Great Britains Olympic Snowboarding Ambitions

Everyone may be enjoying the warm start to the summer but the Winter Olympics 2010, to be held in Vancouver in February, are only a few months away now. As you would expect, preparations in Team GB are already well advanced with the team expecting to take a squad of around 50 athletes to compete in the 11 of the 15 sporting disciplines that make up the Games. The short list of potential attendees will be submitted to the British Olympic Authority by SnowsportGB during 2009, but final selection will not be finalised until January 2010.

Snowboarding is one of those sports where Team GB will compete for medals. It is a discipline that has seen a huge growth in interest over recent years. Back at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Team GB only had one snowboarding competitor and four years later, at Torino, Lesley McKenna was joined by Kate Foster and Dan Wakeham, with all three athletes competing in the halfpipe event.

At Vancouver, Team GB will again contest the halfpipe events in addition to the freestyle and snowboardcross competitions, where Zoe Gillings is expected to lead the women's team. Dan Wakeham recently announced his retirement from competition, but there is plenty of young talent moving through the ranks ready to take his place on the team.

In the same way some other Olympic sports, like track cycling, have dramatically improved their profile on the back of lottery funding and better commercial involvement, snowboarding is also already on an upward curve. Certainly, lottery funding has been a big bonus, particularly as GB competitors need to undertake training programmes which invariably involve the expense of foreign travel and accommodation. We are not blessed with the geography and climatic conditions that make snowboarding a very accessible sport in the UK, so another factor fuelling the interest in the sport is the improvement in indoor facilities at home in the form of "real snow" winter sports centres.

It's not just the GB Olympic team that is getting press coverage at the moment. Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong also known as The Snow Leopard is the only member of the Ghanaian ski team. It may seem unusual, but Kwame is planning to compete in next year's Winter Olympics and has struck a year-long deal with The Snow Centre, in Hemel Hempstead. The Centre will support his intense training schedule in advance of next year's Winter Games in Vancouver.

The Snow Centre, in Hemel Hempstead, is the newest of several indoor snow resorts now operating in the UK. The location of this new facility is important as it brings indoor snowboarding very close to the huge catchment area of London and the South East, which previously had to make do with outdoor artificial ski slopes. These artificial slopes were acceptable for ski training but for freestyle snowboarding, involving high jumps and landings, only a real snow surface will suffice. As well as providing our Olympic athletes with the potential to train more frequently and conveniently, the centre also opens up the sport at the grass root level to a whole new generation of future boarders. The children learning the basics on one of The Snow Centre's training courses could be the future Olympic hopefuls in years to come.