RUMFORD, Maine — After the final sit-ski and stand-up distance events of the 2012 U.S. Adaptive Cross Country Championships on Saturday, athletes and coach John Farra reflect on their week (with three total races, including the 0.8 k sprint and 5/10 k) at Black Mountain in Rumford, Maine.
RUMFORD, Maine – As the men’s and women’s adaptive skiers at the 2012 U.S. Cross Country Championships crossed the finish line in a spread-out finish, they did what many racers often don’t think to do – they waited. After their longest races of the week — 6 k for most women and 12 k for most men in the sit-ski category –several were noticeably cold. But they were also a family, joint by backgrounds of personal challenges...
From January 29 to February 3, cross-country skiers and biathletes on the U.S. Paralympic Team will have the opportunity to compete in a World Cup on home turf. The U.S. Olympic Committee announced earlier in October that Telemark Resort in Cable, Wisconsin is set to host the biggest international nordic event the U.S. has seen since 2005, when the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Biathlon and Cross-Country World Championships were held in Fort Kent, ME. Central...
If you’d asked John Farra a few months ago what he’d be doing in 2014, he would have told you, “Going to Sochi and kicking some butt.” He still plans on doing just that, but not with the team he would have expected. The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) announced Thursday that Farra is leaving his post of the past three years as the Nordic Program Director for a position as Director of the...
If the decision-making process at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) Spring Congress is exhausting, the annual International Ski Federation (FIS) meetings are even more challenging. While American skiers often lament the relative lack of visibility of our beloved sport within the US, the FIS Calendar Conference that convened in early June demonstrated that popularity comes at a price. Namely, the larger the number of significant stakeholders—countries, athletes, coaches, administrators and TDs, of course,...
Every May, after storage wax has cooled and spandex has been washed for the first time since November, coaches, officials, and athletes from around the country descend upon Park City for four days to discuss scheduling for the following year and implementing new race rules and formats. This is the USSA Congress. FasterSkier caught up with John Farra, USSA Nordic Director, to get a run down of the most import developments to come out of...
In the lead-up to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Zach Caldwell led a much-discussed, multi-year effort to pin down the best stonegrinds and waxes for the challenging, variable conditions at Whistler Olympic Park. Caldwell’s months and months of hard work even drew the attention of National Public Radio, which Kris Freeman’s horrific skis in the opening 15 k freestyle in Vancouver. When the best skiers and wax techs in the world can be baffled by conditions,...
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...
A World Championship 50k, let alone one at Holmenkollen, is not usually a race that one just jumps into, but US Nordic Combined star Billy Demong is doing just that. Not literally, of course—though he certainly has the chops to pull off such a feat. With Kris Freeman opting to sit out the freestyle event scheduled for 1:00PM in Oslo, Norway, a spot on the US squad opened up. The 50 k is second only...
Just a month into his tenure as governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker made a bold political move: he proposed a bill which would limit the rights of union workers to use collective bargaining. With a strong Republican majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the bill appeared poised to pass. On Thursday, Senate Democrats boycotted: they didn’t come in to work, meaning that the Republicans didn’t have a quorum to hold a...
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...
Cross-country ski racing is never a cakewalk, with competitions that demand hours upon hours of preparation and hard work from participants. But the low-snow conditions in Rumford, Maine are presenting an extra-big headache for everyone involved in the 2011 U.S. National Championships. As the clock ticked down to the start of the event’s opening race on Sunday, organizers were hard at work preserving and augmenting the remnants of the snow on the course—and they were...
It seems like every second year, U.S. Nationals comes out on the losing end of its battle with Mother Nature. In 2007, the first of two years that the event was hosted in Houghton, Michigan, there was barely enough snow to ski on. And in 2009, the first of two years in Anchorage, Alaska, most of the races were cancelled due to a debilitating cold spell that left temperatures far below the FIS legal limit...
After the U.S. men’s performance in the season-opening World Cup relay in Sweden, which had Andy Newell, Kris Freeman, and Noah Hoffman hanging with the leaders through nearly three full legs, the question hung in the air: Who would be the skier to fill the void in the fourth spot? The answer seemed to lie back at home, in the form of a rising star like Tad Elliott, who could be ready in time for...
As a cross country skier, it’s tough to turn down a free trip to World Cups in Estonia, Russia, and the Czech Republic. Unless, of course, you’ve got a shot at racing at World Championships in Norway later on in the winter. That’s the case for Alaska Pacific University’s (APU’s) Holly Brooks, the current women’s SuperTour leader. Along with her teammate Lars Flora, Brooks’s finishes at the November races in West Yellowstone earned her start...
Last week, a new race format debuted on tough courses, with freezing temperatures as a backdrop. Reviews from athletes and coaches were mixed. The Ruka Triple, the three-day World Cup mini-tour in Finland? Nope. Try the SuperTour Sprint Showdown, the double qualifier held in West Yellowstone, MT, last Thursday. The event was the first of its kind in North America, and so far as anyone knows, in the world. Thus far, other countries have not...
As snow hammers Idaho and Montana and forecasts call for frigid temperatures, the fate of Wednesday’s SuperTour-opening double sprint qualifier hangs in the balance. With road closures stranding the race timer and other officials in Idaho, and the National Weather Service (NWS) predicting a high of negative seven degrees on Wednesday, the start of the event has already been pushed back two hours, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. And since the International Ski Federation’s...
In the sport of cross-country skiing, most people would agree that competing with New Zealand is probably smarter than picking a fight with Norway. Consequently, the U.S. Ski Team (USST) will be wearing black suits for the upcoming season, eschewing the red spandex that has been the norm for the past few years. After any number of years of being drowned out by a sea of Norwegian crimson, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association Nordic Director...
If Vegard Ulvang gets run out of Europe, it appears that he still could safely make his home in North America. Ulvang is the chair of the International Ski Federation’s cross-country committee, which is considering the introduction of a new race format that includes five kilometers of climbing followed by five kilometers of technical downhill. Scandinavians have reacted to the idea with derision: Norwegian Eldar Roenning told the newspaper Nettavisen that the idea was “the...
The days of the world championships of interval training may be numbered. That’s the moniker that some Europeans use for the team sprint, which appears on the schedule for every Olympics and World Championships—but rarely on the World Cup. According to U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) Nordic Director John Farra, the International Ski Federation (FIS) has convened a working group that will investigate the potential for doing away with the team sprint and replacing...