After a weekend of city sprinting in Germany, including gluhwein, spills, and DSQ’s, the FIS World Cup heads to Davos, Switzerland, this weekend for another pair of skate races. Saturday sees a rare beast on the World Cup — a long distance individual start skate race (15 for the women, and 30 k for the men) — while Sunday features what might be the most intense sprint of the World Cup season. While Dusseldorf...
For most of the 119 starters in the men’s 10 k freestyle, Saturday’s race was hardly a walk in the park. That is, unless you like to go out in windy, misty, rainy, sleety and snowy conditions and enjoy encroaching darkness. And if you love long, steep hills — three per lap to be exact — the course in Kuusamo, Finland, was for you. Fortunately, the conditions on the second day of the Ruka Triple...
From the start, the U.S. men appeared ready to roll with the best of their World Cup competition at the 4×10 k relays in Sjusjøen, Norway, on Sunday. It wasn’t looks so much as action. Andy Newell jumped out to a first quick lap on the 2.5-k loop, working outside the icy track to position himself in fifth. As he found out, he wasn’t the only one working hard — most of the men he...
The men of the U.S. Ski Team (USST) got off to a rocky start Saturday morning in Sjusjøen, Norway; Kris Freeman led the way in 55th in the 15 k freestyle, +1:55.0 back from Johan Olsson (SWE), who handily bested the men’s field by 31 seconds. “It went really bad, but that’s the way it goes sometimes,” said Freeman on Saturday afternoon. “Overall the energy levels weren’t where they should have been. I’m not trying...
With the biggest squad in recent memory, the U.S. Ski Team (USST) looks to continue building on last season’s results on the World Cup this year, starting with the salvaged opener on November 19. Mild weather put the Americans’ travel plans in limbo last week, delaying their arrival to Europe. With their planned tune-up race in Beitostølen, Norway canceled, Saturday’s race in Sjusjøen will be the first time most of the U.S. contingent puts on...
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — Tad Elliott isn’t a big runner. Reflecting on his training from inside the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center, he was quick to admit that. So when fellow U.S. Ski Team rookie Ida Sargent took him on a long run in Park City, Utah, and the two ended up lost, he wasn’t thrilled. Elliott, the fun-loving, laid-back jokester, not happy? “I was cranky,” he said of what turned out to be a...
No rain, no wind, a brilliant shining sun coming up over the mountains, and rapidly warming temperatures— perfect conditions for the 2011 edition of the Climb to the Castle Rollerski Race. Kris Freeman (USST) made the most of the fine day, defending his 2010 title in impressive fashion, battling with Olympic biathlete Tim Burke for much of the race, before surging ahead with less than 500 meters to go. Burke was a close second, with...
Zach Caldwell’s role within the ski industry is hard to define. In trying to come up with a single phrase to describe his job, ‘ski technician’ isn’t nearly sufficient, as it doesn’t quite capture everything he is—structure designer, snow whisperer, wax chemist, engineer, ski evangelist, and occasional coach (he calls it his “hobby,” as if working with Kris Freeman and Noah Hoffman were as ordinary a pastime as fly fishing). Caldwell’s expertise in everything from kinetic...
In March, two-time U23 mountain bike national champion Tad Elliott told FasterSkier that he was planning to scale back his bike schedule in the coming year in hopes of snagging a nomination to the U.S. Ski Team. “That’s kind of the focus now, is putting more chips into skiing, and wanting to do World Cup skiing, wanting to do World Champs,” Elliott said. Despite a strong 2010 season, he had not been named to the...
The following is the USSA’s list of nominations for the 2012 U.S. Cross Country Ski Team. The nominations include those athletes who qualified based on published selection criteria. The USSA will announce the actual team roster later this spring, naming those athletes who accept the responsibilities of being a part of the U.S. Ski Team and who are planning to compete in the 2012 season. Athletes nominated to the 2012 U.S. Cross Country Ski Team...
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...
Kris Freeman (USST) had one last chance to nail it. A type 1 diabetic, Freeman had had two straight races in Sun Valley in which his efforts had been stymied by the disease. Saturday’s freestyle hill climb up Dollar Mountain, the final race in the four-stage SuperTour Finals, was his last shot to get it right. He did, which allowed him to leave behind three other athletes on the toughest section of the four-kilometer course,...
Off days are good for any number of things: big breakfasts, easy ski sessions, and watching NASCAR on TV. (Yeah, it’s been a slow afternoon at the FasterSkier regional headquarters). But they’re also good for catching up on all the things we missed from the last few days. Below is a brief selection. –Simi Hamilton’s dominating performance in the men’s prologue on Tuesday was a demonstration of what a well-trained athlete can do in a...
In Tuesday’s 3.3 k prologue in Sun Valley, the top-seeded men started last. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise when Simi Hamilton finished his race with a big lead—there were 42 of the continent’s strongest skiers still to come. The surprising thing was what happened next. One by one, each of those 42 men came to the finish line and failed to touch Hamilton’s time. Andy Newell: 18 seconds down. Leif Zimmermann and...
Nordic skiing already claimed the talents of one dual-sport prodigy five years ago, when Canadian Alex Harvey gave up a promising mountain biking career to focus on cross-country. Now, it has gained another: American Tad Elliott says he’s also making a shift away from mountain biking, and will put more of an emphasis on skiing this coming off-season. “That’s kind of the focus now, is putting more chips into skiing, and wanting to do World...
Much to the Americans’ and Canadians’ chagrin, the men’s 4 x 10 k relay at World Championships on Friday did not unfold as it often does. “At the start, they usually jockey for a bit,” Canadian leadoff skier Stefan Kuhn told FasterSkier. “But one Swede, Daniel Rickardsson, was thinking otherwise today, because he had two bad races. So he wanted to prove a point.” Instead of a tactical first leg, where many of the teams...
The American men were overshadowed in Sunday’s 30 k pursuit by the performances of their Canadian counterparts, but there were still some promising signs from a pair of U.S. starters. Kris Freeman (USA) skied three quarters of the race with the lead pack of men, before losing contact and trailing in for 29th, two minutes behind the winner—while by no means Freeman’s best, an improvement on some subpar races over the past week. He said...
Last year the Canadian men proved that performance a week before a major championship event is meaningless as a predictor. The hope is that that is the case this time around, as well. Both the Canadians and Americans did not impress in their final distance tune-up prior to this year’s World Championships – but the general consensus was that there was little to be concerned about. Devon Kershaw led all North American finishers in 26th...
The three day Beitostolen FIS race series in Norway concluded with a frigid race, featuring delayed start times and shortened distances. But this did not stop American skiers from continuing to turn in strong performances on the track. The races were originally scheduled as 15/30km freestyle events, but with predicted highs in the low single digits, the always cold-wary Norwegians opted to cut the distance to 10/15km. The US women packed the top of the...
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,...