The Comox Valley will be well represented in the 2026 Olympics.
Dillan Glennie is heading to Italy with the Canadian Halfpipe ski team.
“It is definitely a goal I’ve been working towards for a long time now, and it’s just really exciting to have it officially confirmed,” said Glennie.
The 25-year-old skier first started her freestyle skiing journey when her family moved to Vancovuer Island in 2010 from North Vancouver. Her parents put her in the Jumps and Bumps freestyle program.
“I skied a lot when I was a kid, but I had never gone in the training park or anything. So that was really the initial opening to like my love of freestyle skiing.”
Glennie said she thinks her parents put her into the program to initially make some friends, being new to the community, but she said it was a really good community of people, and she just fell in love with the sport.
It was also good for her development within the freestyle community.
“We start off at small level competitions, like provincial competitions, and you just work your way up and kind of funnel into what you love doing the most,” she explained. “And for me, that was halfpipe.”
Glennie has competed on the World Cup Circuit for four years now and has also been to a couple of X-Games events. In the 2023/24 World Cup circuit, she achieved two fifth-place finishes at Mammoth Mountain and Secret Garden. She also achieved another fifth-place finish at the Women’s Ski Superpipe event at the X-Games Aspen in 2024, improving on her sixth-place finishes in 2023 and 2022.
However, this is the first time Glennie will be a participant in the Olympics. She was one spot away from the 2022 Beijing Olympics, with her having no expectations of being even close to going.
“It was just like, ‘Wow, I’m actually close,’ and then just kept working for this one,” she said.
Qualifications for Olympic events differ by country. For freestyle skiing, Canada allocates 16 spots for women and another 16 for men, across events like moguls, aerials, skicross, halfpipe, and big air. Each discipline can only send a maximum of four athletes per gender to the Olympics.
“It goes down the list for rankings for how well you place in competitions, and there are different tiers,” Glennie explained. “Tier one is like you get two podiums from that year, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to go to the Olympics. I qualified this year in tier five, which is not great, like I’ve had better seasons in World Cups, and I feel like I’m really grateful to still be able to go to the Olympics this season with not having qualified in a higher tier.”
The official team announcement will not be out until Jan. 20, but Glennie said she was paying close attention to the qualification rankings in case she got bumped. It came down to the last aerial, mogul, and slope style competitions, she said.
“Some of the girls didn’t do so well, as they needed a certain result in order to bump me out of the bubble or qualify ahead of me. As soon as I knew the results, I messaged the main guy for Freestyle Canada, and he told me that I was locked in,” she said. “My boyfriend and my mum were in the room, and as soon as I hung up, they came right up to me and gave me hugs.”
Glennie says her favourite part of the sport is the people in the community and the lifelong friends she’s made.
“I love the sport and skiing and being in the halfpipe and learning new tricks, but the friends that I made along the way are just amazing, and there’s like a special bond between teammates and other freestyle athletes just because our sport is quite scary. It’s really a special community because we all compete against each other at the end of the day, like I’m just as happy for my teammates or my friends on the circuit if they do better than me or if I do better than them.”
Glennie did admit she was quite nervous about being in the Olympics for the first time. She says she’s just trying to remind herself to take it one day at a time, take a step back, and just enjoy it for what it is without putting pressure on herself. The Olympic debutant is confident she will get some good results, as she has done in the World Cup and X-Games, but there is an elephant in the room. She has never made it to the podium.
“I know I have it in me trickwise. It’s just the mental side of things.”
The Women’s Freestyle Halfpipe events will take place on Feb. 19 and 21.
Glennie has also started a fundraiser on CAN Fund to help support the costs of going to Italy. Donations can be made at https://secure.e2rm.com/p2p/fundraising/392217/participant/5560205/en-CA.