Katie Uhlaender is going to a record fourth Olympics for a U.S. skeleton slider and looking for either her first or second Olympic medal.
The 33-year-old was one of four athletes named to the U.S. Olympic skeleton team on Monday, joining Sochi bronze medalist Matt Antoine, 2010 and 2014 Olympian John Daly and first-time Olympian Kendall Wesenberg.
Uhlaender placed fourth in Sochi, .04 behind Russian bronze medalist Elena Nikitina.
Nikitina’s bronze medal was stripped last year due to doping, and she was barred from the Olympics for life, though she is appealing. Uhlaender waits to see if she will be upgraded from fourth place to bronze.
Antoine, too, could be upgraded since Aleksandr Tretiyakov was stripped of his gold.
Daly was in fourth place after three of four runs in Sochi but finished 15th after slipping at the start of his final run.
He came out of a two-year retirement in 2016, hoping for another chance to author a different ending to his Olympic career.
Wesenberg, 27, is the only American slider to earn a World Cup medal since the start of 2017.
She first learned of the sport while watching bobsled during the 2010 Olympics. Wesenberg finished her degree at Colorado, where she played club soccer, and moved to Utah in 2012 to pursue skeleton.
The best World Cup finish for any American this season is seventh.
The Olympic men’s gold-medal favorites are South Korean Yun Sung-bin and Latvian Martins Dukurs. The top women are Germans Jacqueline Loelling and Tina Hermann and Canadians Elisabeth Vathje and Mirela Rahneva.
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