The U.S. Ski Team (USST) wrapped up its first full week of a 14-day training camp in Park City, UT on Friday with an individual start classic rollerski time trial at Soldier Hollow. In the crisp Utah air at just under 6,000 feet, 16 men and 11 women completed the 16.5 k and 12.3 k courses, respectively. Noah Hoffman (USST/Team Homegrown), skiing on a pair of Swenors, bested the men’s field by over two minutes...
If you are thinking that it is a little early for the Climb to the Castle rollerski race you would be right. The annual five-mile grind to the top of Whiteface Mountain in Lake Placid, New York, hosted by the New York Ski Education Foundation (NYSEF) has historically been held in October. The race is timed to coincide with the US Ski Team’s (USST) fall training camp and that two week block was shifted to...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. – In theory, moving up the annual U.S. Ski Team camp in Lake Placid from October to mid-September made sense. It allowed space for a final dryland camp in Park City, Utah, where the USST athletes could train at higher elevations and follow up on tests taken earlier in the year. Also, September usually brings better weather than October in Lake Placid. In nearly 10 years of training in upstate New York,...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. – Rollerskiing through thick fog on a sleepy Thursday morning, several U.S. Ski Team and National Training Group athletes wheeled into the Olympic Jumping Complex parking lot. Almost an hour before their 9 a.m. sprint workout, the small group arrived earlier than some of the venue’s staff, but they weren’t the first athletes there. As they pulled up alongside a row of parked vehicles, a few skiers recognized one another, and without...
Several members of the U.S. Ski Team and National Training Group came out for Day 2 of the Lake Placid USST dryland training camp on Thursday, competing in a classic rollerski sprint. Over the two-hour time trial, six women and nine men raced four times — the women on a 1.3-k loop and the men over 1.5 k. Everyone advanced to the finals, and the idea was to go hard. Here is a recap...
Two rounds of cuts have hit the U.S. Ski Team’s already-reduced budget this spring and summer, increasing demands on athletes, coaches, and administrators alike. According to U.S. Ski Team (USST) Head Coach Chris Grover, the program was directed in late June to trim nearly $60,000 from its 2012 operating budget—in addition to a $30,000 reduction that came in the spring, during the annual budgeting process. The impact of the cuts will mostly fall on the...
For the last two years, the U.S. Ski Team (USST) and U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) have been pushing American athletes to compete more in Europe, citing a need for experience in the cutthroat racing environment there. Belying that push, however, were thousands of dollars in prize money awarded to the winners of the sprint and distance disciplines of the SuperTour, the four month-long domestic race series. Those bonuses—$2,000 for each one, for men...
The 2011-2012 U.S. Ski Team (USST) roster has been out since April, and on the surface, the biggest piece of news in the announcement was sheer numbers. With seven men and five women named to the team, the squad is nearly twice the size it was last year. In order to take advantage of their new strength, USST coaches decided to officially split the team into a men’s and a women’s squad—an arrangement that follows...
The U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team (USST) for the 2011-2012 season is expected to be announced in a few hours, according to John Farra, the program’s director. The nominations haven’t been made public yet, but in making them, Farra and Chris Grover, the USST head coach, have faced a familiar dilemma: add a number of athletes to the squad, and dilute an always-tight budget, or preserve the higher levels of support that come with a smaller...
Rail hard tracks, crisp air, and extra blue – none were in evidence as the World Cup Finals continued with a 2.5-kilometer classic prologue in Falun, Sweden. It may not have been pretty, but it was a ski race. With 10-15 centimeters of snow falling into the morning, and temperatures just below freezing, it is perhaps an understatement to term the conditions a sloppy mess. Marit Bjoergen (NOR) served notice that she would not be...
Kikkan Randall (USA) has three more races before her 2011 World Cup campaign comes to an end, and given her career-best distance finish of 11th last weekend, there is no reason that she couldn’t be in contention for a strong result in the World Cup Finals mini-tour. But at this point, such a performance would merely be icing on the cake. With another strong classic sprint in the Stockholm city sprint, Randall sewed up the...
The day before Wednesday’s World Cup city sprint in Stockholm, Swedish sprinter Emil Jönsson took a phone call from one Carl XVI Gustav—his king. “It was a strange thing—it does not happen every day,” Jönsson told SVT, the Swedish television channel. “He called and told me that I should ski for king and country.” When the king tells you to go fast, you do it—especially when you’re racing around, of all places, the Royal Palace....
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....
Feisty, unintimidated, and encouraging—if ultimately overmatched. That’s probably the best way to describe Jessie Diggins’ effort at World Championships on Thursday, in which she anchored the U.S. women to a ninth-place finish in the 4×5 k relay. It’s also an apt description of the performance of the entire U.S. team, which fought hard to its best World Championships women’s relay result in over a decade, but was ultimately left three minutes behind the winning Norwegians....
The US women continued a solid start to the 2011 World Championships, placing three skiers in the top-30 for the second consecutive race in the women’s 15km pursuit. With an almost impenetrable fog blanketing the Holmenkollen ski stadium, spectators traded ears for eyes – the roar of the crowd alerting those just 100 meters down the track that the racers were coming. The pea soup certainly did not slow race winner Marit Bjoergen (NOR), who...
At least there’s another week until Oslo. That was the take-away for the Americans after Saturday’s 10 k classic race in Drammen, where the top U.S. women struggled on a tough course, in a stacked field of Norwegians. In her World Cup debut, Sadie Bjornsen (USA) led the way in 52nd, 3:19 behind the winner, Marit Bjoergen (NOR). But none of the other American women came within three-and-a-half minutes of Bjoergen’s time, leaving them with...
Kikkan Randall has now recorded three medals in five skate sprints. But if the enigmatic American sprint star is tired, she sure isn’t showing it, as she blasted to her first World Cup victory of the season Saturday, in a skate sprint in rainy Liberec, Czech Republic. Randall took advantage of fast skis, an advantageous situation, and a strong finishing kick to secure the win, crossing the line 0.5 seconds ahead of her closest competitor...
Just before the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) named its team traveling to the 2011 World Championships in Oslo, Brian Gregg got a voicemail from U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover. Gregg, a strong domestic skier on CXC’s Team Vertical Limit, was ranked eighth nationally, and had a shot—albeit a small one—at being selected to the group heading to Worlds. But the news from Grover was disappointing: Gregg’s results had been good, but...
With Kikkan Randall earning frequent flier miles for her trips to the podium, and the likes of Andy Newell, Kris Freeman, Devon Kershaw, and Alex Harvey battling for the top-10, it can be easy for the younger North American skiers to get lost in the shuffle. Simi Hamilton (USA), Len Valjas (CAN), and Phil Widmer (CAN), all members of their respective nation’s B-Teams posted strong results in Sunday’s World Cup sprint in Davos, Switzerland. The...
While the likes of Emil Joensson, Alexei Petukhov and Dario Cologna dominated the headlines, Andy Newell likely had the best disappointing day in the freestyle sprint in Davos. Placing 13th for the second week in a row, Newell missed out on a spot in the semifinals by two inches at most. Newell was his usual self in qualification, posting the fourth fastest time, and easily advancing to the heats. “I felt good [in the qualification],”...