Good morning, and thank you for the invitation to speak to you today.
With Sochi Olympic preparation, our goal in CLA is to create an environment that allows the athletes to be completely confident that everything is in place so they can perform at their best.
I'll go through team selection, Olympic staffing, preparation and familiarization, our 2013-14 season, team leader meetings, pre-Olympic staging, potential issues, and athlete keys and expectations.
To start off, our team selection will be completed December 15. Our expectations for our team numbers for three-men would be: Sam Edney, Mitch Malyk, and John Fennell. On the women's side we have four qualifying for three spots: Alex Gough, Kim McRae, Arianne Jones, and Jordan Smith. We'll have one doubles team with Tristan Walker and Justin Snith, and the new team relay where we'll be very competitive is with Sam Edney, Alex Gough, Tristan Walker, and Justin Snith.
Important to our team's performance at the games, obviously, is staffing and they'll be led by our team leader, Walter Corey, who is our high-performance director. We've hired some of the best coaches in the world to ensure our team has everything in place. Our head coach is Wolfgang Staudinger, and assistant coach and technician is Bernie Glass. We were able to get a Russian assistant coach added to our team, Mikael Zavialov, because we felt it was very important to have a connection to the Russian environment.
We have one of the top strength and conditioning coaches in Jeremiah Barnert.
Public relations, which is very important at the games, will be taken care of by Chris Doran. As well, I will be there to coordinate with friends and family and sponsorship relations. It is very important that we keep the friends and families coordinated and away from our athletes, so they don't go to our athletes and expect their assistance while the athletes are in their Olympic bubble.
Our coaching plan is pretty simple. They are very long days and we want to ensure they are focused on high-priority tasks so they can maximize their coaching technical skills and minimize burnout.
It was very important for us to get a Russian connection, so we put a Russian coach on our team. He's been around since 2011.
We're going to focus on start-ramp coaching and on track in the key areas that are important for this track.
In order to compete properly at the games, we felt it was very important to familiarize ourselves with Sochi, so we've been there since 2009 in FIL Congress. In 2011, we attended a familiarization Canadian Olympic Committee tour. Our athletes have been on the track since March 2012, and we were able to get more of our people there than any other country, to explore the track itself.
We've attended two international training weeks in 2012 and 2013. We were able to do a sliding agreement with the Russian Federation where we were able to get 45% more run volume on the track than other teams. That was very important to us also.
In the season going forward, we were able to take our athletes to Germany in the summer to compete against the top athletes in the world at the start camp. That was perfect for our athletes to know where they were and develop what they needed to do this summer.
Our schedule is pretty simple. This fall we're in Norway, then to Austria, Germany, and then back to Canada and the U.S. for the final two World Cups before our qualification period has ended. We're doing our final preparations with our team leader, Walter Corey, who will be attending a team leader meeting on December 12 with the Canadian Olympic Committee to finalize the rooming lists, sled storage, and sled transportation in the village, and all the rest of the Olympic winter Games logistics.
Our pre-staging camp is going to be in Königssee, Germany, and obviously closer to the venue than Canada. We'll have the ability to access gyms, hockey rinks, start ramps, and be able to slide on a similar track to Sochi, so it will help prepare our athletes. There will only be a three-hour time change to Sochi. so we felt that was a perfect and comfortable place for our athletes to stage just prior to the games.
Our plan is to travel to the games on January 31 and avoid Moscow, which is what our team always needed to do—avoid Moscow because of the logistics issues up there. We'll be going Munich to Frankfurt and straight to Sochi. That's a nice win for our team.
We're arriving on February 1 and travelling straight to the main Olympic village, so our athletes can get acclimatized and take care of their outfitting in the main village. Then on February 2 we'll be heading straight up to the mountain villages, which is where our team will live and compete from.
Our basic schedule is that on February 3 we'll be right on the track inspecting it, on February 4 we'll be starting training, and we'll get into official training on February 5. Our events are February 8 and 9 for the men's race, February 10 and 11 for the women's race, February 12 for the doubles competition, and the team relay is on February 13.
We have identified some potential issues, for example, we have no night training, but all the races are in the evening, which is difficult for our athletes to get used to, the different light. We were able to do some race simulation in the evenings during the international training week to combat this potential issue. One of the other issues concerned a place to tune our equipment. We've worked with the Canadian Olympic Committee, which has been very helpful in securing space at the Olympic village and at the track, should we need to do some sled preparation at the track.
The Russian home-track advantage is one of our big issues, which is the reason we ensured we did a track exchange with the Russians to get as much extra training as we could on the competition track.
One of the other issues we were dealing with is an equipment change or a rule change this spring. We were able to purchase the equipment needed to test our sleds this summer to ensure we came into the season with equipment that was up to snuff and would be legal for racing at the Olympic Games.
One of the big changes for us is the team relay. An issue we're dealing with is that usually when our athletes complete their event they're finished, but now they're going to have a couple more days and then race again in the team relay. So we have plans in place to ensure that our men's athlete will continue to train once he's finished his singles event. When it comes to Alice Goff, we're hopeful that she'll be in the medals for a women's race, so we have a victory plan in place so she can celebrate her win and then get right back and focused for the team relay two days later.