Devon Kershaw had it in his head. He wanted redemption. The Canadian National Team veteran hadn’t been entirely pleased with his season so far despite finishing fourth in the Tour de Ski two weeks ago. After several top 10 performances this season, Kershaw took a big hit on Saturday, finishing 40th in the World Cup classic sprint after his pole shattered in his hand and he struggled to find a replacement. With one chance to leave...
From the qualifier through to the A-final, recently crowned Tour de Ski champion Dario Cologna (SUI) skied a “perfect” sprint day by all accounts in Otepää, Estonia on Saturday. The current overall World Cup points leader made a statement from the word get-go, posting the fastest qualifying time by an unbelievable 4.2 seconds in a 1.4 k classic. He then went on to decisively win his quarter, semi and final heats. Ola Vigen Hattestad (NOR)...
Both Tim Burke and Lowell Bailey had their moments in Saturday’s mass start race in Antholz-Anterselva, Italy. After two shooting stages, Burke was in the top ten. After three, Bailey was 11th. But in the end, after four stages and 15 k of skiing, the Americans ended up in a race with each other – for 20th place. “It was an up and down race for me today,” Bailey wrote in an e-mail to FasterSkier....
It’s a testament to Darya Domracheva’s speed that even with a 30-second lead with two kilometers to go, French relay anchor Marie Dorin Habert – the 11th-ranked biathlete on the World Cup and no slouch herself – was terrified of being caught. “I was very worried!” Dorin exclaimed in a post-race press conference. “Darya is better than me at skiing.” Luckily for France, Dorin is a better shot than the Belorussian star. After three legs...
After winning the Tour de Ski, Dario Cologna (SUI) took a much-needed break from racing and skipped last weekend’s city sprints in Milan, Italy. His return to the World Cup on Saturday in Otepää, Estonia, left little doubt that the overall points leader is on top of his game. He owned the classic sprint from the qualifier to final. Cologna’s qualifying time was more than 4 seconds ahead of the next-fastest skiers, and he handily...
Justyna Kowalczyk didn’t have to say a word. Marit Bjørgen knew it was on. Kowalczyk, the three-time defending Tour de Ski champion from Poland, had spent the better part of the last two weeks recovering from her most recent Tour victory. Bjørgen, the Tour de Ski runner-up, had done the same, skipping last weekend’s races in Milan, Italy, to prepare for Otepää, Estonia. While the two rivals didn’t face off until the final of Saturday’s...
The Swedish biathlon team has had to adjust to several surprise announcements in the last year. In the spring star coach Wolfgang Pichler decided to retire. In the fall, Mattias Nilsson Full results
Canadians Chandra Crawford and Perianne Jones teamed up to place third in the World Cup team sprint in Milan, Italy on Sunday, joining Americans Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins on the podium. The event marked the first time Canadians and Americans have shared a World Cup podium in cross-country skiing. Crawford has enjoyed a resurgence this year, re-establishing herself as one of the top sprinters in the world. The 2006 Olympic champion in the freestyle...
Jessie Diggins I’ll confess that I don’t much care for team sprints, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I was more impressed by Diggins’ individual sprint than her podium performance paired with Kikkan last weekend. When I collect results data, I only track age very crudely, using the year of birth indicated by [...] Related posts:
After last week’s performances in by the men’s team, highlighted by Russell Currier’s sixth-place finish in the 10 k sprint during just his second World Cup start of the season, the U.S. women’s biathlon team needed a feel-good story of their own to stay in the spotlight. In Thursday’s 7.5 k sprint in Antholz-Anterselva, Italy, they did just that as World Cup rookie Susan Dunklee raced to her first top-20 result. The 17th-place finish was...
On Sunday, January 15th, Kikkand Randall and Jessie Diggins placed second in the World Cup team sprint, part of a weekend of racing in downtown Milan, Italy. This was the second silver medal World Cup performance of the year for the American women in the team sprint—Randall and Sadie Bjornsen paired up in Dusseldorf, Germany to finish second as well back in November. While Randall has continued her remarkable season, and top results have become...
When American and Canadian skiers start consistently winning domestic races, they face a choice: do they stay on their home circuits, or head to Europe? And if a trip across the Atlantic is in the cards, where will they race? With limited World Cup quotas and a myriad of regional race circuits, skiers have to not only choose which of the many races they might attend, but also generally organize and fund the trips themselves....
Since coming down with a whopper of a sinus infection nearly five months ago, Skyler Davis hadn’t felt like himself. In his first year on the U.S. Ski Team’s development squad, the 20-year-old tried to shake it. He tried at the U.S. Ski Team’s dryland camp in Lake Placid, N.Y, but he had to leave early to recover at home in Jericho, Vt. Afterward, Davis rallied and put forth the effort needed to earn his...
Of all the nordic disciplines, biathlon is perhaps the one where small errors make the biggest difference. A centimeter here, a millimeter there – missing a target by that much, or little, can have drastic impacts on an athlete’s results. On Sunday, however, Magdalena Neuner didn’t make a small error. She made what is perhaps the worse mistake in biathlon: cross-firing. Coming into the third shooting stage of the 10 k pursuit with a sizeable...
The weekend after the Tour finishes will have smaller fields, and this was no different. Still, The Americans will take the results regardless of who else shows up. Here’s how the women’s finalists progressed during the day: Flat courses will tend to produce times like this, where the qualification round is quite fast, and then [...] Related posts:
MILAN, Italy – Italy is a place of great history, with ruins from ages past, ancient works of art and a culture that existed long before North America felt the footfall of Western civilization. Americans and Canadians generally travel to Italy to admire the history of the country, not make it. But on another brilliant sunny day in the northern Italian metropolis of Milan, Kikkan Randall, Jessie Diggins, Chandra Crawford and Perianne Jones did just...
The narrow course set up on the streets of Milan, Italy delivered yet another exciting World Cup day of racing on Sunday in the team sprint event. For the American duo of Simi Hamilton and Andy Newell, however, it was unfavorably so. Coming into the exchange zone on the third leg of the semifinal, Austria I’s Harald Wurm pushed Hamilton, sending him to the ground and ruining the Americans’ chances of advancing to the finals....
With the U.S. men’s team notching their best day ever in Saturday’s sprint, hopes were high that the team could place athletes in the top ten or even the top five in today’s pursuit. But although the Americans were frequently close, they couldn’t pull it off. After starting with bib 6, Russell Currier missed a shot in the first prone stage which dropped him to 12th; and while Tim Burke, starting with bib 11, was...
When Norway’s Emil Hegle Svendsen starts a pursuit race in bib 1, it’s a pretty good bet that he’ll stay there. Gamblers today, however, would have been sorry to put their money on the overall World Cup leader. As soon as the 12.5 k pursuit started in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, Svendsen began making errors. After being caught by Frenchmen Simon and Martin Fourcade, who had started second and third, the trio skied into the...
MILAN, Italy – You would have to be a fool to get between Alexey Petukhov and the podium too many times in one weekend, but we will never know what would happen thanks to Nikolay Morilov. The Russian duo, anchored by Morilov, skied to a convincing win in the men’s team sprint in the downtown Milan Parco Sempione on Sunday, besting Swedes Calle Halfvarsson and Teodor Peterson and Italians David Hofer and Fulvio Scola. Peterson...