Four years ago, Marianne Leeson stood at the top of the hill in Vancouver and soaked in the roar of the crowd below. As she readied herself in the starting gate, the noise grew so loud that she could hardly hear the last-minute instructions being given to her.

“It is pretty awesome to hear that,” the 26-year-old said. “I was thinking, ‘This is so cool.’ It gives you an adrenalin rush. You want it more — and I wasn’t even an athlete.”

Leeson, who had hoped to compete in Vancouver, instead served as a forerunner, a rider who goes down the course to help get it ready for the competitors. Next month, in Sochi, the M.M. Robinson grad will get the opportunity to experience it from the other side after being named to Canada’s Olympic snowboard team Tuesday afternoon.

Leeson knows the next time she’s in a starting gate, it will be nothing like Vancouver.

“It will different being an athlete,” she said. “As an athlete you have to shut all of that out.”

As an athlete, Leeson has done a remarkable job focusing on the task at hand. Consider that just 12 days ago, Leeson still had not met the Olympic requirement of three top-16 finishes on the World Cup circuit. With just three races left, it would have easy to hear a giant clock ticking in her ears, threatening the dream she had been working toward since she ditched her skis for a snowboard at the Milton Heights Racing Club a decade-and-a-half ago.

Instead, Leeson came through with what she needed, placing 16th in the parallel slalom at the World Cup race in Bad Gastien, Austria. Two days later, she made it into the round of 16 again. Squaring off against the top qualifier, Leeson won the first run. On the second, she made a small mistake six gates from the finish, allowing her rival to edge her by two-tenths of a second in their combined times. Though she had narrowly missed guaranteeing herself a top-eight finish, Leeson couldn’t help but be pleased with another 16th-place finish.

“It really was good, just for my confidence,” she said. “It showed (the previous race) wasn’t a fluke. I am becoming more consistent. Looking back, I can say ‘What if?’ I always want to perform better. I wanted top eight (in Austria). But I know I have the ability to be right there with the top riders.”

Leeson admits that confidence wasn’t there when she came home for the Christmas break. Coming off a career-best ninth-place finish in the parallel giant slalom at a World Cup in Switzerland followed by a strong off-season training program, the results had not been what she hoped for. She was 32nd in the parallel giant slalom and 30th in the parallel slalom at the World Cup season opener in Italy.

“I came home for Christmas deflated,” she said. “I had to pick myself back up again. I couldn’t focus on what other athletes were doing. I had to focus on the things in my control and hope it all came together.”