a St Moritz World Cup late last month, but once again all the women ahead of her were beyond the junior ranks.

Hoar turned 23 on Australia Day but is still eligible to compete in the junior titles.

And when 20-year-old Lincoln-Smith produced her best result of 11th in Sigulda in December, only four women ahead of her were under 23.

If any of the three Australians do finish on the podium in Igls, it will be a remarkable outcome for the program run by the Australian Institute of Sport and supported by the Australian Olympic Committee.

AOC