FasterSkier discusses the selection of nine skiers to the Canadian 2015 Nordic World Ski Championships with Canadian National Team Head Coach Justin Wadsworth. "In every race we have good opportunity. It is just putting it together on the right day," he said of the team's chances in Falun, Sweden.
Three of nine athletes met Cross Country Canada's primary standards for selection to the 2015 World Championships Team, and CCC named another six skiers to the team on Monday.
Olivia Bouffard-Nesbitt (Rocky Mountain Racers) didn't have a great start, but she held off a charging Russian to finish 12th in the 15 k skiathlon at U23 World Championships. She believes she accomplished something else, too: potentially earning a place on Canada's team to senior World Championships in Falun.
It has been a year and a half since Lenny Valjas last made an appearance in World Cup sprint heats. Let that sink in. The tall Canadian is thrilled that not only is he back and feeling like himself, but he didn't just squeak in - he qualified tenth and missed a lucky loser spot in the semifinals by just 0.03 seconds.
The four-man Canadian World Cup Team we've come to know over the years is back at it again, and has been training for the last two weeks with four other top domestic skiers -- Perianne Jones, Emily Nishikawa, Graeme Killick, and Jesse Cockney. This week, most of the team will test its stuff with the best of them at the World Cup opener in Kuusamo, Finland.
Cross Country Canada High Performance Director Tom Holland reports back on a trip to South Korea, where he scoped out the site of the 2018 Olympics. "It's a more simple Games," he said. The biathlon stadium is in good shape, but some of the cross country ski trails aren't built yet.
We caught up with new CCC Women's Committee Chair Madeleine Williams, a former national-team member and 2010 Olympian who's passionate about keeping Canadian females in elite sports and has made public recommendations on gender equality.
In his first week as president/chair of Cross Country Canada, Jamie Coatsworth -- a longtime financial supporter of Canadian nordic skiing -- talks about the position and how he ended up filling the vacancy left by Richard Lemoine. "Sort of looking up around the room, I spoke to some of the other board members," Coatsworth said. "And I said somebody’s gotta do it."
Chandra Crawford stuck with skiing long after winning gold as a U23 at the 2006 Olympics because she remembered when Beckie Scott and Sara Renner explained "it would take ten years to get good." She committed, and after three Olympics, Crawford, 30, retired from the sport to pursue higher education -- cutting right to the chase with an MBA to better serve Fast and Female.
It turns out Daria Gaiazova took her final international cross-country ski race where her career all began – in her native Russia at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games. The dual citizen, who along with teammate Ivan Babikov had the rare opportunity to race back-to-back home Games in Canada and Russia, has decided to call it a career.
Two weeks ago, Richard Lemoine learned that he would not be reelected for a second term as president of CCC's Board of Directors, should he run again. He resigned and an acting chair and former president is filling the void until CCC's Annual General Meeting, an open board meeting, this weekend.
Tor-Arne Hetland is officially part of the Canadian crew after wrapping up his first training camp with the Canadian World Cup Team in May. Onboard since April, he says he's eager to give the perspective and stability that Cross Country Canada wants. "It is asked for new ideas into the team and I’m ready to give this," Hetland says. "And also more stability in the World Cup."
If you're familiar with Canada's junior-racing scene, you've probably heard of Coach Pav. After three years as Ontario Ski Team head coach, Pavlina Sudrich is moving back to the Yukon to work with a couple U23 athletes and continue her coaching education.
In an interview on Friday, Canadian head coach Justin Wadsworth discussed how he will work with Tor Arne Hetland in the coming year for Canmore-based World Cup athletes - "I’ve already had fun talking training with him" - and the other part of his new job, getting the national training centers aligned with the World Cup team to improve the development pipeline.
Cross-Country Ski de Fond Canada (CCC) has changed its leadership structure in an effort to ramp up for the 2018 Winter Olympics, with Justin Wadsworth overseeing all national-team programs and training centres, and Louis Bouchard and Tor-Arne Hetland as World Cup Team coaches.
Canadian Women's World Cup Coach Eric de Nys is in the process of starting a new junior-training program in Canmore after parting ways with the national team. “With the World Cup team being what it will be next year, it just can't justify having that many coaches there,” he says. “We had to do some restructuring and part of that was eliminating a job.”
Brian McKeever and Graham Nishikawa came back from all odds after McKeever went down in Wednesday's sprint, then surged ahead for gold -- his first with Nishikawa alone, second of the Sochi Paralympics, and ninth total. "That was stressful,” McKeever told Cross Country Canada. “Once the cuss words were out, the only thing you can do is get back up and race."
Mark Arendz fired his name into the history books on Saturday as the first Canadian ever to win a silver medal in biathlon at the Paralympic Winter Games.
For Canada, the 30-kilometer freestyle mass start was less about results and more about the emergence of a unified women's team, which finished within places of one another and stuck together even after the race. While one is continuing on the World Cup, national-team veterans Dasha Gaiazova and Chandra Crawford will not be racing this weekend in Lahti, Finland.
Cross Country Canada announced late Friday night that it added two women, Brittany Webster and Amanda Ammar, to its 2014 Olympic cross-country team. That brings the team total to 13 athletes, seven women and six men.