Pete Vordenberg

Lahti is a party town. This town goes out at midnight every day of the week. There is shouting and revelry on the snowy streets at 4am. There is bar after bar on every block, and they are inevitably full, and loud and smoky. Can it be like this all the time, or is it only for the World Cup weekend and other big events? Something tells me in Lahti it is all the time....

Just the train from Milan up to Germany was a ten-hour ride. But the views were excellent. The big Italian valleys are patterned with row after row of grape vines some thin as a finger others thick as trees. The air is heavy, a near permanent haze that is humid and sticky and which lays a misty veil over everything. Italy is old and new, run down and newly painted. A hotel room can lack...

This early season block was the results-highlight of our year. Trond and the waxers drove all over Europe (from Italy to Norway to northern Finland and back) on roads slick enough to rival the Fairbanks — Salcha commute while the athletes flew from race site to race site. The racers, coaches and waxers basically kicked ass scoring our best world cup results so far and putting Kris in the World Cup red group. The rest...

Editor's Note: We received a lot of great feedback on Pete Vordenberg's New Koch series that we ran last April. Now Pete has generously offered to do it all for us again. This is Part One in Pete Vordenberg's US Ski Team 2003-2004 Year In Review. Part One has a ton of great information about how the US Ski Team trains, particularly in the spring and summer months. I have always wanted to be an...

August. New Zealand. Still an hour or two out of Auckland and high over the pre-dawn South Pacific there is nothing but blue. Blue unpolluted by other color, and every tone and hue of it too. From the edge-of-space dark-blue in the high west, fading all the way down to the pale-blue horizon where it meets the deep-blue sea far, far below. Thirteen hours cramped in this winged-tube of air-born aluminum hurling through all that...