Editor’s Note: The original version of this article listed Laura Valaas as a member of Team Endurance Professionals. According to Valaas, she was never a part of the team, despite being listed in Team Endurance Professionals marketing material. The article has been corrected, and we apologize for the error. In April of this year, Kristina Owen and Josh Korn began sharing a grand idea with some of their friends in the ski world: they wanted...
(Note: FasterSkier initially made an error and reported that Lanny Barnes was not re-named to the National Team. Since then, we have corrected the article – it was in fact her sister, Tracy, who was not re-named. FasterSkier apologizes for the error.) Last year was a historic season for U.S. biathlon. In late December, Tim Burke captured the yellow World Cup leader bib, and continued to wear it through part of January; it was the...
While Kris Freeman couldn’t quite match his winning performance from yesterday, he made a strong effort in the 10 k skate at Muonio today and was rewarded with a second-place finish, showing impressive consistency early in the season. “I’m always more comfortable in classic than skate,” he told FasterSkier after the race. As usual, the women competed first, also in a 10 k race. The temperature had dropped overnight and thanks to the humidity of...
America took its second win of the weekend in Muonio, with Kris Freeman skiing to a 12-second victory over Tobias Anger of Germany in a 10 k classic race. While Freeman was clearly the big story of the day, the morning actually started off with the women’s 5 k race. With a huge 45-meter climb partway through the course and a mostly downhill finish for the last kilometer or more, it was a fast and...
The first race of the weekend in Munio, Finland, went off without a hitch this morning, as Kikkan Randall cruised to a victory in the 1.1 k skate sprint. In a change from last weekend, both the men and women raced on the same course – a 1,110 meter point-to-point beginning with a steep pitch straight out of the start. The course then wound around some more gradual uphills and finished with a steep downhill...
The race season started off last weekend in Muonio, Finland, but that was just a preview. This weekend, the Olos resort will be hosting three more races, with a start list including over 600 skiers from twenty-two different countries. In addition, the Americans have arrived in full force: the Craftsbury Green Racing Project has been joined by the U.S. Ski Team (USST), and the Maine Winter Sports Center’s (MWSC’s) collection of athletes from around the...
At just twenty-one years of age, Leif Nordgren is the youngest member of the U.S. Biathlon Team. In the past few seasons, he has racked up some of the best American results ever at the World Junior Championships, snagging a bronze in the pursuit in 2008 in Rupholding – the first U.S. medal at the event since 2002. This year, he’s no longer in the junior ranks, so he’ll be fully exposed to the senior...
For the nordic world, the highest profile issue on the agenda at the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC’s) recent executive board meeting in late October was the inclusion of women’s ski jumping in the 2014 Sochi Olympics. But besides other events like the figure skating team event and a luge relay (FasterSkier isn’t sure how that works, but we want to see a hand-tag halfway down the luge track…), the IOC board also looked “favorably” towards...
Estonian Andrus Veerpalu has competed in every Olympic Games since Albertville in 1992. In Vancouver, at 39 years of age, he contested only the 50 k classic mass start, finishing sixth. Many assumed that it would be one of his last races. They were wrong. This year, Veerpalu will be focusing on the World Championships in Oslo, Norway; in particular, he plans to peak for the classic distance races. There is no reason to believe...
FIS kicked off its winter race season in Munio, Finland and Rybinsk, Russia this weekend. In Muonio, the first race of the year was a classic sprint, contested Sunday morning in frigid temperatures, which drew a variety of athletes from around northern Europe. The Craftsbury Green Racing Project was the only American team in attendance, but they turned heads as Ida Sargent, racing in her U.S. Ski Team suit to avoid an NCAA violation, qualified...
Each year, many of northern Europe’s best racers travel to Muonio, Finland, for early-season training and racing. With reliable snow even in late October, these national teams travel from Ramsau, where the glaciers are no longer so nice, to this small town far north of the Arctic Circle. Here, the Finns have been hoarding a giant pile of snow all summer, and in the fall, they spread it around with an excavator and dump trucks....
Swede Bjorn Ferry won his first individual Olympic medal in Vancouver, capturing gold in the pursuit race. He has three career World Cup victories and two relay medals, both from mixed relay events: gold at the 2007 World Championships in Antholz, Italy, and bronze at the 2010 World Championships in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia. Ferry is also the only biathlete we know who is married to a world champion arm-wrestler. Can he continue his winning ways this...
Back in June, Nat Herz ran a piece on homologation called “It’s Not as Boring as You Think.” Since then, I’ve gone through most of the process while working for the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. Nat was right. It’s not boring. However, the relative ease or difficulty of some parts of the process took me by surprise. Since Nat introduced the concept of homologation on a theoretical level, I thought I would provide a first-person perspective...
Jonne Kahkonen was hired by the United States Biathlon Association this summer to be the new women’s head coach. Kahkonen, who hails from Finland, just finished a four-year stint as head coach of the biathlon program. Finland’s top performances last season came from Kaisa Makarainen, who finished the year ranked 22nd in the overall World Cup Standings. How did Kahkonen end up in the United States? U.S. Biathlon Association President Max Cobb said that he...
With only seven weeks until the first race of the World Cup season, biathletes around the world are making their final preparations and fine-tuning their training. For the Americans, this meant a two-week training camp in Soldier Hollow, Utah, which finished Friday. Coaches had two main goals for the camp: to take advantage of training at altitude, and to solidify shooting skills in “combination” workouts with rollerskiing. Coach Patrick Coffey said that the staff worked...
Last month, a group of high school students from New England had the chance of a lifetime: to travel to Norway in time for the biggest and most culturally iconic ski races of the season.
How to not wreck the environment, from Paris-Match
The Craftsbury Outdoor Center and its Green Racing Project are excited to announce a new event, the Craftsbury Spring Tour, scheduled for March 19th through 21st. Racers from UNH, Dartmouth, Stratton, and Burke have already signed up, along with the GRP, guaranteeing strong fields. An expansion of the traditional Craftsbury Spring Fling, the weekend will offer a number of different racing opportunities, including an NRL-sanctioned stage race modeled after the Tour de Ski, a BKL...
Rebecca Dussault, a member of CXC Team Vertical Limit, won her second American Birkebeiner on Saturday. Her victory was perhaps all the more impressive considering that she came down with an upper respiratory infection 5 days before the race, and she was unsure if she would be able to race until Friday afternoon. Check out
The final NorAm races in Val Cartier, Quebec, were held in changing conditions on Tuesday. Dasha Gaiazova (Canadian National Team/Skielite) won the women’s 10k interval-start classic, sweeping all three races of the series, while Stefan Kuhn (Canadian National Team/Canmore Nordic) picked up his first win of the weekend in the men’s 15k race. Both athletes are likely to represent Canada at the Olympics in Vancouver after winning qualifying sprints in Canmore, but the Olympic teams...