Times are what they are. Precautions are the name of the game. This year’s Blink Festival in Norway played to a reduced field and limited spectators due to COVID precautions. Some races, as will be noted, included modified race rules to limit close contact between athletes. Lysebotn Opp – 06/08 The Lysebotn Opp is perhaps the marquee event. It features lovely fjord views and a grueling 7.5-kilometer uphill skate switchbacking up a mountainside. In...
Editor’s Note: The following is part of a series proposed by Maks Zechel, a 20-year-old Canadian cross-country skier embarking on his first season training abroad. In August, he made the big move to Norway, where he’ll be training and racing with Team Asker for the entire winter. Through these updates, Maks hopes to share his personal “observations, stories and lessons learned” to help close the gap between North American and Scandinavian nordic skiing. Previous posts: #2, #4, #6, and
France has never won a World Cup team sprint, neither for men nor women, classic nor freestyle. And its team will have to wait a bit longer for that time to come. But France was oh-so-close on Sunday, with Baptiste Gros and Lucas Chanavat racing against the Russian duo of Andrey Parfenov and Gleb Retivykh in the men’s 6 x 1.5-kilometer freestyle team sprint in PyeongChang, South Korea. Chanavat, last year’s U23 world champion in the freestyle sprint, tried...
Answer the door when opportunity knocks: Russia’s Petr Sedov wins the men's 30 k skiathlon in PyeongChang, South Korea while U.S. skiers Noah Hoffman and Scott Patterson score top-tens.
FIS Nordic Combined Junior World Championships (Park City and Midway, Utah): Normal hill/5 k [UPDATED] In the individual normal hill/5-kilometer Gundersen on Saturday, the last nordic-combined competition of 2017 Nordic Junior World Championships, American Ben Loomis captured his first top 10 in his third Junior Worlds in ninth place. Eighteen-year-old Loomis jumped to 10th then picked off one place in the 5 k to finish ninth, 1:22.3 minutes behind the winner, Germany’s Vinzenz Geiger. Geiger...
It’s not like winning is a new feeling for Canada’s Alex Harvey. After all, the Quebec-based cross-country skier said in a Cross Country Canada press release. “It is nice to be able to own a statistic like that, but I do it for the result and to be the best I can be each race. If that means that I win back-to-back then that is a bonus.” With Strong Performances, Canada Looks to Relay While...
U.S. SuperTour (Truckee, Calif.): Classic sprints [UPDATED] Less than a week after being men’s 30 k classic mass start champion at this year’s U.S. nationals — won Saturday’s SuperTour classic sprint as well. Lustgarten, of the Craftsbury Green Racing Project, raced to a 1.58-second victory in the men’s A-final at the Auburn Ski Club in Soda Springs, Calif., finishing in 3:03.4. Ben Saxton, of the Stratton Mountain School (SMS) Elite Team, placed second, and Reese...