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Anita Moen

The Chinese Ski Team’s Path to Beijing (Part 3)

This is the final installment of a three-part series on the development of the Chinese ski program. Click here to read part 1 and part 2. Part 3: Olympic Hopes and Misgivings in Norway For the Chinese cross country ski team, the 2022 Beijing Olympics opened with a blaze when Dinigeer Yilamujiang was selected to co-light the Olympic flame. It was an enormous honor for the twenty year old cross country skier from Altai, China...

The Chinese Ski Team’s Path to Beijing (Part 2)

You can find the introduction to this three-part series on the development of the Chinese ski program here. Creating a Generation of Skiers China, pursuing Olympic medals on home snow, signed deals in 2018 to train Chinese skiers in Norway and Finland. The first hurdle would be filling these programs with potential skiers. To that end, a talent building program was initiated and young professional athletes in the second tier of rowing, kayaking, and running...

The Chinese Ski Team’s Path to Beijing (Part 1)

Salmon for Skiing Over the last four years China has undertaken perhaps the grandest experiment in cross country skiing history: can hundreds of athletes cherry picked from other sports and given seemingly unlimited resources be turned into Olympic medalists in nordic events?  Chinese athletes have never medaled in any of the nordic disciplines, and their teams head into the Olympics as the darkest of dark horses. Success, in the form of medals, is key to...