HomeTag

Étienne Hébert

It’s Ogden and Ketterson Again in the Craftsbury SuperTour Freestyle Sprint

SuperTour racing continued on Friday in Craftsbury, Vermont, as part of the Henchey Memorial Carnival, which also included Eastern Cup and collegiate racing. The three-day event is presented by the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, NENSA, U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and the University of Vermont (UVM), the EISA carnival host school. Racers were faced with snowy conditions for the opening 1.4-kilometer freestyle sprint as a winter storm made its way across the Northeast. Friday morning’s grooming report...

Ketterson and Ogden Take Classic Sprint Win on New Tracks at Mt Van Hoevenberg

By Rachel Bachman Perkins and Ben Theyerl After a brief break, the SuperTour picked up in Lake Placid this weekend, with a fluoro-free Period III kicking off with a 1.5-kilometer classic sprint. The frigid forecast called for overnight lows of -5 Fahrenheit, with a wind chill as low as -23F. Highs during the day were only predicted to climb into the low single digits. Qualifiers were scheduled for 10/10:45 am, with quarterfinals for the open...

Eastern Canada Cup #3,4: Back to Business

  The Eastern Canada Cup series wrapped up in Mont Sainte Anne (MSA), Québec, with distance racing for over 300 skiers each day. As with Westerns, the second weekend brought results and execution a little higher in the athletes’ focus, but the almost universal use of the words ‘fun’ and ‘excitement’ remain a reflection of a return to racing after a season without. MSA is just outside Québec City and is very accessible for most...

Eastern Canada Cup #1 & 2: Getting Started in Nakkertok

Once again, there was a great weekend of racing on the Nakkertok trails in Gatineau, QC. It was almost like the pandemic pause hadn’t happened: lots of racers, live results on Zone4, great support for media. But it isn’t really just Nakkertok. ENGNE, a coalition of local clubs, puts on great races using Nakkertok trails and the NakkerTrak snowmaking magic. As with the first Western Canada Cup (WCC) race, the theme of the weekend was...

Canadian Eastern Championships: Weekend Wrap-up

The NorAm series went to Duntroon, Ontario, for the Canadian Eastern Championships: three days of varied weather, new race formats, and new faces on the podium, all hosted by Highlands Trailblazers. Easterns is possibly the most storied ski race in Canada. Most years, it is the largest FIS event in North America. This year, the Polar Vortex froze out the travel ambitions for many families and lower budgets in the post-Olympic season persuaded many western...

Saturday Rundown: Relay Silver for U.S. Men; Loomis 4th; Plus Hakuba & Gatineau

(Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Americans Ben Loomis, Luke Jager and Gus Schumacher.) Junior World Championships (Goms, Switzerland): Men’s and women’s relays Two individual medals and a relay podium. That’s how the U.S. team fared this week at Junior World Championships in terms of a medal count, but the significance of its breakthroughs go way beyond the hardware. Hailey Swirbul became the most successful American nordic skier at Junior World...

Thursday Rundown: Swirbul 3rd in Junior Worlds Skiathlon; U.S. NoCo Relay 7th (Updated)

(This article has been updated to include comments from Americans Hailey Swirbul and Gus Schumacher.) Junior World Championships (Goms, Switzerland): 10/20 k skiathlons second in the 5 k classic for her first individual medal and the best-ever finish for the U.S. at Junior Worlds. “This means so much,” she told race organizers after taking third in Thursday’s skiathlon. “I’m so happy to represent the United States here and show how we can improve in the...

Tuesday Rundown: Swirbul 2nd at Junior Worlds; Loomis 3rd (Updated)

(This article has been updated to reflect that American Hailey Swirbul was in second for most of Tuesday’s 5 k race, not over one minute back as previously reported based on a live timing error. It has also been updated to include comments from Americans Hailey Swirbul, Ben Loomis, Stephen Schumann, and Gus Schumacher, Canada’s Antoine Cyr, University of Alaska Anchorage nordic head coach Andrew Kastning, and U.S. Ski Team Development Coach Bryan Fish.) Junior World Championships (Goms,...

Halvorsen Eighth to Lead U.S. in World Juniors Sprint, Canada’s Ritchie 12th

(Note: This article has been updated to include comments from American Hannah Halvorsen.) 2018 World Junior Championships is off and running and two brand-new champions have been crowned. Moa Lundgren of Sweden took the women’s skate sprint title while the men’s final went to Tom Mancini of France. On a perfect blue-sky day nestled deep in the Swiss Alps, the world’s best skiers under the age of 20 raced around a hilly sprint course with...

Sunday Rundown: Seefeld, Goms, Ridnaun, Craftsbury

IBU Open European Championships (Ridnaun-Val Ridanna, Italy): Single mixed & mixed relays Susan Dunklee and Lowell Bailey teamed up for the final day of the 2018 International Biathlon Union (IBU) Open European Championships in Ridnaun, Italy, and raced to a bronze medal in the single mixed relay. The American duo, both of which earned individual medals at last year’s IBU World Championships, finished just 9.1 seconds out of first, which went to Norway’s Thelka Brun-Lie...

Wednesday Rundown: Ruhpolding IBU World Cup; MSA NorAm Trials

IBU World Cup (Ruhpolding, Germany): Men’s 20 k individual For France’s Martin Fourcade, the difference between a miss on the last shooting stage of the men’s 20-kilometer individual International Biathlon Union (IBU) World Cup on Wednesday versus perfect shooting wouldn’t have ultimately changed his result in Ruhpolding. Despite the one-minute penalty, which was tagged onto his total time after his lone miss of the day, Fourcade still won by a minute. The Czech Republic’s Ondřej...

Tuesday Rundown: MSA NorAm Skate Sprints

NorAm Trials (Mont Sainte-Anne, Quebec): Freestyle sprint The Mont Sainte-Anne (MSA) NorAm weekend continued Tuesday with freestyle sprints, which counted toward Junior and U23 World Championships team selection only. In the women’s 1.3-kilometer sprint, Dahria Beatty, of the Canadian World Cup Team and Alberta World Cup Academy (AWCA), won every heat to take her second win of the MSA NorAm, after winning Monday’s skiathlon winner, Browne, of the national U25 Team and Pierre-Harvey National Training Centre (CNEPH),...

Monday Rundown: U.S. Nationals; MSA NorAm Trials

U.S. Cross Country Championships (Anchorage, Alaska): Classic sprint Men’s report Caitlin Patterson did it. With a classic-sprint win on Monday, she successfully capped off an undefeated 2018 U.S. Cross Country Championships, as the top American woman in all four races over the past week in Anchorage, Alaska. Patterson, of the Craftsbury Green Racing Project, qualified seventh then won the women’s 1.5-kilometer final by more than 2 seconds in 3:39.58 minutes. Finland’s Jasmi Joensuu, a junior...

Friday Rundown: Kontiolahti & Lake Placid (Updated)

IBU World Cup (Kontiolahti, Finland): Men’s & women’s sprints [UPDATED] Fifth place is becoming a habit for US Biathlon’s Susan Dunklee, who shot 9/10 on Friday (1+0) and finished 34.9 seconds out of first for her third fifth-place result in the last three individual races. Twice at last week’s International Biathlon Union (IBU) World Cup in PyeongChang, South Korea, Dunklee placed fifth: first in the sprint and again in the pursuit. She ended her racing there...

Wednesday Rundown: Drammen & Lake Placid (Updated)

FIS Cross-Country World Cup (Drammen, Norway): Classic sprints Just three days after 2017 Nordic World Championships ended in Lahti, Finland, World Cup cross-country skiers were back to their regular-season grind with 1.2-kilometer classic sprints on Wednesday in Drammen, Norway. In the men’s race, Norway stole the day with Eirik Brandsdal notching his first World Cup win since 2015 in Drammen, but Russia’s Sergey Ustiugov broke up the team’s total domination of the final with a...

Monday Rundown: Junior Nationals Open in Lake Placid

USSA Cross Country Junior Championships (Lake Placid, N.Y.): 5/10 k freestyle individual starts The U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association (USSA) Cross Country Junior Championships (a.k.a. Junior Nationals) opened Monday in Lake Placid, N.Y., with U16, U18 and U20 men’s and women’s 5/10-kilometer freestyle individual start races taking place at the Olympic Jumping Complex trails just up the road from Mt. Van Hoevenberg, where organizers had originally planned to host the weeklong event. A lack of natural...

The annual Eastern Canadian Championships are a special event in the Canadian winter.  On paper, it is just another NorAm that provides opportunities to earn World Cup starts, national-team positions, and valuable International Ski Federation (FIS) points, but it has grown to be bigger than that. While Western Canadian Championships and Canadian nationals change their host venue each year, Nakkertok, Chelsea Nordiq, and Heats Women’s classic sprint podium: Maya MacIsaac-Jones, NST U25, 3:42.06 Sophie Carrier-Laforte, CNEPH, +0.66 Anne Hart,...

In an effort to showcase the North Americans competing at this past week’s International Ski Federation (FIS) 2017 USANA Nordic Junior World Championships and U23 Cross Country World Championships at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah, we asked those qualifying athletes several questions about themselves — actually, we had them fill in the blanks. Here we have 18-year-old Étienne Hébert, of the Montériski Ski Club, representing Canada at his first Junior Worlds. He competed in the

On the first day of 2017 Junior World Championships at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah, there was one man who appeared to be dominating the 1.5-kilometer classic sprint from top to bottom. Norway’s 19-year-old Petter Stakston, in his second Junior Worlds, started Monday off with a qualifying win, by 0.61 seconds over Finland’s Turo Sipilä, in 3:45.33 minutes. Then he won the first men’s quarterfinal of the day and proceeded to win the first semifinal as...