SWEDEN – Both Charlotte Kalla (SWE) and Marcus Hellner (SWE) will sit out the team sprint events at the 2011 World Championships in Holmenkollen at the end of February. They join Norwegian top racers Marit Bjoergen and Petter Northug, who have already announced that they are skipping the team sprints.
“For me, having a famous sibling is solely a bonus,” says Karstein Johaug, the younger brother of Olympic ski racer Therese Johaug. The 18-year-old has the 2012 World Junior Championships podium in mind, and he has a plan in place for getting there.
Langrenn.com is now owned by Nilsen Support, while former co-owner and managing editor Trond Harald Sand and reporter Ivar Haugen formally left the company on September 1, 2010.
SWEDEN – Petter Northug is not allowed to write autographs or meet the fans during the 2011 World Championships in Oslo. That approach doesn’t appeal to Sweden’s top skier Marcus Hellner. He welcomes the public and wants lots of action at the venue, and promises to sign autographs.
OSLO, NORWAY – Jørgen and Anders Aukland, Jörgen Brink, Jens Arne Svartedal and Sandra Hansson. They’ll all be on the start line as the 10K uphill roller ski time trial in Oslo gets underway today, Thursday.
The Norwegian biathlon web site Strafferunden.no got their hands on the new Rottefella binding set to launch officially in over a week.
SWEDEN - Two of the biggest favorites for the Oslo 2011 World Championships are choosing different ways to peak for the events in February/March: Charlotte Kalla (SWE) chooses to race the Tour de Ski again, while rival Marit Bjoergen (NOR) chooses the same plan as she did for the 2010 Olympics and skips the Tour.
Scott Johnston doesn’t dish up a recipe for success or hand out a year-long training plan. This fall, he will coach clinics where he explains how to create sensible, individualized training plans aimed at maximizing individual potential based on proven principles of endurance training.
Actovegin is not a new drug on the Eastern European arena. Former Norwegian biathlon team director Kjell Ove Oftedal, found a glass vial of Actovegin next to a Russian wax trailer during a World Cup race in 2006.
NORWAY - Langrenn.com’s exclusive interview with Nikolay Pankratov from September 2, 2010, reveals a universe of difference between Norwegian and Russian training culture.
NORWAY – When Russian skier Nikolay Pankratov was caught on the Swiss border with intravenous equipment and 22 vials of actovegin, nobody was more shocked than Martin Johnsrud Sundby. The Norwegian national team member has spent much of his summer training with and getting to know the Russian skier during his extended training stay in Norway.
Bjoern Daehlie spills the beans about interval training in the 1990s.
Ski poles with… zippers! Coming to a location near you.
The period from 1989 to 1994 is often referred to as the “golden age” in Norwegian cross-country skiing. During these years, Norwegian skiers hauled home buckets of medals, and the party culminated with the Olympics on home turf in Lillehammer 1994. What happened behind the scenes was determining for the results. Terje Olav Seim was one of the wax techs on the support team who groomed and polished up several golden pairs. There is no...
NORWAY – Bringing young athletes from all the ski disciplines onto one team is the recipe for excellence in the future. “Team Morgendagens Helter” is 5-year talent development project organized by the Norwegian Ski Association and backed by major sponsor Statoil, designed to share training strategies and increase the pool of experience across the different ski disciplines.
A group of handpicked Norwegian junior skiers in the Norwegian Ski Association’s talent development group are treated to their own mentors among the World Cup racers, as well as team camps that blend athletes from all the ski disciplines. The result is major motivational boosts.
This week, Norwegian wax techs and Head Wax Coach Knut Nystad are headed for the ski tunnel in Torsby, Sweden, with truckloads of skis and tools to find the optimal combinations. “Normally, the national teams have a training camp in the ski tunnel, but this year they don’t. So we decided to have a testing camp here on our own,” Nystad explains to www.langrenn.com. Testing and adjusting Although it is, as Nystad points out, not...
AURE, NORWAY – Cross country skier Petter Northug (NOR) leaves Aure and the rest of the events at Toppidrettsveka. Northug completed two of four events. Toppidrettsveka started out as an elite Norwegian week of competitions, camps and challenges that evolved into an international week of camps and competitions in the northwest part of Norway. The past two years it has featured World Cup roller ski events, and this summer acted as test events for the...
Martin Rosvall, 32, works full time as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Umeå in northern Sweden. But the constraints of a full time job, work-related travel and conferences are no barriers to stellar marathon performances, Rosvall says. Point in case: In March, he finished 15th overall at the Vasaloppet, the 90 K classic race that attracts more than 20,000 skiers and was Rosvall’s main goal for the season. The legendary race...