Andrew Newell is one of the country's top junior skiers. He will be sending us a number of reports from this year's World Junior Championships. Newell also has his own ski film production company, <X-Ski Films, which just released its first video called <Generation X-Ski
From when the team flew into Sundsvall Sweden on Sunday Jan 26 the trip has gone extremely well. Solleftea, the town where the races are being held, was only an hour and 1 half hour drive from the air port which made for a much more relaxing travel day than in previous years. For the first week of the trip we had an awesome training camp skiing on the race trails every day. Our hotel was situated midway up an Alpine hill and within a few feet of the world class race trails. The first several days we enjoyed lot of snow, great hard wax skiing, and mild weather despite a few days that dropped to the -20c rage with some wind. With plenty of great food and solid training the team was looking strong and healthy. Acclimating to the time change is always a little bit of a trick and many of us were not able so sleep through the night well into the second week of the trip.
By the first of February many more teams had arrived at the race venue and the trails were getting crowded with the different colors and languages. At this time the team moved off the Alpine hill to another hotel about a 15 min drive away from the trails. With only a few days before the start of the races week lots of time and effort was put into prepping and testing skis for specific snow conditions with our head wax genius Chris Hall.
Last night (2/2/03) the opening ceremonies were held in down town Solleftea to kick off the official start of the World Junior Championships. Each team paraded down the main walking street in town with an awry of flags, torches, and banners. It is an awesome sight to see all 29 different countries screaming and yelling for the same cause. Cross country Skiing is very popular in Sweden so an event of this magnitude brought out many young skiers and spectators to help us get fired up for the races.