One of the first things Lenny Valjas did upon arriving in Östersund, Sweden, on Thursday was put a pole strap on. His Canadian World Cup teammate Alex Harvey went out for a ski shortly after arriving in Europe early that evening, but not Valjas. He stood in his hotel room testing out the strap on his left hand. Valjas, 23, is going to be paying a lot of attention to that hand and more specifically,...
This week, World Cup cross-country skiers across North America are checking their lists, checking them twice, loading up on supplies and then cutting their luggage in half to prepare for a long season over in Europe. The Canadian national team is headed over to Sweden next Wednesday on Nov. 7, about 2 ½ weeks before the World Cup opens in Gällivare, Sweden. Meanwhile, several U.S. Ski Team members are flying to Finland within the next...
This is a belated post about my experiences leading up to my World Cup debut last week in Ostersund, Sweden. Looking out the window… there are men setting up a television camera on a raised platform. They angle it so it will catch racers hammering over the course’s last uphill. Volunteers are unraveling sponsor signs, stretching [...]
Sunday’s 10 k pursuit in Ostersund, Sweden was set up to be a barnburner from the moment the previous day’s sprint ended. With Olympic and World Champions Tora Berger and Magdalena Neuner separated by just 0.2 seconds and last year’s overall World Cup winner Kaisa Makarainen lurking 15 seconds behind, there was no doubt that things would get exciting. Germany’s Neuner and Norway’s Berger skied the first lap together, a study in contrasting styles. Berger’s...
At the start of Sunday’s World Cup men’s pursuit, there was one man out in front: Carl Johan Bergman of Sweden. After picking up the win in Friday’s sprint in Ostersund, Swedene, Bergman had a seven-second advantage over the rest of the field. But as Friday’s victory was just the second of his career, the big question was how long the 33-year-old would be able to hang onto the lead. The answer, it turned out,...
Today in Ostersund, Sweden, two women returned to the spots they’re used to occupying on the World Cup biathlon results sheet. For Germany’s Magdalena Neuner, that spot was at the top. The 24-year-old won her 25th World Cup after placing third in a wind-dominated individual race earlier this week. For any other champion, an occasional bad day is standard. But Neuner is so good that seeing her finish over a minute and a half behind...
After finishing the 10 k World Cup sprint in Ostersund, Sweden on Friday, Lowell Bailey didn’t have to be chatty. He only needed a few words to describe how his race had gone. “It was a great race for me,” Bailey wrote in the opening of an e-mail to FasterSkier. That might be an understatement. The American placed fifth, the best finish of his career; he was less than ten seconds off the podium. Every...
Perhaps never before have the world’s best biathletes’ dreams of perfection been dashed so quickly at the beginning of a season. Over the last two days in Ostersund, Sweden, each one of the world’s top shooters has missed at least one shot. Usually, there’s just a few races like this in a season. This year, both the men’s and women’s World Cup openers have featured incredibly gusty, unpredictable winds. Even without shooting clean, a few...
One by one, last year’s heroes succumbed to errors over the course of the opening biathlon World Cup race in Ostersund, Sweden on Wednesday. Norwegians Tarjei Boe and Emil Hegle Svendsen, wearing the yellow and red bibs of as the previous overall and discipline leaders, only made it four kilometers before the mistakes began. Racing near the beginning of the field in the interval-start competition, each missed two shots in their first of four shooting...
While U.S. and Canadian skiers have been competing at FIS and World Cup races for several weeks now, the American biathletes waited until Sunday to kick off their season in an IBU Cup sprint. The race in Ostersund, Sweden, was actually the second of the weekend, but the U.S. team sat out of Saturday’s race. While the men were lucky to have skipped the windy conditions that shook up the result sheet in the opener,...
A month after the rest of the GRP left for Finland, I finally found myself on a plane getting ready to start my biathlon race season. A week ago, I arrived in Ostersund, Sweden for US Biathlon’s first on-snow camp of the winter. With temperatures in the 40s (Farenheit), rain pouring down, and [...]
Swedish biathlete Mattias Nilsson is hanging up his rifle at age 29, he abruptly announced on Thursday. After struggling with health problems all year – including hemochromatosis, when too much iron builds up in the body – Nilsson received confirmation last week that he had a leaky heart valve and that it was dangerous for him to continue competing in endurance sports. “I had been somewhat prepared that this could be the news, but not...
On December 16th, the Swedish tabloid Expressen reported that doping materials had been found in a trashcan at the Scandic Hotel in Ostersund, where the Russian, Belorussian, and German biathlon teams had stayed during the opening week of World Cup competition. While a number of officials tried to dismiss the report as sensationalist, as the days went by it became clear that the Swedish police were investigating the matter. Other news sources, such as Germany’s...
The first big chinks in Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s armor showed up at the 2010 Olympics, where his two-medal performance was eclipsed by the three podiums collected by his Norwegian teammate, Emil Hegle Svendsen. Bjoerndalen, 36, was charitable at the time, as befitted a living legend with nearly three-dozen World Championships medals to his name. And there was no sense that he felt threatened by Svendsen—after all, the three medals that Svendsen won in Vancouver represented...
Before this weekend, Finland’s Kaisa Makarainen had never won a World Cup biathlon race. How things change. After winning Friday’s sprint race by eighteen seconds, then extending that lead to almost a minute and a half in Sunday’s pursuit race, Makarainen will have a target on her back when the World Cup heads to Hochfilzen, Austria, next weekend. Makarainen was the first woman out of the starting gate and never looked back, shooting clean through...
Much to Ole Einar Bjorndalen’s chagrin, his Norwegian teammate Emil Hegle Svendsen beat him for a second straight race. As Bjorndalen crossed the finish line in second place, 3.9 seconds behind Svendsen at the end of Saturday’s 10 k World Cup sprint, he threw his poles onto the ground in frustration and rolled his eyes at the cameraman. Bjorndalen held the lead at the 8.4 k checkpoint, but fell on the final downhill coming into...
The story of the day at the men’s World Cup biathlon opener in Ostersund, Sweden, was how Norway’s Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, already a legend despite the fact that he hasn’t retired, blew an early lead in the 20 k individual race by missing two targets in the last shooting stage. Coming into that stage, Bjoerndalen had an edge of just over a minute on his teammate Emil Hegle Svendsen. But with a pair of missed...
This year’s biathlon World Cup opener in Ostersund has an unexpected challenge: not only do racers have to vanquish their competitors, they also have to beat the parasites that are making happy homes inside their gastrointestinal tracts. According to The Local, a Swedish news site, 5,000 people in Ostersund are confirmed to have been infected with the parasite cryptosporidium, and it is feared that up to 9,000 could be affected. Officials are still searching for...
Russian 2008 World Champion is warning of her comeback to biathlon.