Snowboard Canada has announced their Olympic roster and Prince George snowboarder Meryeta O’Dine is one of four women on the snowboard cross team who will represent Team Canada during the Beijing Winter Olympics next month.
The 24-year-old has overcome a lot of challenges on her road to the Olympics, including suffering a major concussion just days before the PyeongChang Olympics .
During the 2017-18 season, O’Dine recorded eight top-10 finishes on the World Cup circuit, which included making one big final and three small finals.
She also won two medals with Zoe Bergermann in the women’s team snowboard cross. Named to her first Olympic team, O’Dine unfortunately didn’t get the chance to compete at PyeongChang 2018 when she suffered a concussion during training two days before her event.
She still ended the season ranked a career-best 11th in the World Cup SBX standings.
In her Team Canada biography O’Dine says she experienced the most difficult year of her life in 2020.
Just as the world was shutting down because of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, her brother Brandon lost his battle with cancer. She struggled with anxiety and depression but with lot of self-reflection and sessions with psychologists, she re-learned how to be an Olympic-level athlete.
Having last competed in January 2020, she returned to the World Cup circuit in January 2021.
She achieved a personal highlight at the 2021 World Championships where she was fourth-fastest during the qualification round, a sign that she was back to being the athlete she knows she can be.
Some of the big highlights from her career include winning the overall snowboard cross title on the Nor-Am Cup circuit in 2015-16, posting three victories in nine events. She finished a personal best fourth at the 2016 Junior World Championships.
A year earlier she won snowboard cross gold in her hometown at the 2015 Canada Winter Games in Prince George when she was just 18-years-old.
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics takes place from Feb. 4 to 20 and will be the first winter Olympics in China.
