Both cross-country skiing and biathlon have welcomed their shares of stars over the past few years, but few, if any, have exploded onto the scene as quickly as Tarjei Bø. Last season, the 22-year-old Norwegian won an Olympic gold medal as part of the Norwegian relay team, but his best finish on the World Cup circuit was fourth. This year, though, he has come on like a freight train. After collecting his first World Cup...
NCAA Preview The 2011 National Collegiate Championship is slated to begin Wednesday, March 9th in Stowe, Vermont. Starting in December, athletes and teams from the Western, Central, and Eastern regions have been battling for hotly contested NCAA spots by competing in regional qualifying races, and this week those qualified athletes will get to see how they stack up against racers from other schools across the country. Only 39 men and 39 women will have the...
There is no doubt that when Canadian Brent McMurtry trained this summer, he was motivated by the thought of standing on the start line in the stadium in Oslo, Norway, in February. But for McMurtry, a member of the Pierre Harvey National Development Center (CNEPH) and one of Canada’s most promising young skiers, had a self-described “disappointing” start to the season. During the first World Cup period, he fell flat, cracking the top 50 just...
The world’s best skiers are getting the experience of a lifetime in Oslo, competing in skiing’s ancestral homeland and getting cheered by a hundred thousand fans. The world’s best biathletes? They’re having a cultural experience too – in Siberia. World Championships are currently being held in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, a town of 70,000 inhabitants situated almost 2,000 miles east of St. Petersburg. The International Biathlon Union charters flights from Oslo and Munich to transport athletes and...
The 32nd annual Yellowstone Rendezvous Race took place in West Yellowstone, Montana on Saturday, March 5, 2011. 533 skiers took to the trails under overcast skies and intermittent snow. Air temperatures ranged throughout the twenties and changing conditions kept the wax techs busy. Skiers from 4 to 78 years old competed in the 2k, 5k, 10k, 25k, and 50k events. Jenny Wolfe, 34 years old and hailing from Yellowstone National Park, won the women’s marathon...
Blue skies, some uncountable number of ski fans estimated in excess of 105,000, the most prestigious individual ski race in the world, and all of it in Oslo, the self-anointed ski capital of the world. Such a day could end only one way: with Petter Northug once again accelerating away from his competition in the last 400 meters of the World Championship 50 k freestyle on his home turf. A World Cup men’s 50 k...
With a handful of gel packets stapled to his bib, American Noah Hoffman would have blended in better at the American Birkebeiner than into Sunday’s 50 k freestyle at the 2011 World Ski Championships. But make no mistake: the way he was skiing was still world-class. Hoffman made it more than 30 kilometers rubbing shoulders with the World Cup podium’s usual suspects—Petter Northug (NOR), Lukas Bauer (CZE), and Maxim Vylegzhanin (RUS)—before finally succumbing to the...
The 87th Vasaloppet took place Sunday, with over 14,000 skiers taking part in the historic 90 k race from Salen to Mora, Sweden. Norway’s Torjus Borsheim took the early lead, winning three intermediate sprints, and holding at one point a two-minute lead over the rest of the field. However, three members of Team Xtra Personnel, Norway’s premiere marathon racing team, Arne Post, Anders Aukland and Jerry Ahrlin, along with Czech Stanislav Rezac took the lead....
The scene at Holmenkollen for the men’s 50km freestyle mass start today was nothing short of spectacular. With an estimated 105,000 fans packed in around the courses 8.3km lap it was an environment that the sport of Nordic skiing has never been witnessed before. Here are some images from along the course.
Saturday, February 26, 2011: Ripton, VT – Under snow-covered trees amidst skiers, parents, and volunteers of all ages in woodland creature-themed attire, athletes aged 5 to 13 descended upon Rikert Ski Touring Center in Ripton, Vermont today for the annual Bill Koch Cross-Country Ski Festival. The annual event brings youth skiers in New England a weekend of championship races as well as non-competitive open activities for families and festival-goers. With the close of the opening day’s...
A World Championship 50k, let alone one at Holmenkollen, is not usually a race that one just jumps into, but US Nordic Combined star Billy Demong is doing just that. Not literally, of course—though he certainly has the chops to pull off such a feat. With Kris Freeman opting to sit out the freestyle event scheduled for 1:00PM in Oslo, Norway, a spot on the US squad opened up. The 50 k is second only...
When Therese Johaug crossed the finish line as a World Champion in the 30K skate, Mom and Dad were among the first ones there to greet her in the paddock.
Carrying the hopes of a nation on your shoulders is hard enough. But when your shoulders are as small as Therese Johaug’s, it’s a feat nothing short of monumental. In the penultimate race of the 2011 World Ski Championships, the 5’2” Johaug did something that so many larger women had tried and failed to do all season: she beat her teammate Marit Bjoergen. Buoyed by the cheers of an estimated 100,000 spectators packed dozens deep...
The dealers on the Fischer / Swix trip to Norway headed up the hill today from Oslo to Holmenkollen, like many we were part of the massive crowd. With a blue sky overhead and downtown Oslo as a background, fans piled along the course of the ladies’ 30km freestyle race today at Holmenkollen everywhere they could. The stadium was filled to capacity and space along the race course was hard to find, it was an...
The American women have had highs and lows at World Championships in Oslo this week, packing three finishers in the top 30 in both of the first two races but also watching Kikkan Randall’s medal hopes in the sprint evaporate in a crash. And while the U.S. made the final in the team sprint and placed ninth in the relay, neither of those performances were quite as good as some were hoping for. On Saturday,...
Biathlon Alberta is pleased to announce the establishment of the Biathlon Training Centre (BTC) to be located in Canmore, Alberta. The Biathlon Training Centre will commence operations May 1, 2011. The initial plan is to have 10 to 20 athletes between the ages of 18 and 23 years, supported by one to two biathlon coaches. The goal of the Biathlon Training Centre will be to provide affordable year‐round training to committed Biathletes who fit the...
Late last February, Canadian Alex Harvey got the tag from his teammate Devon Kershaw to ski the second leg of the 4×10 k men’s relay at the Vancouver Olympic Games. Kershaw was having a bad day, and he’d dug his team into a hole—Harvey started out his race with a 30-second deficit to the leaders. The 22-year-old Quebec native fought as hard as he could, burying himself in an effort to chase down Norway, Sweden,...
With a squad consisting of Alex Harvey, Devon Kershaw, Ivan Babikov, and Len Valjas, Canadian Head Coach Justin Wadsworth thought his team would have a chance at its second World Championship medal in three days in Friday’s men’s relay. But those chances have just taken a hit. According to Wadsworth, Harvey, who won gold with Kershaw in Wednesday’s team sprint, will skip the relay, worn out by a tough race and a long day in...
The eyes of the ski world may have been focused on Oslo today, where the Norwegian women ran away with the win in the 4 x 5 k relay, but the biathlon world is focused on Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, where World Championships kicked off today with a mixed relay. And while the result was the same – Norway on top by a solid margin – the route to victory was a lot more challenging for Norway’s...
Feisty, unintimidated, and encouraging—if ultimately overmatched. That’s probably the best way to describe Jessie Diggins’ effort at World Championships on Thursday, in which she anchored the U.S. women to a ninth-place finish in the 4×5 k relay. It’s also an apt description of the performance of the entire U.S. team, which fought hard to its best World Championships women’s relay result in over a decade, but was ultimately left three minutes behind the winning Norwegians....