Cycling back before you know it — it’s the International Ski Federation (FIS) 2019 Nordic Junior/U23 World Championships in Lahti, Finland which gets rolling with a U20 classic sprint this Sunday. In our quest to check in with some North American athletes in Finland, we emailed a list of quick hit questions. Up first, twenty-two-year-old Ian Torchia who skis for both Northern Michigan University and the U.S. Ski Team Development Team. Torchia participated at World Juniors...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Gus Schumacher spent last winter traveling the world for ski racing, including laying down the season’s most dramatic anchor leg, non-Jessie Diggins edition, to bring the U.S. men’s relay team from fourth to a historic second at World Juniors. The then-high school senior also spent the season touring the country to plan his future in ski racing, talking with multiple NCAA coaches to discuss their programs and weigh everything from coaching philosophy...
A strip of imported snow along the Elbe river, iconic architectural reminders of old-world Europe’s city-scape in Dresden, Germany, Lycra, speedy skiers, and teams of two: all the ingredients for the men’s 1.6-kilometer freestyle team sprint. With tight pack skiing a function of the the relatively flat Dresden ski loop, the ten teams in the final attempted to play stay-out-of-trouble-skiing for the six total laps. But with a crowded tag area and tight corners where...
Risk is part of putting on the race bib. In an individual sport like cross-country skiing, athletes expose themselves to be judged by place, time back, splits, sector times, overall rankings, fastest (or slowest) times on the day. In the latest version of the Tour de Ski (TdS) overall winners were crowned on Sunday; Norwegians Ingvild Flugstad Østberg won the women’s Tour, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won the men’s. Both were first-time winners. Within...
The final stages of the Tour de Ski (TdS) often bring drama: the attrition of some athletes leaving opportunity for others. Among the 45 male competitors who chose to start Saturday’s TdS Stage 6 of 7–a 15-kilometer classic mass start in Val di Fiemme, Italy–some may have been experiencing fatigue from racing the Tour’s previous five stages; others may have been finding their peak. For Italy’s Francesco de Fabiani, who started Saturday in bib number...
If there’s one skier on the U.S. domestic circuit who knows how to time his wins, it’s Kyle Bratrud. The 25 year old now has three U.S. Cross Country Championship titles to his name–his most recent coming on Thursday in the men’s 15-kilometer classic race in Craftsbury, Vt–with all of these wins simultaneously falling on Championship years. In 2015, while still a senior at Northern Michigan University, he earned his first national title by winning the...
On Dec. 26, longtime cross-country skier, coach, and wax tech Floyd Bernard Reishus passed away in Bozeman, Mont. Bernard was a fixture from Alaska to Bozeman as he dedicated his time to enriching lives through cross-country skiing. You can read a complete obituary from the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Reishus was a U.S. Marine, a high school teacher, and “wax guru”. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
*Note: This article has been updated to include comments from U.S. Ski Team B-Tean member, Kevin Bolger Without the visual of the grey and white U23 marker next to his name on an FIS results sheet, it’s easy to forget Norwegian Johannes Høsflot Klæbo is still under 23 years of age. As the Tour de Ski (TdS) celebrates its 13th edition this year, the twenty-two-year-old Klæbo (he celebrated his 22nd birthday this October) is only...
Since Dec. 1, twenty-one-year-old Julia Kern (SMS-T2) has barnstormed the elite level domestic racing calendar. She qualified first and won the SuperTour freestyle sprint in West Yellowstone. The following weekend in the NorAm/SuperTour skate sprint in Sovereign Lake it was another win-win in the qualifier and final. In the next day’s 10-kilometer classic, Kern was third overall and the second American. Last weekend back in Vermont at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, Kern swept the...
A quick look at ski-related news from around the web as we wait for the Tour de Ski to start: – As anyone reading this site is likely aware, retired American skier Kikkan Randall went public with a breast-cancer diagnosis in July of this year, mere months after teaming up with Jessie Diggins to win a gold medal at the Pyeongchang Olympics. But what happened after that? The Anchorage Daily News (ADN) recently published a...
Note: FasterSkier is accepting submissions for regional race reports, including for juniors racing. If you would like to see a particular race circuit covered and have the writer with the will to do it, please have them email info@fasterskier.com. Be sure to include a link to results, and preferably a few original race photos with proper credits. GOVERNMENT PEAK RECREATION AREA, outside Palmer, Alaska — On a day that had a decidedly old school feel,...
It is accurate, the way time ticks away, to say that it was an eternity ago when Norway’s Petter Northug jr. splashed onto the Word Cup scene to the delight of fans and the paparazzi. According to the International Ski Federation (FIS) data base, Northug stepped to the top of the podium in only his eighth World Cup start. In the 2005/06 season, he placed first in Falun, Sweden’s 2 x 10-kilometer pursuit. There...
This season, the US Biathlon Association (USBA) hired on two new coaches; 47-year-old Armin Auchentaller from Italy and Germany’s 42-year-old Michael Greis. Auchentaller’s primary duties are with the women’s team whereas Greis will focus on the men. The U.S. team comes off the retirements of two of its steady-stars; Lowell Bailey and Tim Burke. (Burke was hired in May as USBA’s athlete development manager.) The hiring of the two coaches is part of a plan...
For Norway, relays are often tallied not by wins, but how many wins have been missed. Back in 2009, Team Norway watched on as Team Sweden took the top spot of the podium for the women’s 4 x 5-kilometer relay event in Beitostølen, Norway. In the nine years after that second place finish in Beitostølen, the Norwegian women’s team has missed winning the World Cup relay–excluding team sprints–only one other time (FIS reports that as...
For this week’s Wednesday Workout, FasterSkier reached out to Martin Benes, the newest addition to the U.S. Para-Nordic coaching staff. Benes joined U.S. Para-Nordic this August, after five years working as the nordic skiing director and head coach at Sugar Bowl Academy in Norden, California. He is still currently living in California. Benes’s primary work is with the Para-Nordic national team: A-team members Oksana Masters, Kendall Gretsch, and Dan Cnossen, as well as B-team member,...
With the two big climbs over 1.3-kilometer freestyle sprint course, the women’s World Cup freestyle sprint course in Lillehammer, Norway packs a quad-burning punch. With lungs then legs poaching any extra oxygen, the women’s final, which featured four of six athletes from Sweden, was a primetime show. Nilsson is a finisher, known for her closeout efforts in the finishing straight. But as she and twenty-three-year-old Sundling glided into the S-turns before the final 100 meters,...
FIS Cross-Country World Cup in Lillehammer Norway: Freestyle Sprint Women’s Report | Men’s Report In Friday’s women’s 1.3-kilometer freestyle sprint in Lillehammer, Norway, the first day of three successive days of World Cup racing, the women’s sprint final was stacked with Swedes, with four of six athletes sporting the yellow, blue, and white. In the final, Jonna Sundling of Sweden passed teammate Stina Nilsson meters before the finish line to take the win in 2:52.74 minutes....
If there is anything Russia’s Yulia Belorukova, took away from the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympic Winter Games, besides an individual bronze medal in the classic sprint, it’s that she is capable of sprinting with the best in the world. Leading up to the Games in Pyeongchang, the 23-year-old had yet to land on a World Cup podium. Even post-Pyeongchang, a World Cup win remained unchartered waters for the recent Olympic bronze medalist. But with the opening...
From an outsider’s perspective, it seemed Johannes Høsflot Klæbo of Norway would open his World Cup 2018/2019 season with the familiarity of a win. The first FIS cross-country race of the year, a 1.4-kilometer classic sprint in Kuusamo, Finland, saw the 22-year-old round the course’s final turn in first, holding off his closest competitor, Alexander Bolshunov of Russia, by close to two meters. Approaching the finishing stretch, Norway’s cross-country sprint king was still dictating the...
Cross Country Canada hired Erik Bråten as the new national team coach on November 1st, joining Louis Bouchard. After a short delay to get a work permit, Bråten arrived in Canada on November 15th. Regular readers will know the highlights of his resume: Graduate of the Norwegian School of Sports Science. Winner of the coach of the year from the Norwegian ski federation. Previously Head Coach at Team Kollen, the junior team constituted from clubs...