Whistler based ski racer Mike Janyk was in Squamish this week picking up a new GMC Envoy, part of GMC’s sponsorship of Olympic athletes. Janyk will receive use of the vehicle for a year for his podium placement at a World Championship race last year.

It’s an incentive for Canadian athletes to ‘own the podium’ in the upcoming Winter Olympic Games here on home turf. But with the games just around the corner has it sunk it in for athletes like Janyk that that is exactly what’s coming – competing at the Olympic Games, at home?

“It is surreal, because you think here’s the mountain I train on all the time, a mountain I ski on with friends and then you think it’s the Olympics,” said Janyk. Although he said he has been waiting for that day since he first heard the about the Vancouver bid for the Olympics, or not so much waiting as expecting. “I knew I would be there, even before we won the bid, I knew we would get the Games and I knew I would compete,” said Janyk, now 27 and 20 in 2003 when the winning bid for Vancouver was announced.

Just the same expecting it and competing are two different things and one time Olympian Janyk knows the pressure of competing on the world stage.

“It actually hit me right at the gate in Turin [in 2006] that this is it and you have to perform at a different level, you have to go out and perform on the day.”

That experience and his experience at many World Cup races have definitely prepared him for February. “The approach you have to take is not to deny it [the Olympics] are different. You have to accept it’s a different level of competition and embrace the competition and the pressure.” Janyk said he is feeling confident coming off a strong season last year and says going into the upcoming season he is focusing on consistent results, “I just want to do that and see where it takes me.

Janyk will be off to Europe soon for the start of the new season and won’t be home, except for a few days at Christmas, until the Olympics. He admits that it is still all a little unreal. “It’s a once in several lifetimes experience – your hometown, your home hill in the Olympics, sometimes it is hard to believe.”