With a performance that the American ski community will talk about for a long time to come, Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins became World Champions on Sunday in Val di Fiemme, Italy, with a 7.8-second win in the team sprint over Sweden’s Charlotte Kalla and Ida Ingemarsdotter. This is the first World Championship gold for the United States in cross-country skiing.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words — we took almost a thousand pictures of the women's team sprint on Sunday at the 2013 Nordic World Ski Championships. Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall made history for the United States in winning the country's first-ever world championships gold medal.
In a season of lackluster results thus far, Simi Hamilton's performance in the team sprint in Sochi, Russia, on Sunday is especially notable. Andy Newell's fall in the last lap left the Americans disappointed, yes, but Hamilton was "stoked" to ski the second-fastest third round of the entire field.
In a continued demonstration of the depth on the American women's squad, Ida Sargent and Sadie Bjornsen improved upon their team sprint from Liberec with a fifth place showing in Sochi, Russia, on Friday. They were three seconds off the podium and will leave the Olympic venue on a high note.
Has a team sprint ever been won by a difference of 18 seconds? If so, Dmitriy Japarov and Maxim Vylegzhanin erased all memory of it on Sunday in taking the Sochi team sprint win by exactly that much. The field was stunned — Sweden took second and Germany was third.
Simi Hamilton and Andy Newell began their semifinal in good position with the leaders in the Liberec team sprint, but got unlucky when a Finn fell in front of Hamilton before the last exchange. The duo finished fifth in the heat for 13th overall and did not advance to the finals.
QUEBEC CITY – Two tiny specks charging toward the finish, Graham Nishikawa and Jesse Cockney appeared to merge into a single lane, and then suddenly jolted in opposite directions. Whatever made them move must have been significant, and it could have explained why Nishikawa lost his lead and ultimately the classic team sprint at the Canadian Ski National Championships on Saturday. Turns out it was just water in the tracks on a balmy afternoon at...
QUEBEC CITY – As Alana Thomas stood in the finish pen on the Plains of Abraham and looked back beyond the line, she smiled as Perianne Jones cruised down the final stretch. The Canadian National Team member was going to win by a mile – or maybe a kilometer, figuratively speaking in Canadian terms. While Jones didn’t quite have a full lap on the 11 other teams in the open classic relay at the Canadian...
This weekend’s World Cup Nordic Combined competition featured three days of racing in Seefeld, Austria—the resurrection of the Team Sprint event on Friday, and a HS 109/Gundersen 10 k each on Saturday and Sunday. France came away with the most dominant overall performance of the weekend—or rather, Jason Lamy Chappuis did. He teamed up with Sebatien Lacroix to win the team sprint, and then nabbed the top result in both individual competitions. The U.S. put...
Aiming to add more action and increase interest for the sport, the recent FIS Nordic Combined meeting in Zürich (SUI) discussed new race formats.
Petter Northug Jr. won the 50K skate mass start at the Norwegian National Championships in Tromsø Saturday, despite having to make a pit stop in the woods.
Norwegians Petter Northug and Marit Bjoergen have now both sat out a race at World Championships – not Charlotte Kalla though, and the Swedish star has no plans to take a day off. In another day at the office, Kalla teamed with Ida Ingemarsdotter to win the women’s World Championship classic team sprint in Oslo, Norway, skiing away from Finland and Norway in the last lap. The team sprint features pairs of athletes, alternating laps,...
If you took a hard look at the start list for Tuesday’s 15 k classic at the 2011 World Championships, you might have noticed a few names conspicuously absent from the start list. Foremost among them was Norway’s Petter Northug—the winner of Sunday’s 30 k pursuit in Oslo, and silver medalist in last week’s individual sprint. Norway’s coaches sat Northug to keep him fresh for Wednesday’s classic team sprint, in which he and Ola Vigen...
While most had expected Hanna Falk to be the number-one pick along with Ida Ingemarsdotter for the Swedish sprint relay team, Charlotte Kalla showed up at the press conference Tuesday morning.
Emil Joensson made a beeline for the border after his sprint race last Thursday. He needed to get away to refocus for the team sprint, and make the days go by faster.
The third place by Canadians Chandra Crawford and Dasha Gaiazova in Sunday’s team sprint in Dusseldorf was a breakthrough for both women. For Crawford, it was her first World Cup podium finish in three seasons, and her first-ever in the team sprint, while for Gaiazova, it was her first-ever World Cup podium, period. FasterSkier was able to catch up with Crawford after the race to hear about the hectic racing in Dusseldorf, how she and...
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...
SWEDEN – Both Charlotte Kalla (SWE) and Marcus Hellner (SWE) will sit out the team sprint events at the 2011 World Championships in Holmenkollen at the end of February. They join Norwegian top racers Marit Bjoergen and Petter Northug, who have already announced that they are skipping the team sprints.
Whistler, British Columbia – He had to wait, but Petter Northug finally got to show off his dominating sprint finish against his perennial whipping boy Axel Teichmann. Northug and teammate Oystein Pettersen won the first gold by the Norwegian men’s cross-country ski team since 2002 in the team sprint competition at Whistler Olympic Park. The high-pressure system that has brought unusually sunny weather to Whistler held out for one more day. Firm tracks in the...
It was a an thrilling day in the team sprint with crashes, broken poles and most of all fast ski racing. Here are a few photos from the semis with more to come.