Kikkan Randall isn’t particularly professorial, what with her pink hair and her affable demeanor. But since arriving back in the U.S. last week, fresh off the World Cup circuit in Europe, Randall (APU/USST) has been teaching lessons, all right, with the trails of Sun Valley as her classroom, and the North American women’s field as her pupils. After Sunday’s unit on distance classic skiing, Tuesday’s session was on how to ski a skate prologue. In...
In Tuesday’s 3.3 k prologue in Sun Valley, the top-seeded men started last. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise when Simi Hamilton finished his race with a big lead—there were 42 of the continent’s strongest skiers still to come. The surprising thing was what happened next. One by one, each of those 42 men came to the finish line and failed to touch Hamilton’s time. Andy Newell: 18 seconds down. Leif Zimmermann and...
The cross-country ski season’s last stand begins on Tuesday, when the final domestic races of the year kick off in Sun Valley, ID. The mini-tour known as the SuperTour Finals will start with a 3.3/2.8 k freestyle prologue on a stout course, followed by three more races in four more days. The winner of both the men’s and women’s overall will be the first competitor to arrive atop a ridge on Dollar Mountain, a local...
Most 19-year-old women racing in their first-ever 30 k would be satisfied just to finish. But on Sunday in Sun Valley, Jessie Diggins (CXC) did much more: she came away with a podium at the U.S. National Championships. After 91 minutes of classic skiing—three-quarters of it with the leaders—Diggins ended up in third place, with just enough gas left in her tank to hold off Morgan Arritola (USST) on her last trip up the course’s...
In the U.S. National Championship in the 30 k last year, Kikkan Randall (USST) somehow pulled off a win in northern Maine just 72 hours removed from racing in Europe. This year, with a full week to recover from World Cup Finals, at least Randall’s biological clock was set to the right time. But Sunday’s classic race presented its own challenges: the Alaskan had to overcome a brutal course, the strength-sapping effects of altitude, and,...
The 38 women that aren’t wearing bib one in today’s U.S. National Championship in the 30 k classic have a tough task ahead of them: figuring out a way to beat Kikkan Randall. The 28-year-old Alaskan is in the midst of the best season of her life, having collected four sprint podiums, two wins, and a career-best 11th place in a distance race. She’ll be the favorite in Sunday’s 30 k in Sun Valley, and...
Three quarters of the way through Saturday’s U.S. national championship in the 50 k classic, when the men’s pack began the process of whittling itself down, an unfamiliar figure emerged from the mix into the lead group. Tucked into a sea of U.S. Ski Team and club uniforms, it was easy to miss the tiny form of Yuma Yoshida, who can’t stand much taller than five-and-a-half feet. But by the time the race wound down,...
No, he probably didn’t have what it takes to beat Petter Northug—nor even Marcus Hellner, for that matter. But on Saturday in Sun Valley, Kris Freeman (USST) wasn’t racing those guys. Instead, he was pitted against the North American domestic field in the U.S. National Championship in the 50 k, with a race plan that could perhaps be best described as “don’t mess it up.” He didn’t, despite tricky waxing conditions, and one gambit that...
Kris Freeman (USST) will be the odds-on favorite to win Saturday’s U.S. national championship in the 50 k classic. But the way his last two seasons wrapped up, just making it to the start line in Sun Valley, ID, is a victory in and of itself. In late March, 2009, Freeman was recuperating from surgery on his legs to relieve the debilitating symptoms of exertional compartment syndrome; he had been forced to end his season...
Lars Flora’s 2011 European campaign didn’t go the way he wanted, but at least it went out with a bang. After some disappointing races at the World Championships in Oslo, and at the World Cup Final in Falun, Sweden, Flora finally put it together on Sunday, just in time for his last start before heading back to the U.S. In the 15 k handicap start in Falun, Flora was 30th, less than two minutes behind...
News about Japan hasn’t been hard to come by for the past two weeks. Viewers around the world have been able to watch live on television as the damage unfolded from a massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the country; an ensuing nuclear catastrophe has played out on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. We’d heard little, though, about any impacts of the natural disaster on skiing in the country. Masako Ishida was the...
In the space of one minute at the World Cup Finals, Kikkan Randall (USA) went from contender to collateral damage. Randall had had a great start to Saturday’s 10 k pursuit in Falun, Sweden—the third event of the four-stage mini-tour that ends the cross-country World Cup season—and she was among the leaders, looking for another personal distance best after her 11th-place in Finland last weekend. Enter Therese Johaug. “She decided she wanted to be right...
Since the tail end of the 2011 Tour de Ski, Russia’s star distance skier, Alexander Legkov, has been missing in action. He fell ill with swine flu and couldn’t finish the Tour, then, with an abysmal performance in the relay at World Championships in Oslo, singlehandedly dashed his country’s hopes for a medal in that event. While the relay result stung, Legkov’s drought has been balanced by some strong performances by his teammates. There’s Maxim...
Andy Newell has a title to defend. Having edged out Canadian Ivan Babikov at the finish of last year’s SuperTour Finals in northern Maine, the American sprinter will come into this season’s edition as the defending champion. But with the rest of the U.S. Ski Team in attendance, Newell will have his hands full this time around, in Sun Valley, ID. The full American squad will be in attendance at SuperTour Finals, which start next...
The day before Wednesday’s World Cup city sprint in Stockholm, Swedish sprinter Emil Jönsson took a phone call from one Carl XVI Gustav—his king. “It was a strange thing—it does not happen every day,” Jönsson told SVT, the Swedish television channel. “He called and told me that I should ski for king and country.” When the king tells you to go fast, you do it—especially when you’re racing around, of all places, the Royal Palace....
Andy Newell saved the best for last. After a season in which he had failed to crack the top five a single time on the World Cup, the American did just that in his final sprint of the season, finishing fifth on a tight circuit around the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Sweden on Wednesday. The result wasn’t quite as good as Newell’s best in 2010, when he was third in another city sprint in Norway....
The OPA Cup series is supposedly to be skiing’s equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues. But last weekend’s racing in Ramsau was about as far from a dingy Southern ballpark as you can get. Surrounded by jagged, snowy peaks on a plateau in the Austrian Alps, Ramsau was the last stop on this year’s OPA circuit, which a contingent of U.S. athletes has been following for the last two weeks. Nearly a dozen Americans took part...
There were few participants in the Tour de Ski who were still standing after the finish of that race’s final stage, the brutal ascent up the Alpe Cermis in Italy. But an even more difficult challenge may await those athletes next season: the inaugural Uphill Trophy, a new competition format tentatively slotted into the World Cup calendar in Poland next February. The race packs a whopping 500 meters of climbing into its first four kilometers—nearly...
Short courses, long courses, steep hills, flats, dicey corners: you name it, and Emil Joensson will ski it. In Lahti, Finland on Sunday, the Swede raced to his fifth World Cup sprint victory in seven starts this season, with Eirik Brandsdal (NOR) in second and his teammate Paal Golberg in third. Joensson’s win secured his second straight title in the World Cup sprint standings—which at this point is a merely a restatement of the obvious...
For Dario Cologna, it’s better late than never. After enduring a brutal two weeks at the World Ski Championships in Oslo, where he was stymied by bad skis and bad tactics, the Swiss cross-country superstar finally got things back on track on the World Cup in Lahti, Finland on Saturday. At the finish of the men’s 20 k pursuit, Cologna outsprinted Frenchmen Maurice Manificat and Vincent Vittoz for the win—his first since his victory in...