Alex Harvey and personal coach Louis Bouchard were the first from the Canadian World Cup Team to arrive in Gällivare, Sweden, last Thursday. They spent the earlier part of the month acclimating to altitude in Davos, Switzerland.
Norwegian veteran Alexander Os, whose last good season (by his own estimation) was in 2008-09, has been training independently for years - and shot to the top in the men's biathlon season opener today. Simon Fourcade of France was second and Vetle Sjåstad Christiansen of Norway third.
Canadian World Cup and IBU selection races wrapped up Friday at Frozen Thunder, with a second-straight sprint determining which eight men and eight women would start the season on the World Cup or IBU Cup. Four were prequalified.
You might see it as a missed development opportunity that the U.S. is the only country not to send its very fastest college athletes to the World University Games (we'll explain why). But the Univerisity of Wyoming, races their hearts out, and also uses the opportunity for more than skiing: expanding athletes' horizons, learning, and instilling a lifelong love of sport.
Evi Sachenbacher-Stehle appealed the IBU's 2-year ban for testing positive for a prohibited stimulant, which she argued was ingested accidentally in a supplement. The Court of Arbitration for sport agreed, saying that a six-month suspension was sufficient. Six months is up and the star can return to competition.
Temperatures below -20 degrees Celsius didn't keep Canada's top biathletes from contending for spots on the World Cup and IBU Cup on Thursday, with Nathan Smith and Rosanna Crawford topping the competition in the opening sprints of trials at the Canmore Nordic Center.
A new ski-marathon series has emerged in Sweden, the five-race Björn Dæhlie SKI Challenge, which kicks off Dec. 28 in Falun and ends Feb. 22 in Malung. According to its founders, the idea is have both elite and recreational skiers racing the same events and cut down on travel. (Updated)
Dr. Paul Anderson and World Cup sprint champ Kikkan Randall chat with us about a new study of American Birkebeiner participants. Using 24,000 skiers who have competed in the Wisconsin marathon over the years, they hope to gain valuable insight into what gets people to exercise - and then apply it in a public health perspective.
Logging too many hours to ski fast? The debate is raging in Norway, where Olympian Frode Estil weighed in last week when he argued that many skiers are obsessed with logging hours at the expense of training quality. Longtime coach Mona Hjellsand strongly agrees.
Mark Rajack, a dual citizen of Canada and Trinidad and Tobago, started cross-country skiing just two years ago in 2012, but in the time since, he’s not only learned to ski and compete, but he’s also set his sights higher than many will in their skiing careers: namely world champs and 2018 Winter Olympics.
Rocky Mountain Racer (RMR) skier Maya MacIsaac-Jones recaps her team's two-week, high-performance camp in Park City, Utah. "Because of RMR’s cross-country/biathlon mix, Soldier Hollow was the perfect place for training," she writes. "Coaches were able to coordinate shooting practices for the biathletes with simultaneous rollerskiing sessions for the cross-country side of the team."
Norwegian biathlete Ole Einar Bjørndalen, who became the most decorated Winter Olympian of all time this past winter in Sochi, Russia, was awarded Best Male Athlete of the 2014 Olympics on Friday in Bangkok.
With two seniors and two postgrads on its elite team this year, Ski & Snowboard Club Vail decided to drop the name "HomeGrown" and call them the SSCV Elite, while spending more time and resources on junior development in Colorado.
This week's workout comes from U.S. Paralympics coach Eileen Carey, who shares a fun head-to-head speed session that works on both technique and tactics. "This type of workout is important for our program because we often have training sessions with athletes with a wide range of experience levels and/or with different impairments competing against one another," she says.
Latvian biathlete Edgars Piksons, a 2006 and 2010 Olympian, has tested positive for a metabolite of the most commonly used anabolic steroids. The International Biathlon Union is referring his case to its Anti-Doping Hearing Panel.
Part of the joy and the pain and, ultimately, the poetry of a lifetime of skiing is how the sport focuses one’s attention on natural processes that are both cyclical and unpredictable. This year Southcentral Alaska caught its first real snow on Oct. 20, and early season skiing has been great, but not in the usual ways or places.
"We came into it with the idea of making a really cool video about a race that had never been filmed well before," Anchorage native Max Romey said. He produced a 43-minute film about the famed Mount Marathon in 2013, but this year, he wanted to outdo himself. The 21-year-old college runner is pioneering race-and-training videos in epic landscapes like Alaska.
After a disastrous 2014 event which saw the title race canceled on race morning due to dangerously high winds in the mountains, there has been much soul-searching in Norway as to how the Birkebeiner ski marathon can go forward (or whether the organizers were being wusses).
Research published last fall found that using testosterone, even briefly, had long-lasting effects on muscle in mice - and extrapolated that in humans, these effects could last decades. The mechanism for this cell memory opens the door to similarly long-lasting effects of HGH or other performance-enhancing drugs.
U.S. Biathlon, unlike some national teams, doesn't select its World Cup team each spring. Certain team members prequalify, but there were at least two spots up for grabs at the four-race rollerski trials held in August and October in Jericho, Vt. The final team was announced Tuesday, one month before the season starts in Sweden. (Updated)