With temperatures warming steadily throughout the week, the final event at Spring Series–the National Long-Distance Championship–was moved just over an hour north from its originally-scheduled location at the Nordic Heritage Center in Presque Isle to the Maine Winter Sports Center's other world-class venue in Fort Kent. The venue also hosted World Cup biathlon races in 2004.
The trails there were amply-covered with snow but equally soft and mushy, making the grueling 30km and 50km mass-start classic races even more immensely long and difficult.
Canadian Dasha Gaiazova, by far the most dominant skier overall in the women's competitions this week, racked up another podium place finishing just inside thirty seconds off Wagner's winning time of 1:47:26.1. Subaru Factory Team skier Kristina Strandberg had a strong race, taking third, another 38 seconds back.
Kate Whitcomb (FSx/Maine Winter Sports Center) was in fifth coming into the stadium at the end of the grueling race when she made a wrong turn and followed the lap lane around rather than heading into the finish, almost giving up one place but managing to retrace her steps in time to hang onto fifth ahead of Canadian Christine Bisson. Next were Kikkan Randall, Ida Sargent, Karin Camenisch, and Anna Mcloon, who rounded out the top ten.
Full results from the women's 30km National Long-Distance Championship: http://www.nensa.net/sched&result/2006/Women_SS_30K.pdf
The men's race started at noon under a strong sun and spread out quickly after the mass-start, with increasingly mushy uphills and squirrelly tracks making it difficult to ski efficiently even for some of the best skiers. Kris Freeman later commented “I had to totally re-learn how to double pole out there.” Towards the end some racers in the top fifteen were occasionally breaking into a walk on a couple of the steepest and most chewed-up short hills, and a few skiers even stopped for several minutes to re-wax.
After a lap and a half on the 12.5km loop, a lead pack of eight skiers were staying tight and clear of the rest of the field. The pack consisted of well-established skiers including David Chamberlain (Atomic), Kris Freeman (US Ski Team), Justin Freeman (Fischer/Salomon), Chad Giese (Subaru Factory Team), and Dave Stewart (FSx/XC Oregon), as well as top up-and-coming college skiers Ben True (Dartmouth), Mike Sinnott (Dartmouth), and Jurgen Uhl (UVM.)
With Freeman way off the front, it looked to be a battle for second. Giese was still holding down second and Justin Freeman and Dave Stewart were now both following him closely. On the last long climb Justin Freeman charged hard and managed to get clearly away from Stewart and a few seconds ahead of Giese, who fought hard all the way to the line and ended up third, just four seconds from second. Stewart came into the finish straight within sight of Giese twelve seconds later after 2 hours, 48 minutes and 38.8 seconds of racing. Freeman's winning time was 2:45:37.2, an incredible 2 minutes, 45 seconds ahead of his brother–most of which came from the final 12km of racing.
http://www.nensa.net/sched&result/2006/Men_SS_50K.pdfVideo footage from the men's race and post-race comments from Wendy Wagner, Kris Freeman, and other top skiers will be added to the new FasterSkier Multimedia gallery shortly along with more photos. Click the following link to browse Spring Series race footage, interviews, and photos: http://70.103.189.87/~fastersk/media/index.php
[***IMPORTANT NOTE: you must have QUICKTIME software to view the videos. If you do not have this program already installed on your computer, you can very easily (and legally) download it for free at the following link:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ ]
