With multi-medal winners and accomplished local athletes carrying Canada’s colours onto the Whistler Creekside slopes and Whistler Olympic/Paralympic Park courses for the 2010 Paralympics, the Canadian team could make a strong charge towards the other half of the goals set out by the Own the Podium program: to finish among the top three nations in the gold-medal count at these Games.

The Canadian Para-Alpine Ski Team finished atop the Nation’s Cup standings for the first time in last season’s IPC Alpine Skiing World Cup racing, and Canada’s Para-alpine athletes are now “at the end of the most successful Paralympic cycle in their history,” Jean-Francois Rapatel, CPAST high-performance director, said in a teleconference Tuesday (March 9).

The athletes came out of the World Cup events earlier this season with Canada again ranked first overall, he added, though they lost ground by skipping the recent World Cup finals in Colorado to concentrate on their Paralympic preparations.

The racers have been gearing up through recent training and staging camps on Vancouver Island and at Panorama, and are all “well rested and really eager to go” after two great days of training in Whistler this week, Rapatel said.

The team for the Paralympics includes a powerful mix of veterans such as North Vancouver’s Lauren Woolstencroft, Chris Williamson of Markham, Ont., and Vancouver’s Karolina Wisniewska, who have won 14 Paralympic medals between them, and relative newcomers such as Whistler’s Sam Danniels.

The sit-skier impressed coaches with his strong showing in last year’s IPC Alpine World Cup Finals, where he made his World Cup debut and finished fourth in the men’s downhill, just three hundredths of a second off the podium.

“He’s still considered an up and comer in the sport… (but) I think he can do very well,” Rapatel said, adding that Danniels will focus on the speed events.

Visually impaired skier Viviane Forest of Edmonton is expected to be a major medal threat, even though she’s going into her first Paralympic Winter Games. Guided by Whistler’s Lindsay Debou, Forest has only four per cent vision and has rocketed up the ski racing rankings since she shot onto the World Cup circuit in 2008, becoming an overall IPC World Cup champion.

“Her ascension to where she is right now has been spectacular,” Rapatel said, adding that it’s “definitely possible” that Forest and Debou could reach the podium in all of their Paralympic races though their category is challenging. Forest also has two Paralympic gold medals to her credit already from Summer Games, having competed with Canadian goalball teams.

Whistler’s Matt Hallat and Morgan Perrin will be a force in the men’s standing races, though theirs is one of the toughest categories in Para-alpine racing, with a “really deep field,” Rapatel said.

Hallat is a long-time national team member and slalom specialist who has been skiing strongly and posting multiple World Cup top-10 results this season. Perrin loves to go fast, Rapatel said, and has been “constantly moving up from year to year.”

Out at WOP, Whistler’s Tyler Mosher will charge through his Paralympic events on home snow, along with a team of 12 athletes selected by Cross-Country Canada to take on the world.

In a group that includes five athletes who have already earned medals at IPC World Cup, world championship or Paralympic events, Brian McKeever of Canmore, Alta., and Colette Bourgonje of Saskatoon, Sask., are the other headliners. A legally blind cross-country skier who qualified for the 2010 Canadian Olympic team, McKeever is guided by his Olympian brother Robin in Paralympic events and has won seven medals so far in two Games.

The great wheelchair athlete Bourgonje will compete in her sixth Winter Paralympics, having won four medals each in Winter and Summer Paralympics.

McKeever sought to push himself to his best level — and show people what Paralympians are capable of — by becoming the first person to compete in both Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, but came up just short. He was named to Canada’s cross-country team for the 2010 Games, but at the end was not selected to race.

“It was a very difficult thing to have to swallow,” McKeever said, but he appreciated the response of people throughout Whistler and Canada after the disappointment.

After McKeever did an interview on the CTV stage in Whistler Village, he said, “People were coming up to me on the street and offering their support. That was a such a cool thing, to know people from Whistler, and Canadians in general, were ready to offer up their support.”

Though the blow is “rapidly becoming distant history now,” McKeever said, it’s left him talking about trying for another four years to get back into that position — luckily for Canadians who want to cheer on his success.

“It definitely feels like there’s a lot of unfinished business,” he said.

Now he’s intently focused on the 2010 Paralympics, where he’ll compete with Robin in five cross-country ski and biathlon races. In their third Paralympics, McKevver said they’re again ready to go in as favourites and perform to that standard, as they did in 2006.

“We can go in knowing out preparation is good,” he said.

The action starts on Saturday (March 13) with downhill races at Creekside and biathlon events in the Whistler Olympic/Paralympic Park.

Canada’s Para-alpine team: Sam Danniels; Jeff Dickson, Sudbury, Ont.; Luke Donovan, Dalhousie, N.B; Josh Dueck, Vernon; Andrea Dziewior, Nanaimo; Arly Fogarty, Montreal; Viviane Forest with Lindsay Debou; Matt Hallat; Kimberly Joines, Rossland; Morgan Perrin; Melanie Schwartz, Toronto; Kirk Shornstein, Edmonton; Chris Williamson, guided by Panorama’s Nick Brush; Karolina Wisniewska; Lauren Woolstencroft.

Canada’s Para-Nordic team: Mark Arendz, Springton, P.E.I.; Jody Barber, Smithers; Colette Bourgonje; Sebastien Fortier, Quebec; Langley’s Lou Gibson; Ottawa’s Margarita Gourbonova, guided by Robert D’Arras; Courtney Knight, guided by Mary Benson and Andrea Bundon, Vancouver; Brian and Robin McKeever; Tyler Mosher; Ottawa’s Alexei Novikov, guided by Jamie Stirling; Robbie Weldon and guide Brian Berry, Thunder Bay, Ont.