Former UAA skier and APU ski coach Frode Lillefjell was selected as the Coach of the year in Norway. He received the honors from the Norwegian Ski Federation/Norwegian Coaches associations. The award was handed out at the annual Coaching seminar hosted by the Coaches Association last weekend in Trondheim. Lillefjell has coached Team Trøndelag the past two seasons, an elite racing squad in the Trondheim area of Norway. The team includes Ole Marius Bach, Petter Eliassen,...
Its’s been a little while since the site has had an update as things have gotten a little hectic this spring. After the Navarino Trail Marathon, Dan started to have issues with his left knee again. The same knee that he had surgery on twice before. After taking a week off to fully recover from [...]
There was no rest for the weary on day 7 at the USST camp in Bend, Oregon. The scheduled event for the morning was a team time trial consisting of two person teams, each person racing two, 5 kilometer legs. “It was a fairly open-ended workout, and it was really fun,” said U.S. Ski Team coach Matt Whitcomb, who noted that because some athletes were feeling “a little beat up from the camp”, they opted...
Between Kikkan Randall, Sara Renner, Chandra Crawford, and Beckie Scott, there has been no shortage of successful female athletes in North American over the past decade. Step off the trails and into the wax room, and you’ll find even more involved in the sport as coaches for collegiate and club programs. But during the May meetings of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association in Park City, Utah, an accomplished group of female coaches gathered not...
Dasha Gaiazova exploded onto the North American cross-country scene this past season. She dominated the Nor-Am Cup Circuit, earning seven victories, and never once did she step off the podium in her 11 starts in North America. Gaiazova also made her mark on the international arena, collecting 63 World Cup points. After being an alternate at the Turin Games in 2006, she earned her first Olympic starts for the Canadian team in Vancouver in the...
With their dominating performances at the 2010 Olympics, Billy Demong, Johnny Spillane, and Todd Lodwick have welded their names to the sport of nordic combined like Bill Koch did to cross-country skiing. But if Head Coach Dave Jarrett has his way over the next few years, they won’t be the only ones people remember. After taking three silvers and a gold from the Games, the team’s main focus for 2011 is winning more medals—they want...
Ivan Babikov (CAN) won the opening leg of the Ski 2 Sea relay at Mount Baker, Wash., Sunday morning.
Devon Kershaw had a stand-out season this winter, racking up top finishes in the World Cup (placing 31st in the overall final) and placing 16th in the Tour de Ski. But his season culminated, appropriately, at the Olympics where he had several inspirational performances, including a 16th place pursuit, 4th place team sprint with teammate Alex Harvey, and his last – and best – race, the 50 kilometer classic, in which he was just .6...
Simi Hamilton’s duct-tape days are over. After a spectacular winter that included an appearance at the 2010 Olympics and a national championship, the newly-minted U.S. Ski Team (USST) member begins the 2010-2011 season with a big jump in support and a long-term plan. Gone are the days of
After more than a half dozen doping cases among Russian skiers in the last two years, the International Ski Federation (FIS) will consider sanctions against the country at its upcoming meetings in Turkey next week. Under FIS rules, Russia’s athletes and coaches could be banned from participating in races, events scheduled in the country could be cancelled, or its officials could be stripped of voting rights at future meetings. In an e-mail to FasterSkier, FIS...
June is still a week away, but the 2011 ski season is already lurking just around the corner, ready to pounce on any who spend too much time relaxing this spring. There are only 26 weeks (184 days) until the first SuperTour in West Yellowstone, and the season-opening Continental Cup races in Finland are even sooner – just 171 potential training days until these first FIS races. As the name would suggest, the calendar is...
The last time Andy Newell and Ivan Babikov skied together, they were fighting tooth and nail over the top of the Lonesome Pines Ski Area in Fort Kent, during the last stage of the 2010 SuperTour Finals in Fort Kent, Maine. The two were at it again on Monday morning, but in a much more amicable—and slower-paced—setting, as the U.S. and Canadian national teams combined forces to kick off their first camp of the year...
For elite skiers, resting well can be just as important as high-quality training. Morgan Arritola and Liz Stephen each learned that lesson the hard way, and both say that next year, they won’t make the same mistakes again. Arritola, 24, and Stephen, 23, are entering their second year of World Cup racing for the U.S. Ski Team (USST). Both struggled to maintain their form for the full duration of their rookie winter, and neither cracked...
JohnnyKlister is still accepting nominations for its annual Johnny5–awards given to five people who pushed American skiing forward in 2009-2010. Last year’s winners: Zach Caldwell, The Nordic Combined Team, Kikkan Randall, Fasterskier.com, Pete Vordenberg. Send along your nominations to
You may not recognize the name Chad Salmela, but if you live in the United States and watched any of the biathlon, nordic combined, or cross-country ski races at the 2010 Olympics, you’ve heard his voice. Along with play-by-play man Al Trautwig, Salmela spent the month of February the band A M Herculis. Now that the dust has settled, we caught up with Salmela to hear what it was like behind the scenes at the...
Central Cross Country Ski Association (CXC) is pleased to welcome Jason Cork as Elite Coach for CXC Team Vertical Limit. This position was vacated by Bryan Fish in May as he was asked to join the US Ski Team as a Continental Cup Coach. Fish has been with CXC from the formation of the Elite Team in 2006, and saw two athletes compete at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games as well as see six athletes...
If there’s one thing that a pair of underpaid, endorphin-addicted, former collegiate athletes can’t say no to, it’s free entry into a race that involves barbed wire, spear-throwing, and enough running to sort out the pretenders. That’s why Topher and I found ourselves on our way to the Spartan Race near Burlington last weekend. They’d offered media free entry, and we somehow managed to convince ourselves that the six-hour round trip from Williamstown would be...
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Ken Davies is currently the chair of the Alberta World Cup Society. FasterSkier regrets the error. Cross Country Canada (CCC) has turned down an opportunity to host a Tour de Ski-style event in February of 2012, according to a letter released by the organization Tuesday. In interviews, CCC officials said that plans for the “Tour of the Rockies” foundered on the potential costs, which could have...
There are very few coaches for whom taking a job with the U.S. Ski Team (USST) is a step down in intensity. But after 300 days on the road last year as head coach of the Central Cross Country (CXC) program, that might just be the case for Bryan Fish. Last week, Fish was announced as the USST’s new Continental Cup coach, completing a USST staff reorganization that began in April when Chris Grover took...
By virtue of his marriage to Beckie Scott, one of Canada’s all-time greatest cross-country skiers, it’s obvious that Justin Wadsworth would be tied into that country’s ski community. But few anticipated his recent appointment as the head coach of the national team, which came after he worked for several years on the World Cup with the American squad. In one sense, Wadsworth doesn’t face too much of a challenge: the Canadian men pulled down half...