When Lyndon Rush looks at Canada’s bobsleigh and skeleton team, he thinks the group of 18 athletes heading to the Olympics is so strong that doing anything other than winning medals will make them upset.

“I don’t know where our weak spot would be, to be honest with you,” the bobsleigh pilot from Humbolt, Sask., said last Thursday (Jan. 28), one day after the Olympic-bound athletes were officially announced at a ceremony in front of more than 700 red-clad kids at a Calgary high school.

Rush’s confidence is well founded. Canada’s bobsleigh and skeleton athletes have won sleds full of World Cup medals, including 18 this season, and the team includes three Olympic medallists, one – Mellisa Hollingsworth of Eckville, Alta. – of whom returns to Whistler for the Games as the top women’s skeleton slider of the season.

Though Wednesday’s team announcement wasn’t a surprise, Hollingsworth still considers it an honour to earn an Olympic berth, since she missed out on the experience in 2002. She enjoyed the Calgary ceremony particularly because it connected the elite athletes with children to share their stories, while in a school gymnasium that she saluted as the foundation of sport.

“I think it’s great. It’s definitely a special day. It’s the second Olympic team I’ve been named to, and I don’t take that lightly,” she said.

Hollingsworth will return to the Whistler Sliding Centre having overcome a rough battle with the Olympic track. Though she set the women’s skeleton track record run time in the World Cup last February, the course gave her crashes, a broken sled and stitches before she left it last March.

When she returned to the fast and technical track in the fall and took her first run from the top, the veteran slider approached it with fear and horrific images flashing through her mind. But she found that she sank into her sled and achieved a Zen state, relaxed and in control through her run.

She survived and thrived through the team’s training session, and now feels the Whistler track forced her to keep from panicking or making drastic moves when a line she tries doesn’t work out. She’s able to make do and find speed down the track without forcing lines, going with her skills as a slider who relies on “feeling.”

“I’ve really been able to let my guard down,” Hollingsworth said of her lessons from this season.

Rush, who has won two World Cup gold medals this season, said he thinks the key to the Whistler track is not the bottom section, where sleds have reached speeds of nearly 154 kilometres per hour, but the particularly technical top.

“It’s the first nine corners where you’re going to win the race in Whistler,” Rush said. He thinks he has a handle on those turns, after many runs on the track, but “it all just comes down to execution on the day of the race.”

Assisted by new equipment thanks to investments from the likes of the law firm Borden Ladner Gervais and Rush and his own teammates, Rush has had his most successful season ever, winning his first World Cup two-man race with Olympic medallist Lascelles Brown and his first four-man race plus a bronze medal in another four-man event.

Legendary Canadian pilot Pierre Lueders, who has won 98 international medals in his 20-year career, including two Olympic baubles, did not reach the podium in this World Cup season. But Rush said he thinks that Lueders, whom he has watched through his whole career as the standard to reach, is a champion is able to “find a way no matter what” to reach the top.

“He’s going to be one of the guys to beat,” Rush projected.

Rush will race in the Whistler four-man event with Brown, Calgary’s Chris Le Bihan and Edmonton’s David Bissett, while Lueders will slide with CFL player Jesse Lumsden, Edmonton’s Neville Wright and Summerland’s Justin Kripps.

Canada’s female bobsledders have earned plenty of hardware themselves. Calgary’s Kaillie Humphries finished second overall on the World Cup circuit this season, pushed by Heather Moyse of Summerside, P.E.I., to four medals. Calgary’s Helen Upperton, backed by many World Cup medals and a fourth-place finish in the 2006 Olympics, will slide with Shelley-Ann Brown of Pickering, Ont.

Canada’s skeleton stars collected 10 World Cup medals this season, seven of them won by Hollingsworth en route to becoming the overall World Cup champion.

She’ll be joined by decorated veteran Michelle Kelly of Fort St. John and Abbotsford’s Amy Gough, an Olympic rookie who won her first World Cup silver medal this season.

In the 2006 Games, the Canadian men nearly swept the skeleton podium, with Calgary’s Jeff Pain capturing a silver medal behind Duff Gibson’s golden performance and Paul Boehm finishing fourth.

Pain will be back to pursue another taste of Olympic glory alongside Jon Montgomery of Russell, Man., winner of the World Cup race in Whistler last season and a gold medallist on the 2006 Olympic track in Cesana, Italy, this season, and Toronto’s Mike Douglas, who has nearly cracked the podium with career-best fourth-place finishes in two World Cup races this season.

On Thursday (Jan. 28), Biathlon Canada announced the eight athletes who will fire into the Whistler Olympic Park at Games-time. Led by Olympian Zina Kocher, a regular top-15 finishers on the World Cup circuit who has a fourth-place finish under her belt from this season, the women’s team will be rounded out by Prince George’s Megan Tandy, Megan Imrie of Falcon Lake, Man., and Canmore’s Rosanna Crawford, sister of Olympic cross-country sprint champion Chandra.

Olympian Jean-Phillippe Le Guellec will compete in the individual men’s events, and will race with two-time Olympian Robin Clegg of Ottawa, Marc-Andre Bedard of Valcartier, Que., and Brendan Green of Hay River, N.W.T., in the relay.

Cross-Country Canada on Wednesday added four more Olympians to its roster after receiving more quota spots: Drew Goldsack of Red Deer, Alta., Calgary’s Brent McMurtry, Canmore’s Gordon Jewett and Brittany Webster of Caledon, Ont.