Katie Uhlaender now has made five of the six U.S. Olympic women’s skeleton teams.
“USA Bobsled and Skeleton is incredibly proud of the three athletes nominated to represent Team USA in skeleton at the 2022 Olympics,” USABS CEO Aron McGuire said. “It was a battle to make the team and it came down to the very last race.”
The final race of the World Cup season was Friday morning, and there was a race within the race — three American women vying for two Olympic spots, all of them with realistic chances of making the team. Uhlaender had the best odds, followed by Megan Henry and then Curtis — who wound up needing the race of her life to make it to Beijing.Curtis finished a career-best sixth to cap her first full season on the World Cup circuit, which was good enough for her to narrowly leapfrog Henry in the system that the U.S. was using to decide its spots. Henry was 15th in the finale.
Here's one way of explaining how close it was: Curtis finished her two runs on Saturday in 2 minutes, 18.87 seconds — and if she had finished in 2:18.99, not even one-eighth of a second slower, Henry likely would have been going to Beijing. The nomination of the three skeleton athletes pushes the total number of U.S. sliders selected for the Beijing Games to 11, after an eight-person team from USA Luge was revealed earlier this week. All that’s left is USA Bobsled, which is expected to announce its Olympic teams no later than Monday.More AP Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/winter-olympics and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports