After anchoring the Russian relay team past Norway's Emil Hegle Svendsen, Dmitry Malyshko picked up his first individual World Cup win in the sprint in Oberhof today. Russia put four men in the top six, thanks to a good team atmosphere and a strong service team. Svendsen was relegated to third.
Miriam Gossner - at just 22 years old already an Olympic silver medalist in cross country skiing, from the relay in Vancouver - skied so fast that not even two penalties in the 7.5 k sprint could keep her from the top spot on the podium. Sara Studebaker (USA) had a season-best performance, shooting clean to finish 29th.
A strong team effort, where each racer skied among the fastest times of the day withstood the pressure of the notoriously loud and crazy Oberhof fans, gave the U.S. their best relay result in the era of modern biathlon.
Friday's World Cup relay turned into a barnburner in Oberhof, with Emil Hegle Svendsen desperately trying to make up nine seconds on Dmitri Malyshko in the final 2.5 kilometer on the newly-salted tracks. The Russian held strong, though, and gave his team the victory.
A willingness to be cold and wet were requirements for success in Oberhof today; ability to see targets through the fog and also to stay fuzzy-side-up on the course's steep and slushy downhills were encouraged, but not required, to be on the podium. Valj Semerenko noted that she'd prefer if it were minus five and sunny, but Ukraine won the women's relay anyway.
They entered the Tour with high ambitions and a fair amount of confidence, but on the whole the first two stages of the Tour de Ski in Oberhof, Germany, have not gone as planned for Kris Freeman, Noah Hoffman and Andy Newell. Freeman crashed in the pursuit after a promising prologue and leads the Americans in 58th.
After the 9 k classic pursuit stage of the Tour de Ski, three American women sit in the top 30 of the overall standings. Kikkan Randall, following an impressive win in the prologue, leads the way in 14th, 1:48.3 seconds behind Tour leader Justyna Kowalczyk. Liz Stephen ranks 23rd and Holly Brooks sits just behind her in 25th. Jessie Diggins moved up 12 places to reach 50th at the end of the pursuit.
Three Russians worked together to swallow Sunday's pursuit leader, Petter Northug, in the second stage of the Tour de Ski. Maxim Vylegzhanin and Alexander Legkov held the pace and secured a 1-2 finish while Northug settled for third.
With four men in the Tour de Ski, Alex Harvey led Canada with a season-best of sixth in Saturday's 4 k prologue. While it probably wasn't going to make or break his season, it was still a good sign for him and teammates like Ivan Babikov, who posted a personal best of 32nd.
Last year's Tour de Ski prologue winner, Petter Northug of Norway started the 2012/2013 Tour on another strong note, winning Saturday's 4 k freestyle prologue in Oberhof, Germany, ahead of Marcus Hellner and Alexander Legkov.
For the past couple weeks, I have been training in Germany with the USBA national A team. We have spent time at some of the winter World Cup venues and shared the ranges with European national teams and club teams. The first couple weeks were in Bavaria, training at Ruhpolding. This week we are training [...]
RUHPOLDING, Germany – At the Chiemgau Arena on Monday, the U.S. biathlon team was surrounded by something it doesn’t always experience in training: a cacophony of shots that didn’t belong to them. With the German women’s team, the Ukrainian national team, and juniors from France and Germany on the range, as well as a group of German men doing a non-shooting sprint workout, training was quite a bit busier than your typical biathlon practice in...
RUHPOLDING, Germany – After winning a World Junior title in 1997, Jay Hakkinen has gone on to compete in four different Olympic Games and notch nine individual World Cup top-tens, including one this year. But despite Hakkinen’s long contribution to the U.S. team, in past years he has been more visible in Europe than in the sport in his home country. In 2008 he moved to Oberhof, Germany, when he and his girlfriend Kristin Orlameunder...
Between training on an Austrian glacier and inside a ski tunnel in Germany, a guy’s got to have some off-snow fun. Not that skiing isn’t fun, but when it’s your job, an offer to play pickup soccer with several top Norwegian and German nordic skiers is difficult to pass up. For Andy Newell, the invite came nonchalantly from Norwegian men’s coach Trond Nystad, who previously headed the U.S. Ski Team. With little notice, the 27-year-old...
As the world turned its attention to London this weekend for the opening days of the Summer Olympics, another set of elite American athletes were quietly logging training hours in Ramsau, Austria, in preparation for the coming winter season and, ultimately, the 2014 Winter Games. The U.S. Ski Team men began a 12-day European camp on Dachstein glacier on Saturday, where they will stay for a week before heading to Oberhof, Germany, to train in...
In the months following its first camp of the year in Bend, Ore., the U.S. Ski Team (USST) has several new training destinations planned along with its old standbys: the men and women will split up and head to Alaska, Sweden, Austria and Germany over the course of the summer. And for the first time since its first trip to New Zealand 10 years ago, the Snow Farm is completely off the schedule. The women’s...
Since January 1st, the biathlon World Cup circuit has given us a tour of central Europe. We started in Oberhof, Germany, a biathlon mecca that attracts over 30,000 fans. Nove Mesto in the Czech Republic, site of the 2013 World Championships, hosted us the following week and treated us to some [...]
In the first competition of this week’s six-race series in Oberhof, Germany, Olga Vilukhina anchored the Russian women’s relay team to a victory, the nation’s fourth in a row on biathlon’s World Cup circuit. But in the last competition, Sunday’s 15 k mass start, a different team became dominant. Germany’s Andreas Birnbacher shot 20 for 20 and skied to a 24-second win, annihilating the rest of the 30-man field. In the process, he gave his...
As described in the race report, the German town of Oberhof finally got some much-needed snow on Thursday – it just happened to come as a blizzard during the World Cup men’s relay held that evening. With both significant snow accumulation and huge gusts of wind hitting the course, the biathletes struggled through with an unusually high number of spare rounds and penalty loops. Italy eventually took the win, with Russia and Sweden rounding out...
After an extreme and unexpected implosion in Wednesday’s relay, Magdalena Neuner of Germany scooted out of the stadium without talking to the press. On Friday, she was able to hold her head high after hitting all of her targets and skiing to a 37-second win over Darya Domracheva of Belarus in the 7.5 k World Cup sprint in Oberhof, Germany. “It was important for me to delete that last race,” she said in the post-race...