I'm in Toronto right now with the entire #CBCOlympics crew for an Olympic Seminar - basically a giant production meeting for the upcoming Sochi Olympic broadcast.  I'll be providing colour commentary for the skicross, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be involved.  At the end of the day today, Scott Russell had every Olympian in the room stand up, and I realized that Chris Irwin has followed through with his original intentions of getting Olympic medallists involved for almost every single sport's coverage. 

We got a sneak peek at the graphics and the features that have been pulled together for the games - they look great - and got to meet the lovely people we'll be working with, both in Russia and on the other end of whatever technology will be keeping us connected to the home base in Toronto.  So nice to be part of the team!

It's so interesting to see what goes into the Olympic broadcast, and to see how the athletes are presented and portrayed by the media, for the media.  We Canadian athletes really are one big team, and it's so hard to determine who is going to have success ahead of time.  Even as an athlete it's impossible to know whether you will win or lose.  I just hope that every single athlete goes into these Olympics treating it like the time in their life that they will eventually look back on as "that time I won the Olympics" like I did.  I wrote everything down, I took lots of pictures, I did my work, and I savoured every moment, because I knew there was a chance that I would look back on the entire experience as just that: "that time I won the Olympics".

Here are some of my behind the scenes pics, and some retrospective comments about how my life has changed since 2010.  I love to think of all the other athletes who's lives are about to change forever.

I am the only skicross athlete who doesn’t have to qualify next season.  I am one of just three Freestyle Athletes to have earned myself an Olympic spot almost a year before the Games.  This is a huge accomplishment, and now I can focus on getting ready for the Olympics instead of focusing on being selected.  I can pick and choose which events I hit up next season in order to be best prepared for the biggest race of my life.

I was awarded this spot based on my results at Cypress, the Olympic venue, and in Japan at the World Championships.  The spot was chosen by use of the “Method A” criteria, which looked our best two results from the three most important races of the season. The third race was the World Cup Final in France.  The idea was to determine who performs well under pressure on the world stage.  My results were a 2nd and a 1st, so all I needed to do at the last race was hope that neither of my two teammates who were still in contention would win.  That was kind-of weird, competing within the team and pushing each other.  Of course I wanted them to win, but I lucked out there and held my position.