Four-time World Champion Martin Fourcade placed 48th in Saturday's cross country World Cup, but was left disappointed on a day where he said he couldn't have done well even in a biathlon race. Fourcade told FasterSkier that biathletes have nothing to prove, and he still hopes to race the World Championships relay for France.
Entering his third straight season with the Canadian Para-Nordic World Cup Team, Erik Carleton has already made some big decisions this year. Among them, he had to choose whether to race the Alberta Cross Country World Cup in Canmore or go for gold at the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) World Cup opener in Vuokatti, Finland. It must be tough to be Carleton, a competitive-nordic racer who doubles as a Para-Nordic guide for Brian McKeever, arguably the...
One of the first things Lenny Valjas did upon arriving in Östersund, Sweden, on Thursday was put a pole strap on. His Canadian World Cup teammate Alex Harvey went out for a ski shortly after arriving in Europe early that evening, but not Valjas. He stood in his hotel room testing out the strap on his left hand. Valjas, 23, is going to be paying a lot of attention to that hand and more specifically,...
When talking about women’s ski jumping in 2012, it’s impossible not to frame the discussion within the context of the sport’s long fight to be recognized as an event worthy of inclusion at the Olympics. Lindsay Van and Co.’s failed 2009 legal battle against the Vancouver Games captured the attention of the mainstream media as a strikingly medieval story for the twenty-first century. It was announced in the spring of 2011 that women’s ski jumping...
STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Imagine if Charlotte Kalla or Marcus Hellner were caught this season with a positive test for EPO, or maybe a bag of blood in a hotel room. Or what if Ole Einar Bjørndalen showed up with HGH, or Petter Northug with steroids? If you can’t imagine any of these things, it’s because of a cultural change in Scandinavia in the last two or three decades that is the result largely of the...
There’s Dasha2: It Takes More.’ If you talk to the 2010 Olympian, that’s exactly how she’s approached this season. After largely individualized plan while complying with national-team standards. In doing so, she chose to train with Louis Bouchard, the World Cup men’s assistant coach and head of the Pierre-Harvey Training Centre (CNEPH) in Mont Sainte-Anne. That required a cross-country move and parting ways with Rocky Mountain Racers and its coach, John Jacques. She also signed...
This summer, U.S. Nordic Combined Head Coach Dave Jarrett expressed his frustration with zero-centimeters of leeway when it comes to form-fitting jump suits. If the disqualified because he hadn’t tailored his suit between competitions. Officials randomly checked Demong and discovered his jump suit had 3 centimeters of extra space. Jarrett said in an October phone interview that the +2 centimeter rule, which follows international ski-jumping regulations, was a compromise. “It’s essentially tight suits, but it’s...
When Peru’s first Winter Olympian asks you to help him out, you say yes. At least that’s how Leif Zimmermann reacted last year. The two were acquaintances when Roberto Carcelén, a Peruvian cross-country skier who made the Vancouver Games at the age of 39, told Zimmermann – a Bridger Ski Foundation (BSF) skier and 2006 Olympian – about his Inca Runners company. Still racing the occasional SuperTour, NorAm and national championship at the age of...
Matt Liebsch couldn’t believe the nerves he was fighting before the 2012 American Birkebeiner. A Minnesota ski hero at the ultimate of U.S. cross-country marathons, Liebsch had won the 50-kilometer skate race in 2009. In early February, he took back-to-back victories at the 2012 Boulder Mountain Tour and City of Lakes Loppet. But the last time Team Birkie’s lone elite skier raced the Birkie in 2011, he was ninth. And he hadn’t competed in three...
Last winter, a number of relatively young American athletes catapulted their way to top-ten World Cup results in nordic disciplines – often very much to their own surprise, and certainly to the surprise of European commentators. One of those was Stockholm, Maine’s Russell Currier, who, joining the biathlon circuit halfway through the season, had a breakout performance in his second race of that weekend. In a sprint in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, 24-year-old Currier started...
For someone who finished the World Cup last winter ranked second in the overall standings, Canada’s Devon Kershaw flies relatively well under the radar. While his own teammate Alex Harvey is treated as a “pseudo-god” in Quebec, Kershaw is rarely mentioned by name when European journalists ask Dario Cologna (SUI) or Petter Northug (NOR) whom they’re watching out for in the coming year. This relative anonymity, Kershaw says, is just fine by him. “It’s pretty...
You can say a lot about Marty Hall—and, in fact, most of it has probably already been said. The former coach of the American and Canadian national cross-country ski teams is an outspoken and prolific observer of the sport today, but that’s nothing new. He famously implied that the Russians were doping at the 1988 Olympic Games, and an Ottawa newspaper story upon his departure from the Canadian squad referred to him as the “opinionated...
The symptoms started at a July training camp with Central Cross Country (CXC) in northern Wisconsin. The runner-up from last year’s SuperTour series, Jennie Bender, 24, wasn’t feeling well. For two to three days at a time, she’d experience bouts of nausea. Then her neck felt sore, along with her jaw and teeth. One night, she tossed and turned with cold chills, and feared that she’d wake up a leper. The next day, she pushed...
Annie Hart has been hanging out with the Stratton Mountain School (SMS) T2 Team for a couple months now, but don’t get it wrong, she’s still a Dartmouth skier. A 20-year-old junior, Hart spent most of the summer studying and training at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. That way, come late August, she could take the fall off. In an email from Park City, Utah, where she’s been training with the U.S. Ski Team (USST)...
Sara Studebaker is an Idaho-raised, New-Hampshire educated, Lake Placid-based Olympic biathlete – who just happens to be adopting Anchorage, Alaska as her second (or third) home. While Studebaker lives and trains primarily out of the Olympic Training Center in upstate New York, her boyfriend, former biathlete Zach Hall, stays in Anchorage, where he has works and trains junior biathletes part-time. Between traveling on the biathlon World Cup all winter and the distance separating the East...
This past March, Maria Graefnings capped off a hugely successful college career in winning her second NCAA title in the 5-kilometer freestyle at Bohart Ranch in Bozeman, Mont. In her two years at the University of Utah, the Swede dominated the Rocky Mountain region with eleven total RMISA wins. She once gave Kikkan Randall a run for her money in Idaho at SuperTour Finals. But instead of riding off into the sunset after graduation, as many...
By all accounts, Canada’s Zina Kocher had a great season on biathlon’s World Cup in 2012. After a disappointing Olympics in Vancouver and then a dismal 2011, she joined the newly-formed Biathlon Alberta Training Center, skated through trials races, and rejoined the World Cup, where she had three top-ten finishes and landed 19th in the overall standings, her best-ever ranking in nine seasons on the circuit. This year she’s training to more consistently hit the...
It downpoured across much of the Northeast on Wednesday. Those at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in northern Vermont hardly noticed. Owner Judy Geer called it “drizzle.” That morning, about 20 Craftsbury Green Racing Project (CGRP) athletes and coaches participated in the second annual Roll-Run-Row race, which pitted the some of the nation’s best nordic skiers against top-tier rowers. All belonged to the same program, but the idea was to have some competitive fun while pushing...
After nearly two weeks of dryland training in Park City, Utah, the Canadian women’s cross-country team will pack up and head to St. George on Saturday. Saint what? One of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., St. George is tucked in the southwest corner of the state about 300 miles (483 kilometers) from Park City. It requires about a five-hour drive south, and the group is going to the 75,000-population metropolis to train through...
The average adult makes somewhere around 35,000 decisions per day. Before setting out for a road ride on Sunday, three retired Olympians made a couple of casual ones. First, former Canadian national-team members Robin Clegg (biathlon), Jason Myslicki (nordic combined) and Sean Crooks (cross-country skiing) decided to ride between 80 to 100 kilometers just outside Calgary, Alberta. Second, they picked a quiet township road, which would lead them to a coffee shop in the suburb...