Zoe Gillings, Lesley McKenna, Kate Foster, Ben Kilner and Dom Harrington have all qualified for the FIS Snowboard World Cup Finals in Valmalenco, Italy, this coming weekend.

Britain’s Double Olympian snowboarder Lesley McKenna, 34, from Aviemore, will lead the quartet of athletes in the Half Pipe discipline with Kate Foster, 23, from Painswick, hoping for another good performance as she bids to earn her second Olympic qualification following Turin three years ago.

Leo Addington, the British team’s Half Pipe coach said: “For Lesley McKenna, at this stage in her career, to continuously produce performance after performance shows that she has the physical and mental abilities to still put it down to the opposition. Kate is pushing forward to the Vancouver Olympics after having had a year off. The women’s field in snowboarding has increased dramatically and for her to get and maintain the ranking has been great for her.”

Last but not least is, the other member of the team, Zoe Gillings, 23, from the Isle of Man, who is rated Britain’s best athlete on snow and also Team GB’s best chance of a snowsport medal in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year. She finished third in the snowboardcross final at the FIS Snowboard World Cup Finals in Valmalenco, Italy.