The U.S. Ski Team’s Liz Stephen was in Sun Valley for the last few days, attending the national championship in the 30 k classic and the SuperTour Finals. But she wasn’t racing: instead, she was limited by a foot injury to cheering from the side of the trail. For the past month and a half, Stephen has been enduring severe pain while training and racing, stemming from inflammation in her heels near a bony enlargement...
The way Kikkan Randall skied in Sun Valley on Wednesday, she still wasn’t beatable. But at the very least, she showed that she’s human. Randall had won Tuesday’s prologue, the opening stage of the 2011 SuperTour Finals, with a thoroughly dominating performance, putting more than 15 seconds into her nearest competitors in a seven-minute race. In Wednesday’s 10 k mass-start classic, Randall (APU/USST) was again impressive—at least, for nine kilometers. Heading out on her last...
Kikkan Randall isn’t particularly professorial, what with her pink hair and her affable demeanor. But since arriving back in the U.S. last week, fresh off the World Cup circuit in Europe, Randall (APU/USST) has been teaching lessons, all right, with the trails of Sun Valley as her classroom, and the North American women’s field as her pupils. After Sunday’s unit on distance classic skiing, Tuesday’s session was on how to ski a skate prologue. In...
In Tuesday’s 3.3 k prologue in Sun Valley, the top-seeded men started last. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise when Simi Hamilton finished his race with a big lead—there were 42 of the continent’s strongest skiers still to come. The surprising thing was what happened next. One by one, each of those 42 men came to the finish line and failed to touch Hamilton’s time. Andy Newell: 18 seconds down. Leif Zimmermann and...
The cross-country ski season’s last stand begins on Tuesday, when the final domestic races of the year kick off in Sun Valley, ID. The mini-tour known as the SuperTour Finals will start with a 3.3/2.8 k freestyle prologue on a stout course, followed by three more races in four more days. The winner of both the men’s and women’s overall will be the first competitor to arrive atop a ridge on Dollar Mountain, a local...
In the U.S. National Championship in the 30 k last year, Kikkan Randall (USST) somehow pulled off a win in northern Maine just 72 hours removed from racing in Europe. This year, with a full week to recover from World Cup Finals, at least Randall’s biological clock was set to the right time. But Sunday’s classic race presented its own challenges: the Alaskan had to overcome a brutal course, the strength-sapping effects of altitude, and,...
The 38 women that aren’t wearing bib one in today’s U.S. National Championship in the 30 k classic have a tough task ahead of them: figuring out a way to beat Kikkan Randall. The 28-year-old Alaskan is in the midst of the best season of her life, having collected four sprint podiums, two wins, and a career-best 11th place in a distance race. She’ll be the favorite in Sunday’s 30 k in Sun Valley, and...
No, he probably didn’t have what it takes to beat Petter Northug—nor even Marcus Hellner, for that matter. But on Saturday in Sun Valley, Kris Freeman (USST) wasn’t racing those guys. Instead, he was pitted against the North American domestic field in the U.S. National Championship in the 50 k, with a race plan that could perhaps be best described as “don’t mess it up.” He didn’t, despite tricky waxing conditions, and one gambit that...
After winning the silver medal in the team competition during 2010 Vancouver Games and proceeding to win the US nationals summer Nationals, Brett Camerota thought he was on his way to take yet another step. But it would be a step back.
In the space of one minute at the World Cup Finals, Kikkan Randall (USA) went from contender to collateral damage. Randall had had a great start to Saturday’s 10 k pursuit in Falun, Sweden—the third event of the four-stage mini-tour that ends the cross-country World Cup season—and she was among the leaders, looking for another personal distance best after her 11th-place in Finland last weekend. Enter Therese Johaug. “She decided she wanted to be right...
Since the tail end of the 2011 Tour de Ski, Russia’s star distance skier, Alexander Legkov, has been missing in action. He fell ill with swine flu and couldn’t finish the Tour, then, with an abysmal performance in the relay at World Championships in Oslo, singlehandedly dashed his country’s hopes for a medal in that event. While the relay result stung, Legkov’s drought has been balanced by some strong performances by his teammates. There’s Maxim...
Andy Newell has a title to defend. Having edged out Canadian Ivan Babikov at the finish of last year’s SuperTour Finals in northern Maine, the American sprinter will come into this season’s edition as the defending champion. But with the rest of the U.S. Ski Team in attendance, Newell will have his hands full this time around, in Sun Valley, ID. The full American squad will be in attendance at SuperTour Finals, which start next...
Andy Newell saved the best for last. After a season in which he had failed to crack the top five a single time on the World Cup, the American did just that in his final sprint of the season, finishing fifth on a tight circuit around the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Sweden on Wednesday. The result wasn’t quite as good as Newell’s best in 2010, when he was third in another city sprint in Norway....
The OPA Cup series is supposedly to be skiing’s equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues. But last weekend’s racing in Ramsau was about as far from a dingy Southern ballpark as you can get. Surrounded by jagged, snowy peaks on a plateau in the Austrian Alps, Ramsau was the last stop on this year’s OPA circuit, which a contingent of U.S. athletes has been following for the last two weeks. Nearly a dozen Americans took part...
Short courses, long courses, steep hills, flats, dicey corners: you name it, and Emil Joensson will ski it. In Lahti, Finland on Sunday, the Swede raced to his fifth World Cup sprint victory in seven starts this season, with Eirik Brandsdal (NOR) in second and his teammate Paal Golberg in third. Joensson’s win secured his second straight title in the World Cup sprint standings—which at this point is a merely a restatement of the obvious...
For Dario Cologna, it’s better late than never. After enduring a brutal two weeks at the World Ski Championships in Oslo, where he was stymied by bad skis and bad tactics, the Swiss cross-country superstar finally got things back on track on the World Cup in Lahti, Finland on Saturday. At the finish of the men’s 20 k pursuit, Cologna outsprinted Frenchmen Maurice Manificat and Vincent Vittoz for the win—his first since his victory in...
The American nordic combined skiers came tantalizingly close to medals in their four events at World Championships in Oslo over the past two weeks. In the two team competitions, they were fourth and sixth, while in two individual races, they put two men in the top 10 both times. In Friday’s World Cup in Lahti, Finland, the Americans were spared the fate of again falling just short of the podium—but for the wrong reasons. On...
A World Championship 50k, let alone one at Holmenkollen, is not usually a race that one just jumps into, but US Nordic Combined star Billy Demong is doing just that. Not literally, of course—though he certainly has the chops to pull off such a feat. With Kris Freeman opting to sit out the freestyle event scheduled for 1:00PM in Oslo, Norway, a spot on the US squad opened up. The 50 k is second only...
The American women have had highs and lows at World Championships in Oslo this week, packing three finishers in the top 30 in both of the first two races but also watching Kikkan Randall’s medal hopes in the sprint evaporate in a crash. And while the U.S. made the final in the team sprint and placed ninth in the relay, neither of those performances were quite as good as some were hoping for. On Saturday,...
Much to the Americans’ and Canadians’ chagrin, the men’s 4 x 10 k relay at World Championships on Friday did not unfold as it often does. “At the start, they usually jockey for a bit,” Canadian leadoff skier Stefan Kuhn told FasterSkier. “But one Swede, Daniel Rickardsson, was thinking otherwise today, because he had two bad races. So he wanted to prove a point.” Instead of a tactical first leg, where many of the teams...