Ski-ing Harris has early date with Calgary

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 13

Ski-ing Harris has early date with Calgary

By

TIM DUNBAR

Madonna Harris will be the first of the New Zealand ski-ing contingent to move into the Canadian city of Calgary for the next month’s XV Olympic Winter Games.

Harris, the only nordic or cross-country skier in the New Zealand Olympic team, will arrive in Calgary from her Utah base on February 1.

She will contest the women’s 20km event — the longest race for women on the cross-coun-try ski-ing programme — and will have the opportunity to train on the actual race course at Canmore Nordic Centre, about 100 km west of Calgary.

Thus Harris will get a valuable, three full weeks of training on the course; her race is scheduled for February 25.

The name of Madonna Harris is remarkably little known in this country when it is considered that cross-country ski-ing will be the forth sport in which she has represented New Zealand. She has been living in the United States for several years, since arriving there on a university basketball sports scholarship.

As a world-ranked road cyclist, Harris (formerly Gilchrist) has her eyes firmly fixed on Seoul and. is virtually certain to be the first New Zealand athlete to be selected for both the summer and winter Olympics.

Before riding for New Zealand at the last two world cycling championships Harris, now aged 31, also represented her native country in basketball and track and field, as a 400 m hurdler. While Harris will be living in the smaller athletes’ village at Canmore the four alpine skiers, Kate Rattray, Bruce Grant, Mattias Hubrich and Simon Wi Rutene, will all be housed at the main athletes’ village on the University of Calgary campus.

Along with the ski-ing section manager, Adrian Farnsworth, Grant and Rattray will arrive in Calgary from Europe on February 4 to be followed by the other two skiers three days later. They will all be preceded by the New Zealand Olympic team’s chef de mission, Richard Wheatcroft, who will settle in to the village on February 3. The four bobsleigh competitors plus the reserves based in Calgary, will also move into the Games village early in February. The Winter Olympics will last from February 13 to 28 with the opening ceremony and assorted ice hockey games the only activities set down for the first day. Grant will be in action on the second day, competing in the glamour alpine ski-ing event, the men’s downhill, for which official training will begin

at Nakiska, Mount Allan, on February 11.

Mr Farnsworth flew out of New Zealand early yesterday morning to join the ski team in Europe, which still has a shortage of snow.

Before leaving Mr Farnsworth had received gratifying news in the form of Wi Rutene’s latest race results from Austria and the new F.I.S. (International Ski Federation) points seeding list. Competing in a F.I.S. slalom at Zauchensee, Austria, earlier this week Wi Rutene finished third, a tantalising nine-hun-dredths of a second behind the winner. And in his first downhill race for 18 months he was within 3.8 s of the winner in a 70point result.

The latest F.I.S.' list shows that Canterbury’s Rattray has lowered her points for giant slalom from 65 to 46, thereby improving her world ranking from 229th to 136th, Grant is now ranked about 160th for downhill while Wi Rutene is in the top 80 for giant slalom and is 111th in slalom.

Hubrich’s giant slalom points have gone down from 60 to 45 in another notable improvement. Although a slightly wrenched knee meant that Grant had to take a five-day rest he will be racing again in the World Cup downhill at Schladming, Austria, at the end of the month.