Europe seems to suit Sadie Bjornsen just fine. Nearly a month into her first long-term overseas tour, Bjornsen is skiing fast and appears to be getting faster. She led a contingent of a US World Championship skiers in the 5km classic FIS race in Beitostolen, Norway, placing 8th overall. The race was won by former overall World Cup runner-up and current Norwegian World Championship team member, Astrid Jacobsen. The veteran posted a time of 15:02,...
AUBURN, N.H. — Fischer Skis announced today that seven of the fourteen athletes selected to the 2011 U.S. Cross Country World Championship team choose to compete on Fischer Skis. The seven Fischer skiers competing in Oslo, Norway, at the famed Holmenkollen venue will be led by Kikkan Randall, the 2009 World Championship Silver Medalist. Randall, who just scored her second World Cup victory last week in the freestyle sprint in Liberec, Czech Republic, is joined...
January 12, 2011 (Park City, UT) – World Championship silver medalist Kikkan Randall (Anchorage) will lead a strong 2011 U.S. Cross Country World Championship Team to compete at Holmenkollen in Oslo beginning Feb. 24. Randall is one of 14 athletes named Wednesday to compete in the biennial Championships. The International Ski Federation’s 2011 Nordic World Ski Championships are especially important this year, taking place in the heart of nordic skiing and in its most prestigious...
Dumped from the U.S. Ski Team (USST) after a sub-par 2010, Torin Koos (Methow ODT) clearly had something to prove coming into the 2011 U.S. National Championships—and he didn’t disappoint. With a victory in Saturday’s skate sprint, Koos collected his second title of the week, coming out on top in a frantic dash to the line with Simi Hamilton (USST) and Lars Flora (APU). Koos’s two victories in Rumford could easily serve as the opening...
Sun Valley’s Colin Rodgers lost his shot at the 2010 Olympic team after a battle with compartment syndrome last year. But in Saturday’s skate sprint prelim at the 2011 U.S. championships in Rumford, he showed that he still has his speed. With the men’s qualifier concluded, live timing showed Rodgers edging CXC’s Garrott Kuzzy by a tenth of a second, with Simi Hamilton (USST) in third. Torin Koos (Methow ODT) was fourth, and Tim Reynolds...
One last national title is up for grabs on Saturday in Rumford, ME, as a skate sprint wraps up the 2011 U.S. championships. Rock-hard, borderline icy conditions should make for a lightning-fast, hectic day of racing around the 1.4-kilometer course. The men’s field is headlined by Torin Koos (Methow ODT), but he’ll have his hands full with Simi Hamilton, the U.S. Ski Team’s 23-year-old sprint stud. Koos won last Sunday’s classic sprint in convincing fashion,...
With U.S. Nationals looming, there’s quite a collection of domestic skiers who think they could ski to a podium finish in the biggest races of the year. Besides the eternal glory of winning a national championship, there’s more on the line: for seniors, the races will be their best shot of earning low National Ranking List (NRL) points, which will qualify them for World Championships, and for younger skiers a strong result could mean a...
With Kikkan Randall earning frequent flier miles for her trips to the podium, and the likes of Andy Newell, Kris Freeman, Devon Kershaw, and Alex Harvey battling for the top-10, it can be easy for the younger North American skiers to get lost in the shuffle. Simi Hamilton (USA), Len Valjas (CAN), and Phil Widmer (CAN), all members of their respective nation’s B-Teams posted strong results in Sunday’s World Cup sprint in Davos, Switzerland. The...
If Josef Wenzl wants to race at the 2011 World Ski Championships in Norway, he probably can do it without a bodyguard. But that’s only thanks to the last-minute heroics of the sprinter Anders Gloersen (NOR). Wenzl, a German, squandered a sure podium finish for himself and the top Norwegian pair in Sunday’s team sprint in Dusseldorf, crashing out on the final corner and taking John Kristian Dahl along with him. Gloersen ended up being...
Since 2002, the city sprint in Dusseldorf, Germany, has become a fixture on the International Ski Federation’s (FIS’s) World Cup calendar. One of three regular city sprints on the circuit, Dusseldorf features a flat, extremely fast, and almost dangerously narrow and twisty sprint course. Over the last eight seasons, the German city has become renown for carnage and upsets, almost as much as for cross-country skiing in a unique location and with a great crowd...
This weekend’s World Cup city sprints in Dusseldorf aren’t supposed to start in the airport. But the American and Canadian ski teams will be cutting it pretty close. Thanks to a strike by Finnair’s flight attendants, the two squads’ sprinters are spending Thursday night in Finland and departing for Germany on Friday—giving the teams a buffer of roughly 24 hours before the start of the races on Saturday. American Andy Newell’s schedule will be even...
As the season gets fully under way, FasterSkier will be featuring previews of teams and athletes at different levels. We published our piece on US World Cup athletes, check out our 24 Teams in 24 Days series. With eight athletes headed to Gallivare, Sweden for the World Cup opener, the U.S. Ski Team (USST) will have the numbers to field both a men’s and women’s relay team for the first time in many years. The increased...
The Triac Basket – No Tools, No Glue, No Excess. “We placed a priority on reducing swing weight and achieved this by removing all excess material including glue and even lettering at the basket end of the pole” says Lars Karlöf, the Swix Sport R&D engineer. With the first of the kind interchangeable yet glue-less basket you finally have a 100 % reliable connection between the basket and the shaft with a minimum of weight....
More than 150 training days, countless kilometers of rollerskiing, and dozens of loads of dirty laundry: A summer and fall’s worth of preparation will be put to the test in just over two weeks, when the U.S. Ski Team (USST) makes its departure for Europe. All seven members will fly to Finland on November 7 for a weekend of tune-up racing north of the Arctic Circle in Muonio. From there, the squad will part ways,...
SUN VALLEY, ID (Sept. 14) – World Championship medalistAndy Newell (Shaftsbury, VT) and top distance athlete Liz Stephen (E. Montpelier, VT) and Noah Hoffman (Aspen, CO) and 2010 Olympian Morgan Arritola, Fairfield, ID (Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation; Fischer, Salomon, Kris Freeman, Andover, NH (Andover Outing Club; Fischer, Alpina, Alpina, Swix ) 10/14/1980* Kikkan Randall, Anchorage (Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center; Fischer, Salomon, Salomon, Swix) 12/31/1982* Noah Hoffman, Aspen, CO (Aspen Valley Ski Club;...
Evidence of autumn abounds at the U.S. Ski Team’s camp in Sun Valley. Temperatures on Thursday struggled to break 50 degrees, there’s snow in the mountains outside town, and with three time trials over the next week and a half, the team’s training focus has shifted from volume to intensity. But despite the signs of the inexorable creep towards winter, nobody’s getting ahead of themselves. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, still,” said...
Sure, it’s only August. Sure, it’s the Southern hemisphere. And yeah, okay, the Americans and Canadians have been training over 20 hours a week during their camps in New Zealand. But all this notwithstanding, most people would still agree that winning a skate sprint over Andy Newell is a great way to start your rookie season on the U.S. Ski Team. And that’s what Simi Hamilton did on Saturday, nipping Newell by inches at the...
The World Cup opener is still 100 days away, but for the U.S. and Canadian national teams, the 2010-2011 cross-country season kicks off today with a 10/15 k classic mass start event. The race is part of the ANC series – the Australian and New Zealand Continental Cup. It is being held at the Snow Farm in New Zealand, and will feature an elite, if small, field. The U.S. Ski Team (USST) will start their...
There was no rest for the weary on day 7 at the USST camp in Bend, Oregon. The scheduled event for the morning was a team time trial consisting of two person teams, each person racing two, 5 kilometer legs. “It was a fairly open-ended workout, and it was really fun,” said U.S. Ski Team coach Matt Whitcomb, who noted that because some athletes were feeling “a little beat up from the camp”, they opted...
