Six years ago, a back injury put a damper on Rosie Brennan's skiing, but she didn't let it get her down and finally addressed it this spring. Now training consciously and rehabbing the injury, the 24-year-old APU skier is hoping for another career-best season leading up to the Sochi Games.
Japan sets draconian Olympic qualification standards for its athletes: if they can't land at least three top-12s in World Cup racing, then skiers are stuck at home and quota spots handed out by FIS go unfilled. The Japanese men have qualified as a relay team, but are working extra hard to prepare for early season World Cups where they hope for results that will allow them individual starts as well. For now, that means many hours on snow in Stelvio, Italy.
We’re 199 days and counting if you’re keeping track of how much time remains until the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and we know many of you are. In case you haven’t been reading every ounce of pre-Olympic coverage, we’ll do our best to stay on it and provide relevant nordic updates throughout the next sixth months.
It can feel like nordic sports don't have anyone in their corner when it comes to funding. But that's not true - former University of Colorado racer and coach Alan Ashley is now the Chief of Sports Performance at the USOC, and his strategy is informed by his past experience. We chatted with him about how he works to develop skiing and every other Olympic sport.
Despite the Scottish location, Andrew Young grew up skiing the way many readers probably did too: in a club, with friends, trying to get fast enough to beat their older sisters. After becoming the youngest man to race a World Cup in 2008, Young relocated to Norway for better training and coaching, and is a lock for his second Olympics this winter.
The Sochi Organizing Committee showed off, for the first time, the beautiful meals that will be up for grabs at the Olympics in February. Across the nordic sports, North Americans could medal in, we estimate, four events - and if you start talking a little crazy, maybe almost a dozen sets of the handcrafted hardware could come back across the Atlantic.
Last week, Johnny Spillane announced his retirement after well over a decade on the U.S. Nordic Combined Team. The four-time Olympian explains why he decided to call it a career before the 2014 Winter Games.
With the Olympics looming, the U.S. Biathlon Association cut its national team to the smallest it has been in years, with no new members and only one athlete under the age of 25; development was cut almost completely. President and CEO Max Cobb hopes that good performances in Sochi will be a rising tide that lifts all boats in his sport.
"It's beautiful and it's very strange," U.S. biathlete Annelies Cook said of the new Olympic venue in Sochi, which sits just next to the cross country trails on the slopes of a steep mountain chain. From racing to the athlete village, from unusual rules about rifles to pleasant surprises with washing machines, biathletes are learning what life will be like at next year's Games.
While Martin Fourcade of France joked that now he has his gold medal from Sochi, Tim Burke finished the day with important insight, too: namely, that he can ski among the fastest times on the trails that will hold Olympic competition next winter. With only one missed shot in the 20 k race, the American made the top five for the second competition in a row.
Skiers and jumpers tested out the Sochi trails - quite successfully for the U.S. and Canada; biathletes finished up World Youth and Junior Championships with another medal for Sean Doherty and two Canadian top-tens; Americans turned to longer marathon racing at the Boulder Mountain Tour and Craftsbury Marathon; Canadians mini-toured through Eastern Championships.
After a short break in the calendar, World Cup action begins again on Friday in Sochi, Russia, with a triple-header. More than the usual amount of intrigue surrounds the upcoming events; in addition to being the first World Cup in almost two weeks, this will be the first international cross-country event to take place at the Olympic venue for the 2014 Games.
Note: For more on Professor Ljungqvist’s fight against doping in Sweden, and its effect on Scandinavian sport culture, you can read
If the ski arenas currently under construction in Sochi, Russia, remain at their current size, the International Ski Federation is going to be unhappy with spectator capacity for Olympic ski competitions come 2014. International Ski Federation President and International Olympic Committee member Gian Franco Kasper criticized the venues for being unprepared for the Games based on his observations from last week’s site visit. At a Tuesday press conference in Cavalese, Italy, for the Val di...
Coaching a college team which you yourself are part of might not seem like the best way to learn the tricks of the trade – or to become a better athlete, for that matter. And yet that was the situation in which Piotr Bednarski found himself in the late 1980’s at Cornell University in upstate New York. From there, he has gone on to be one of the most successful coaches in the Midwest, across...
HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE – When Laura Spector left the East and drove to Bozeman, Montana, this spring, she knew she was headed for school, but she wasn’t sure what was going to happen after that. The 2010 Olympian and national team biathlete had finished up her first full year of training and racing since graduating from Dartmouth College, and it wasn’t what she had been hoping for. After starting the early-season World Cups she struggled,...
An Italian court cleared six Austrians of involvement in the doping scandal of the 2006 Turin Olympics on Friday. Former cross-country coach Walter Mayer, ski president Peter Schroecksnadel and biathlon director Markus Gandler were cleared, along with team doctor Peter Baumgartl and skiers Martin Tauber and Jurgen Pinter. The Austrian Ski Federation released a statement following the verdict saying that the decision proves “many accusations against Austria ski federation representatives were false.” Though six walk free, three...
clean and lost its fight with WADA to continue issuing lifetime Olympic bans to drug violators. In a statement following the release of the new Code draft, BOA said the proposed ban is “an important step in the right direction, and it’s moving toward reflecting the higher standard that athletes want to see.” The draft is the first-round step in WADA’s Code Review Process. The second phase began June 1, a third phase will begin on...
Note: This is the second piece in a three-part series following several groups of biathletes as they negotiate the college question.
