The 10th annual JLS Sports trip to Trout Lake / Bend just wrapped up last Sunday. This year word spread like wildfire among not only Western skiers but Easterners too. We had a record number of attendee’s including an Olympian, elite juniors, college skiers and a few just entering the crazy fun world of competitive Nordic skiing. Seven skiers from the East participated in the camp and a few even came out early this summer...
While many in the Northern Hemisphere are at the beach, the racing season in the Southern Hemisphere is about to get going. Both the Alpine and Cross-Country FIS Continental Cups will launch their competition seasons on 6th-8th August 2010. The South American Cup in Alpine Skiing will be starting in Cerro Castor, Ushuaia (ARG) with a set of technical events, whilst the Australia/New Zealand Cup in Cross-Country Skiing will kick off at Snow Farm in...
Identifying talent in endurance athletics at a young age can be a challenging task. My goal in this article is to give you a sense of what different levels of success at WJC/U23s might indicate and how much variability there is between athletes in this respect. Our basic tool will be a graph of FIS points versus age for distance results, broken down by their best result (finishing place) at WJC/U23s. This gives us a...
Before last year, Ida Sargent had had a handful of strong results, but the only way you wouldn’t have heard her name by the end of the 2009-2010 season is if you’d been buried in a snowbank. Sargent, who split her winter competing for the Craftsbury Green Racing Project and the Dartmouth Ski Team, started out with some top-10s in the early season SuperTours, then really heated up at the national championships in Anchorage, where...
When James Southam lined up for the start of a 30 k pursuit race at the Olympics in Whistler in February, it was the first time he’d done so all year. At the 2009 World Championships in the Czech Republic, Southam faced a similar challenge: the pursuit race there was only his second of the season, following a World Cup in Whistler earlier that year. Of the 24 SuperTour races scheduled by the U.S. Ski...
I step off the bus from the Strip into the Las Vegas evening and walk inside the Palms Casino, about 40 minutes early for the poker game between Marcus Hellner and Petter Northug. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and I’m just coming off a two or three mile walk in search a loaf of bread, jostling tourists in 100-degree heat. The only place I can find to make my peanut butter and jelly sandwich is...
When Kris Freeman, Andy Newell, Kikkan Randall, and the four other members of the U.S. Ski Team (USST) head out on the first ski of their on-snow camp in New Zealand this week, they will have at least 7,657 reasons to appreciate it. That’s number of miles separating Wanaka, the site of the team’s camp, from Park City, Utah, where the team is headquartered. The USST leaves Sunday for New Zealand, and for the next...
Bryan Fish is the former CXC Team Vertical Limit head coach, and now coaches for the U.S. Ski Team. FasterSkier approached Fish about CXC’s unique approach to periodicity–the sequencing of hard and easy blocks in a training plan–and this was his response. We got an e-mail from a reader with a story idea—he mentioned that CXC takes a different approach to periodicity, alternating hard weeks with easy weeks rather than doing the typical three-week progression....
Winning at cards requires both luck and skill. On his fourth day of play at the 2010 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Petter Northug’s luck ran out–but not before he had survived long enough to win more than $20,000. With fewer than 700 players remaining from an original pool of more than 7,000, Northug was eliminated, on a hand that he had less than a 20 percent chance of losing. Late in the...
Petter Northug continued his run at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas on Monday, upping his chip count by 50 percent and advancing to the fourth day of competition. “During the three days he has played, he has not made a single mistake,” said Thorkild Gundersen, a journalist from Northug’s sponsor, Vi Menn Magazine, in an interview with the Norwegian website Nettavisen. After his third day of play at the tournament, Northug checked...
With the Sochi Winter Olympics more than three years off, the city still maintains an aura of mystery to most Americans. Not for Luke Bodensteiner, the vice president for athletics at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), who has already visited the 2014 venues twice. Bodensteiner’s first trip to Sochi was with the International Ski Federation (FIS) two years ago, when he helped with a training seminar for some of the initial Olympic volunteers....
If Petter Northug’s ski career ever goes south, he might have a future in poker. On his second day of play at the 2010 World Series of Poker on Friday, Northug quadrupled his chip count and watched Swedish rival Marcus Hellner exit the tournament—giving Northug a victory in the Las Vegas challenge set up for the two skiers by his sponsor, Vi Menn Magazine. “It was a good table, and I played good poker,” Northug...
It’s not oil, fish, or aquavit that’s behind the Norwegian sports machine, which delivered the most medals per capita of any nation at the 2010 Olympic Games—at least not entirely. Instead, a healthy portion of the funding for Norway’s sports organizations comes from Norsk-Tipping, the state-owned gambling company. Norsk-Tipping dedicates 45.5 percent of its annual profits to sports—more than $241 million U.S. dollars in 2009 alone. That’s one of the reasons that quadruple Olympic-medalist Petter...
In Las Vegas, the house always wins. And in Tuesday’s head-to-head rollerski race between Marcus Hellner and Petter Northug, Northug was the house. On a course laid out by his Norwegian magazine sponsor—and modified at the last minute to give him a better shot at the win—Northug took the last two heats of a best-of-three series in the parking lot of the Palms Casino, evening the score with Hellner after losing to the Swede in...
11:28 PM: With ten minutes to go in the first day of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, it appears that both Petter Northug and Marcus Hellner have survived, and will head into a second round of play later this week. The two each have comfortable stacks of chips, and will be in decent position as the tournament continues on. 4:50: For once, it looked like Petter Northug was faced with a comeback...
Marcus Hellner one, Petter Northug zero. In an hour-long production worthy of two A-list celebrities, Hellner outlasted Northug in a one-on-one game of Texas Hold’em at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas on Sunday evening. Orchestrated by the Norwegian men’s magazine Vi Menn and the online gambling company PokerStars, the event showcased the kind of status that the two athletes enjoy in Europe. Clad in a crisp white button-down shirt emblazoned with a Norwegian flag...
If Petter Northug and Marcus Hellner had any doubts as to whether they’d be out of their element during the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, the high temperatures in the triple digits over the weekend should serve to quash them. The two may be Olympic gold medalists, but they’re also unseasoned card-players. If they hope to fare well in the tournament, the Scandinavians will have to better old-school pros, new-school math-whizzes, and hundreds...
What do a GPS, a retired airline pilot, and a Norwegian guru named Hermod Bjorkestol have in common? All are key components of a plan to bring many of the U.S.’s biggest venues in line with International Ski Federation (FIS) standards. At its annual meetings in Turkey in early June, FIS made it clear to American officials that a longstanding exception would be revoked: starting in the winter of 2011-2012, all races held in the...
Training with Marit Bjoergen and the Norwegian women’s cross-country team might be an intimidating prospect even for some of North America’s elite men. But not for Kikkan Randall. In the middle of a two-week visit to Norway this month, Randall took up an offer to go head-to-head with the country’s women’s squad in a double-pole interval workout. And while the pace was high—“pretty much all out”—Randall wasn’t blown away. “It was pretty cool just to...
