From 2011 to 2014, Sylvan Ellefson, based out of Edwards, Colorado, was on a roar. SuperTour wins, World Cup starts, and a 30-kilometer skate national championship in 2014. Now, at 31 years old, it seems the skier who began his ascent in the sport during high school would rather focus on being a husband, father, brother, and coach rather than draw attention to himself. Based as a business person in Colorado’s Vail Valley, Ellefson is giving back...
In late August, U.S. Ski Team (USST) Head Coach Chris Grover broke his own news, releasing three new sets of criteria on behalf of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, the national governing body for cross-country skiing. The three separate documents discussed by Grover and linked in his blog disclosed the selection criteria for World Cup and World Cup Period 1 team selection, 2019 World Ski Championships (WSC) in Seefeld, Austria, and the 2019/2020 national team. Grover...
After the announcement that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Executive Committee, which WADA refers to in short at the ExCo, voted 9-2 in favor of reinstating the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) on Thursday, it released a statement describing what it considers a conditional reinstatement. As mentioned in an previous FasterSkier article, Russia has not fulfilled two outstanding provisions laid out in WADA’s “roadmap” for reinstatement. In its most recent public statement on the matter, also published on...
A full Olympic quad after Sochi, nothing remains irrefutably clean. Off the radar then on again, the Sochi doping scandal has sent recent tremors through the sports world. In a quick summary, after the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, the host nation was handed sanctions for the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics that affected some of its athletes. A total ban from Rio was not enacted despite the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) recommending the contrary. Russian athletes...
He’s another skier who bleeds maple syrup. Raised in Putney, Vermont. Skied at the Statton Mountain School (SMS), Dartmouth, and post-collegiately with the Craftsbury Green Racing Project — take a breath — and yes, still in Vermont as the SMS T2 Team head coach is Pat O’Brien. Thirty years old this summer, O’Brien has been at the helm of one of the dominant elite level programs in the U.S. since 2014. As he begins his fifth...
On June 19, Cross Country Canada (CCC) announced that 52-year-old Jennifer Tomlinson will serve a two-year term as the new chair of its Board of Directors. She replaces The CCC press release opens with a statement that Tomlinson — a former racing director, volunteer coach and integral member of biathlon andwith his seventh place in the Olympic sprint, have been the individual podium hopes for the Canadian team. This past spring, Knute Johnsgaard (half of Canada’s...
Let’s go niche for a second as this will be a recurring theme of this rollerski review. It’s not exactly the dark web, but this esoteric rollerski site lists over 50 manufacturers. Presuming each brand builds out several models of rollerskis, we’re talking well over 100 styles and permutations of dryland training gear. That’s only considering skate rollerskis. The basic engineering premise is the same for all of those: two wheels, four ball-bearing sets per ski,...
press release detailing its position on the likely closure of the jumping venue. Making matters more complex, it appears Calgary is preparing a bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics. In a study (
The newest hire to the U.S. Ski Team (USST) coaching ranks is 34-year-old Gus Kaeding. Kaeding is a newly minted MBA as of 2017 and is fresh off a gig with the U.S. Olympic Committee based out of Colorado Springs. Kaeding was a junior skier at the Stratton Mountain School (SMS), skied collegiately at Northern Michigan University, and coached at Central Cross Country and went on to become head coach of the SMST2 Team prior...
Øyvind Sandbakk. If you are new to his name, he is one of the key reasons Norway has remained ahead of the sport-performance curve in nordic sport. If there’s an interesting question to answer with regards to things like double-poling efficiency, Sandbakk or one his students is on it. Yes, Norway has strength in numbers when it comes to cross-country athletes, but they also have a Sandbakk and a cadre of graduate students who keep...
With the evolution from aluminum-shaft rollerskis to composite laminates (think a combination of wood, sometimes a honeycomb matrix and layers of fiberglass/carbon fiber) manufacturers have built rollerskis with “flex”. A skate rollerski’s flex pattern is part of the design process to better mimic that ubiquitous “on-snow feel” nearly all rollerki manufacturers claim and few master. For the purposes of this review, “on-snow feel” for rollerskis will be defined as the following: smooth, relative vibration-free...
The following Wednesday Workout was written by Dr. Øyvind B. Sandbakk, the managing director at the Centre for Elite Sports Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. (He’ll also be featured in an upcoming Nordic Nation podcast.) Beyond his work at NTNU, Sandbakk is the head of research and development at the Norwegian Olympic Sports Center (Olympiatoppen). At 37, he has established himself as one of the premier researchers studying...
And she won that in un-Bjørgen like style by coming from behind to reel in a speedy Jessie Diggins. This brings us to the point that this is the 50th episode of Nordic Nation. So, we wanted to go big. Really, no one is bigger than Bjørgen in the sport. In this ‘Take a Bow’ episode with Marit, we cover motherhood, training, racing, the media, and growing up in a small Norwegian club with three racers. The...
von Ballcap episode, we sit down with newly retired pro-skier Dakota Blackhorse-von Jess in his hometown of Bend. At 32, Dakota, or “Dak” as he’s most often called, had been on the scene for over a decade. In that time, Blackhorse-von Jess won the support of his peers and fans as a skier’s skier. The man is nothing but energy and intellect wound into a 5-foot-9-inch body that ultimately became a sprinting force. His story...
Here’s a link to that piece. Most recently, she drilled down into the
(Correction: This review has been updated to reflect that Hjul rollerskis are sourced and manufactured in China, as explained to FasterSkier by importer Pioneer Midwest.) This rollerski review has as much to do about perception as it does about the more-than-solid value discovered in the Hjul skate rollerski. info@fasterskier.com with the subject line “Gear Review Inquiry”.
BEND, Oregon — Zoe Roy. OK, OK. First things first. Don’t forget the umlaut. So it’s Zoë Roy. (Zoeeeee. Not Zo.) If you don’t know Roy and you’ve been to Bend, Oregon, well then, maybe you haven’t exactly been to Bend. Roy is at once keen, kind, clever, artistic, athletic, and nine parts out of ten fun. She is an icon of fun here. But let’s cut to the chase. We cover nordic sport and...
Cross Country Canada has reset. In this nascent Olympic cycle, there’s been an CCC hired Nic Lemyre as a high performance and development advisor. (Former high performance director Tom Holland recently retired.) For the past 21 years, Lemyre has resided and worked in Norway, most recently as a professor of sport psychology at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH) in Oslo. He also currently serves as the head of the department of coaching...
