Pursuing my interest in the French women’s team further, I was put in contact with Thibaut Chene, the women’s coach for L’équipe de France. Before coaching the women’s national team, Chene worked with the French junior team for four years. Thus, many of the women now at the senior level have worked with him since they were junior skiers. In 2015, the prior women’s team coach, Anaël Huard, left and Chene took over. An article written at...
The Journal of Science in Sport and Exercise recently published a paper titled ‘Preparing for the Nordic Skiing Events at the Beijing Olympics in 2022: Evidence-Based Recommendations and Unanswered Questions’, written by Øyvind Sandbakk, Guro Strøm Solli, Rune Kjøsen Talsnes, and Hans-Christer Holmberg. This is essential reading for anyone who is hoping to represent their country next year, covering the basics of elevation, time zone changes, cold weather, and the possibility of race format changes...
Part I of this article examined Sadie Maubet Bjornsen’s childhood, World Cup debut, and the injuries that she overcame along the way. This article, Part II, starts with a frank look at some of the challenges of being an American World Cup skier, then discusses her overall career highlights, her final World Championships earlier this year, and what comes next. In addition to the injuries, there are some challenges to life on the World Cup...
The debate to run equal race distances for men and women remains. Molly Peters, the head cross-country ski coach at Vermont’s St. Michael’s College, has led a grassroots campaign to make equal distance racing commonplace at the NCAA level and beyond. She’s the lead voice for The Ski Equal Team. The group sent a letter to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Cross Country Sport Committee, its Equity and Inclusion Committee, and CEO Tiger Shaw asking...
To classic ski, and to do so well, requires an athlete to perform an almost stupidly large number of tasks at the same time. You have to move two arms, two legs, and two ankles in alternation, in almost infinite variations depending upon the snow, the wax, the course, and your remaining energy. You have to mediate between power and finesse, kick and glide, stimulus and weight transfer. In short, you have to balance a...
Living in France for the past year, and with ski racing never far from my mind, I was interested in learning more about the athletes and system here, particularly for the women. While the French men’s team is a force to be reckoned with, both in sprinting and distance, results, or even athletes, on the women’s side are sparse. For example, at the Oberstdorf World Championships in Germany this past season, the French men’s relay...
Last fall, one thing was certain — the pandemic would worsen. And it did. Rosie Brennan, summed up her feelings about traveling to Finland for the first round of World Cups by jumping in head first, masked, of course. “I don’t believe anyone knows the answer [to if we should or should not have a World Cup] as we are all experiencing this pandemic for the first time and still don’t have a full grasp...
Last year at this time, I was primarily gym-ridden. After roughly five months on snow, my fitness was high but my tolerance for the impact and specific demands of running were low. Throwing better judgement to the wind, I gave in to the allure of warm days, rapidly drying trails, and beloved road loops around town, and paid the price. Despite running between zero and ten miles total between December and the end of February,...
Let’s start with some basic gender equality facts in skiing. The first women’s downhill at the Olympics was in1948. Women were awarded Olympic medals in combined (one downhill run and two of slalom) beginning eight years earlier in 1936. FIS has awarded a women’s World Championship in downhill since 1931. The FIS database marks 1967 as the first year for an official FIS World Cup downhill race for both men or women. It’s a different...
Sten Fjeldheim, the cross-country ski coach at Northern Michigan University announced his retirement on March 30th. He coached and mentored at the school for 35 years. This piece from The Mining Journal speaks to Fjeldheim’s legacy and the many accolades NMU skiers achieved under his tutelage. Below are thoughts about Fjeldheim from former NMU skier, U.S. Ski Team athlete and Head Coach, Peter Vordenberg. According to a NMU press release, Fjeldheim had this to say...
According to the FIS database, sprints on the cross-country World Cup began during the 1996-1997 season. That year, American Simi Hamilton was nine years old. And if you listen to any of the Hamilton-lore floating around adventure circles, the Aspen, Colorado native was already eyeing deep-country adventure. We’ll touch upon this often here, but Hamilton moves in the mountains as few can. He’s capable of pushing at near race pace in technical terrain with a...
This year was a big year for women’s Nordic combined racing, not in the way 2020 was a “big year”, but in a record-breaking, moving forward to better things kind of way. For those of you who don’t follow Nordic combined, here’s what you need to know: Competitions involve ski jumping, in which athletes are scored based on style and distance, and later in the day, they compete in a pursuit-start skate race based on...
Let’s dial back to mid-March and the close of the 2021 World Championships with the men’s 50-kilometer mass start classic race. Russia’s Alexander Bolshunov and Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo came into the final corner and finish-straight in close quarters for the win. In the real-time fast-paced moment, Bolshunov and Klæbo tangled, with both skiers barely maintaining balance. To summarize, Bolshunov used all available real-estate coming around the final turn. Klæbo, as he had been doing...
*This is the second part of a multi-piece series on photographing skiing, ranging from capturing skiing on your smartphone to taking a deep dive into how professionals capture skiing on the World Cup. You can read part one here. Smartphones are versatile cameras to have on the go, but if you want to take your photography another step further and dive into the inner workings of a camera, experimenting with a manual camera is your...
This article is part of a series regarding female athlete specific physiology and nutrition. To get started, you can find a primer on the menstrual cycle here and listen to this podcast on Nordic Nation discussing female athlete specific nutrition with registered dietician and professional runner Maddie Alm. The survey analyzed here is an extension of the conversation with Guro Strøm Solli on her research on female athlete specific physiology and effects that the menstrual cycle has on training...
By the time you read this story, Vermont’s Sophie Caldwell Hamilton will have turned a fresh thirty-one. Her birthday is today, Monday, March 22. Although Caldwell Hamilton began representing the U.S. Ski Team on the World Cup in Québec City in 2012, she is profoundly Green Mountain State. Raised in Peru, Vermont near where she later attended the Stratton Mountain School, we’re pretty certain that, in a metaphorical sense, she bleeds maple syrup. As much...
* This is a part of a multi-piece series on photographing skiing, ranging from capturing skiing on your smartphone to taking a deep dive into how professionals capture skiing on the World Cup. Just about everyone carries around a smartphone these days. Also, bundled up in that hi-tech rectangle is a tiny, powerful camera. People often joke that their phone takes a better photo than they could with a manual camera. For many users,...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and their A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage please contact info@fasterskier.com. Four months after the season debut in Ruka, Finland the women lined up at the start line one last time to conclude a season many were skeptical would even...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and their A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage please contact info@fasterskier.com. This is a story that might make Jessie Diggins cringe. We’re here to render her efforts to the singularity of cross-country ski results. (A quick nod – her default is...
“Go back and watch the video,” is something I have heard and done maybe 100 times collectively since the men’s 50 k mass start classic concluded with a winner then a DQ, then another winner on Sunday as the 2021 World Championships slammed the door on competition. To say it was a bizarre scene would be an understatement as Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo and Russia’s Alexander Bolshunov rocketed into and around a sweeping left-hand curve...