TORONTO — With less than two months until Pyeongchang 2018, these are agonizing times for potential Olympians. Even medal favourites have to earn their way on to the team, and a slip here or a stumble there in a qualifier is all it takes for that spot to go to someone else.

For many athletes, the qualifying process is more stressful than the Games themselves: it’s now when you find out if four years of training will pay off with the chance to compete in the biggest spectacle in sports. It’s now when those dreams can also be dashed.

For freestyle skier Cassie Sharpe, though, the goal between now and early February is blessedly simple: “Just stay healthy,” she says.

Sharpe, 25, of Comox, B.C., won an invite-only Dew Tour event last week in Colorado which, coupled with a World Cup win in New Zealand two months ago, all but punched her ticket to South Korea. The Canadian freestyle team won’t be formally named for several weeks yet, but for Sharpe it is just that, a formality.

Sharpe joined a handful of other Olympians in an airplane hangar at Pearson International Airport on Monday, where Air Canada announced an extension of its partnership with the Canadian Olympic Committee. The carrier will be the official airline of Team Canada through at least the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

Cassie Sharpe celebrates her Dew Tour superpipe win on Dec. 15. Matthew Stockman / Getty Images

Sitting in the shadow of a Boeing 787 freshly decked out in the logos of the COC and the Canadian Paralympic Committee, Sharpe said it “feels awesome” to know she is most of the way to Pyeongchang, figuratively speaking. Ski halfpipe, her event, was just added to the Olympic schedule before Sochi 2014, and so Sharpe has been looking toward this chance for a little more than four years. The win in New Zealand put her in excellent shape to qualify, the win last week in Breckenridge just confirmed it.

Sharpe says she has definitely had a few moments when the enormity of making the team has hit her.

“(After New Zealand) that kind of put me in a really good position and I just called my mom, crying,” she says, smiling at the memory of it. “I was just, ‘I think I’m going to go, I think I’m going to make it.’ That was just the moment that was, like, ‘Holy, I could go.’”

There are still a few events on the schedule before South Korea, but Sharpe says she doesn’t expect to change her approach.

“I’m so competitive, I always want to be the best no matter what I do,” she says. “Even though I know that I’m sitting pretty and I know that I’m OK, I still think I’m going to go into the events trying to win them. I’m just too competitive not to do that.”

The competitions also allow for excellent training, and a chance to further hone her runs in the lead-up to the Olympics. Sharpe skied the same runs with the same tricks in each round in Colorado and says she will likely stick to that plan.

“I do have a couple tricks in my back pocket that I’m holding onto,” she says. “I just feel that if I can win with the run that I have, why fix it if it’s not broken? But I definitely have a couple tricks that I want to break out before or at the Olympics.”

As it stands, her run does not lack for tricks: the winning performance at the Dew Tour included 900-degree rotations in each direction and several feats with mystifying names, such as the switch left 360 mute, the right flare tail and the straight air trucker. She learned this stuff at Mount Washington on Vancouver Island, where she and her two brothers were on the snow at a young age.

“It was just instinctual, really,” she says. “We kind of broke away from the ski school and we went to the (freestyle) park and we started skiing there.” She entered her first halfpipe contest five years ago and won it. “I sort of thought, ‘OK, maybe this is what I’m meant to do.’” Her younger brother, Darcy, 21, a slopestyle snowboarder, is also an Olympic hopeful.

“Watching him at contests really inspires me and I think vice versa, so we really feed off each other, for sure,” Sharpe says.

And so, with her spot all but assured, does that mean friends and family are planning to make the trip to Asia?

“Oh yes,” Sharpe says, and begins to rattle off the list: “Two sets of aunts and uncles, my mom and dad, my older brother, my dad’s best friend, my boyfriend, my boyfriend’s dad…”

This sounds like quite a gang, she is told.

“There’s a crew,” she says, laughing. “There’s a crew, for sure.”

So now all she has to do is stay healthy.

• Email: sstinson@postmedia.com | Twitter: @scott_stinson