For the first time in our Winter Olympic history, Australia could have more athletes qualified for an Olympic Games than the number of places available.
For the first time in our Winter Olympic history, Australia could have more athletes qualified for an Olympic Games than the number of places available.
Just four women will get to represent this country in the aerial skiing competition of the 2006 Games, and there is a strong possibility that six Flying Kangaroos could be qualified to fill those places - Lydia Ierodiaconou, Jacqui Cooper, Alisa Camplin and Lainie Cole, who have already met the Australian Olympic Committee's qualification criteria, Liz Gardner and Bree Munro, who could well do so in World Cup competition over the next two weekends.
Australia's swimmers and triathletes have faced this problem many times, but as strong as those teams are, even they have not had to deal with the situation facing Germany's women's luge athletes in the selection process for Torino 2006, as the International Luge Federation website reports:
Torino Olympics without Barbara Niedernhuber
Germany’s Barbara Niedernhuber missed the 1998 Olympic gold medal in Nagano, Japan, by just two thousandths of a second. Four years later she once again achieved Olympic silver in Salt Lake City. Last season she gained her first international title by winning the overall Viessmann Luge World Cup.
But the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, will take place without her.
German national coach Thomas Schwab gave the third and last Olympic ticket to Tatjana Huefner when she finished runner-up at the Viessmann Luge World Cup at Koenigssee, Germany, last weekend. The other two German tickets for Torino had been allocated previously to the 2002 Olympic and four-time World champion Sylke Otto and the 1998 Olympic and 2004 World champion, Silke Kraushaar. (From the International Luge Federation website http://www.fil-luge.org/index_en.htm).
Just four women will get to represent this country in the aerial skiing competition of the 2006 Games, and there is a strong possibility that six Flying Kangaroos could be qualified to fill those places - Lydia Ierodiaconou, Jacqui Cooper, Alisa Camplin and Lainie Cole, who have already met the Australian Olympic Committee's qualification criteria, Liz Gardner and Bree Munro, who could well do so in World Cup competition over the next two weekends.
Australia's swimmers and triathletes have faced this problem many times, but as strong as those teams are, even they have not had to deal with the situation facing Germany's women's luge athletes in the selection process for Torino 2006, as the International Luge Federation website reports:
Torino Olympics without Barbara Niedernhuber
Germany’s Barbara Niedernhuber missed the 1998 Olympic gold medal in Nagano, Japan, by just two thousandths of a second. Four years later she once again achieved Olympic silver in Salt Lake City. Last season she gained her first international title by winning the overall Viessmann Luge World Cup.
But the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, will take place without her.
German national coach Thomas Schwab gave the third and last Olympic ticket to Tatjana Huefner when she finished runner-up at the Viessmann Luge World Cup at Koenigssee, Germany, last weekend. The other two German tickets for Torino had been allocated previously to the 2002 Olympic and four-time World champion Sylke Otto and the 1998 Olympic and 2004 World champion, Silke Kraushaar. (From the International Luge Federation website http://www.fil-luge.org/index_en.htm).
