The Winter Games are shaping as a highly significant event for New Zealand's Winter Olympic hopefuls next year.
The Games, among the best-regarded international snow sports events in the world, started last night with a slalom event at Coronet Peak.
Freeski slopestyle qualifying and finals take place over the weekend with halfpipe and alpine skiing events to follow.
For New Zealand's leading athletes it is an important event for putting down performances to impress New Zealand Olympic Committee selectors with an eye on PyeongChang, South Korea next year. The ability to finish inside the top 16 at the Games is a key factor in selection.
Several skiers and snowboarders have already met the qualifying criteria, but showing they have the ability to consistently produce eye-catching form also matters.
New Zealand had 15 athletes at the Sochi Games three years ago. Take out skater Shane Dobbin and skeleton racers Katherine Eustace and Ben Sandford and that leaves 12 snow competitors.
The expectation is that New Zealand will send a team of about the same number, but as Snow Sports New Zealand high performance boss Ashley Light put it, the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity.
New Zealand achieved five placings inside the top nine in Sochi, the best of them being freeskier Jossi Wells' fourth place in the halfpipe.
There were two other notable finishers in that discipline, Wells' younger brother Beau-James taking sixth and Lyndon Sheehan ninth.
Janina Kuzma was fifth out of 23 in the freeski halfpipe; and Dobbin was seventh in his 10,000m final.
SSNZ expect to start nominating athletes around late October.
"We're waiting for World Cups to finish at the Winter Games but a number of athletes have met the top 16 criteria," Light said.
"The idea was always to meet that criteria early in the piece so the athletes can then concentrate on fine tuning and any progression they need to get done between the end of competitions and the start of the Olympic Games."
Injuries have meant Beau-James Wells and Christy Prior - one of only three New Zealand women to have won a World Cup crown, a slopestyle title in 2014 - are making a late start to their qualification bids.
Prior lucked out in Sochi, getting injured early and failing to finish.
The third of those three women - the first being Julianne Bray in 2001 - is Zoi Sadowski Synnott, who at 16, won a slopestyle cup event in Spindleruv Mlyn in the Czech Republic in March.
That followed a World Cup bronze at a Big Air event in Canada a month earlier and a silver at the snowboard world championships followed in May.
Others to have met the nomination criteria include the experienced Kuzma; Queenstown's Tiarn Collins, who was sixth at a World Cup slopestyle event in Austria this year; Jossi and brother Byron Wells, who was selected for Sochi but counted out by injury; Christchurch freeskiing brothers Miguel and Nico Porteous; Wanaka's halfpipe skier Britt Hawes, Queenstown freeskier Finn Bilous, and Christchurch's Jamie Prebble, who was second at the world championships in ski cross in March, becoming the first New Zealand male athlete to win a worlds medal in able-bodied snowsports.
Those who wonder at the quality of the Winter Games may be surprised. In Light's book, the calibre of competitors means it is a world class event and results achieved there are highly relevant in terms of what might be attainable at an Olympics
"The quality of fields attracted by the Winter Games crew are genuinely world class. It is one of only a handful of qualifying events left so the world is coming to New Zealand.
"I think it's underestimated by the majority of people just how high a quality of field the Winter Games produces and it's a nice opportunity for the New Zealanders to compete in their own back yard."
The cutoff date for Olympic selection is, as usual, very late. January 24 is the final cut, just 15 days before the opening ceremony in Korea "but we would hope to have the majority of the team selected prior to Christmas," Light added.
Three skaters are pressing hard to go. Peter Michael has qualified in two individual events and the team pursuit of Michael, Dobbin and Reyon Kay, an all-Palmerston North trio, have also qualified.
Eyes on Korea
● New Zealand officials are confident of at least matching the 15 athletes who competed in the last Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 at February's Games in PyeongChang South Korea.
● The qualifying process is about to kick into full gear with the intention of having nominations with the New Zealand Olympic selectors by the end of October.
● New Zealand had five placings inside the top nine in Sochi; the plan is to better that in Korea.