Snowboarding: Snow-go area traps McKenna

AS Britain's leading slalom snowboarder, Lesley McKenna had high hopes of travelling to Nagano for next month's Winter Olympics. So the announcement last week that she would not be going came as an unpleasant surprise.

McKenna believed she had qualified to be one of the event's 35 competitors on the usual Winter Olympic system for alpine events - rankings averages based on an athlete's two best performances. She finished 22nd and 24th in two out of four World Cup events last year, vastly improved results which made her qualification for Nagano seem a formality, until she realised last week that the qualification criteria were different - and practically impossible for her to meet.

The international skiing federation, FIS, decided to base selection for snowboarding on points compiled from results over the last two years of competition rather than just one, which meant that many snowboarders failed to qualify, regardless of their current World Cup ranking.

"I guess if you're going to play the game then you should make sure you find out all the rules first," McKenna said. "Unfortunately, I put my faith in people, and the systems they created, to be fair and equal. I know now that was very naive.

"I now realise that qualification was almost impossible, but I almost did the impossible and went from last place to having a top 15 finish in some competitions."

Her sense of injustice is fuelled by the fact that she is ranked 36th in the World Cup, and cannot go to Nagano, while the skiers Sophie and James Ormond, at present ranked 166th and 281st respectively, can.

Her plight has met with official sympathy. "If we could we'd get Lesley to Nagano but the problem is that we don't have a right to a quota," said Mike Jardine, the British Skiing and Snowboarding Federation chief executive. "If FIS based the quota on World Cup points, as many thought they should, then she may well have succeeded. I think it would have been a fairer system, but it's easy to say in hindsight."

Snowboarding is culturally closer to surfing than to skiing, and the central problem lies in the fact that many snowboarders do not want FIS to represent their sport. "The sport is too young to be in the Olympics,"Martin Robinson, the British Snowboard Association general secretary, said. "It's not a discipline of skiing but a sport and a lifestyle in its own right. Being controlled by FIS is a bit like making motorbikes a discipline of motor car racing and there's not a snowboarder on the planet who agrees with that."

In contrast to skiing, snowboarding's vibrant and youthful persona attracts scores of sponsors, and FIS, as a founding member of the International Olympic Committee, were only too happy to take the fledgling sport under their wing.

Many of the world's top snowboarders are boycotting Nagano, believing their sport has been misrepresented, and those trying to sample the Olympic spirit feel let down by an unrepresentative system and the inclusion of their sport in the Games without proper planning. "At present, the whole Olympic idea has been ruined for me," McKenna said, "but I'll be there to win the next one."