A recent change in management should have minimal impact on the U.S. Adaptive Ski Team (USAST) in the upcoming season, with competition schedules remaining the same through the winter. Late last week, the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) announced that it would take control of Paralympic alpine and cross-country skiing from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA). One administrator lost her position as part of the change, but despite some initial uncertainty, coaches and athletes...
A newly implemented program will enable the New England Nordic Ski Association (NENSA) to provide up to $7,000 for use in helping New England athletes offset expenses for the J1 Scando trip, U23 / Junior World Championships and the USST OPA cup trip in February. New England athletes making these teams will earn a stipend of $500 for the World Junior and World U23 Championships, and $250 for the J1 Scandinavian Cup Trip run by...
This year, the U.S. Biathlon Association (USBA) had a radical shift in its athlete development strategy: instead of sending a full squad to the World Cup and leaving the rest of the American biathlon field at home, they would minimize their World Cup presence to only those athletes who were succeeding, and field a much larger team at the IBU (International Biathlon Union) Cup races. While the U.S. biathletes that FasterSkier talked to, on and...
“I’m very excited, the last races went really well,” said Brian Gregg, who is coming off a series of solid performances at the Nor-Am events leading up to Christmas and seems to burst with energy.
If you live in the east and were impressed by the snowfall from the Monday’s Nor’easter, the numbers from a storm that hit Colorado last week will give you a new perspective on things. Over the course of four days, the town of Crested Butte saw a mind-boggling snowfall, with accumulations in feet that most places would be lucky to see in inches. The totals? More than five and a half feet at the nordic...
The last-year junior from the Methow Valley is using US Nationals as an opportunity to secure his ticket to the Junior World Championships in Estonia. Only the top five juniors in the country are named to the team.
At 35, Kristina Strandberg (XC Oregon) has enjoyed something of a resurgence in her career this year, with strong results in the West Yellowstone SuperTour races and in events in her native Sweden. Still, it might come as a surprise to see Strandberg on the start line of the Tour de Ski on Tuesday. No, not that Tour de Ski—Strandberg won’t be in Germany alongside Justyna Kowalczyk and Kikkan Randall. Instead, she’ll be in the...
With U.S. Nationals looming, there’s quite a collection of domestic skiers who think they could ski to a podium finish in the biggest races of the year. Besides the eternal glory of winning a national championship, there’s more on the line: for seniors, the races will be their best shot of earning low National Ranking List (NRL) points, which will qualify them for World Championships, and for younger skiers a strong result could mean a...
With 15 titles over the past decade, Kikkan Randall has turned the U.S. National Championships into something of a one-woman show. In the 2010 edition, which was held in her hometown of Anchorage, she swept all four events—collecting nearly $5,000 en route to wins in two distance races and a pair of sprints. This year, the country’s fastest women will assemble at Black Mountain in Rumford, ME. But when the first event of the championships...
While the 2012 Winter Youth Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria are still more than a year away, both the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) and the U.S. Biathlon Association (USBA) have posted qualifying criteria for the event. Why so early? Entries for the Youth Olympics, which are scheduled for January 13th through 22nd, 2012, are due at the beginning of December, 2011. Since there won’t be much time for qualification events that winter, most of...
The second-year U23 skier recently switched programs, returned from injuries and is back with a new perspective. Sadie Bjornsen’s goal for nationals next week is nothing short of the podium.
Following mixed results in the early season, the U.S. Ski Team’s Liz Stephen raced to the top World Cup result of her career in last weekend’s 15 k freestyle in La Clusaz, France—a race she finished a half-second ahead of her friend and teammate Morgan Arritola. Stephen is now at home in Vermont, training in advance of the 2011 U.S. National Championships in Rumford, ME, which begin on January 2. FasterSkier caught her to chat...
While Canadian Ivan Babikov has recorded only one top-30 finish on the World Cup circuit so far this season, the man who has been billed by his teammates as one of the toughest skiers on the circuit remains undaunted. “I’m always a bit slower than other guys in early season,” Babikov said in an e-mail to FasterSkier. “Usually, I need at least a good month of skiing and racing to feel fast.” As a result,...
On December 16th, the Swedish tabloid Expressen reported that doping materials had been found in a trashcan at the Scandic Hotel in Ostersund, where the Russian, Belorussian, and German biathlon teams had stayed during the opening week of World Cup competition. While a number of officials tried to dismiss the report as sensationalist, as the days went by it became clear that the Swedish police were investigating the matter. Other news sources, such as Germany’s...
While racers on the World Cup have voiced concern over the mini tour format following the FIS World Cup mini-tour in Kuusamo, Finland, earlier this season, North American racers overwhelmingly welcome the format.
Twenty-two years after the 1988 Winter Olympics, the Canmore Nordic Centre remains a model of legacy planning for Olympic cross-country venues. When it was built in 1986, Canmore set a new standard for nordic facilities, and when it was refurbished in 2005, the ski area redefined that standard. In his masters’ thesis, John-Christopher Reid called the 1988 Winter Olympics “…the single most significant precedent in terms of structuring Winter Olympic legacies in North America.” Canmore...
“Jessie Diggins basically blew by us on the last lap,” said Holly Brooks, who was leading the tour Sunday morning. Sadie Bjornsen (APUNSC) also gapped Brooks at the end, and left Brooks in third place for the overall Nor-Am minitour.
With eleven athletes already racing in Europe – that’s more than the U.S. Ski Team can say – what could the U.S. biathlon community possibly ask for from their governing body? Well, if some is good, then more is better. After a second series of trials races in Mount Itasca, Minnesota, the U.S. Biathlon Association (USBA) named four more athletes to the IBU Cup roster (the series one level below the World Cup), as well...
In Saturday’s World Cup sprint race, Bjorn Ferry gave habitual powerhouse Sweden its third victory of the new season, and its first in a men’s race. On Sunday, Sweden took win number four. After Helena Ekholm and Anna Carin Zidek, the team’s first two World Cup victors this season, left the Swedes within striking distance of the podium, Carl Johann Bergman used some last-minute heroics to take a 0.3 second win over Ukraine France and...
One of the intentions of the tour format introduced to elite-level cross-country ski racing in the past few years is to allow sprinters and distance specialists to compete on a level playing field. That balance hasn’t been achieved yet at the World Cup level: None of the winners of the four editions of the Tour de Ski, men’s or women’s, have been pure sprinters. But in this weekend’s three-stage mini-tour held in Rossland, BC, organizers...