That’s an easy one: probably not. I’m referring, of course, to his recent pronouncements about the upcoming season, in which he claims that he will win 7 World Cups, the Tour de Ski overall title, as well as 3 golds at World Championships. Obviously, given Northug’s history I’m not inclined to take this too seriously. […]
Tagged idle speculation, petter northug, World CupLiz Stephen destroyed the women’s field this weekend in the annual Climb to the Castle rollerski race. The margin, just over 5 minutes in a race that took the leaders between 40-45 minutes is certainly impressive. But I think that margin doesn’t provide much useful information. Time trials that are most useful as gauges of […]
Tagged climb to the castle, ida sargent, jessie diggins, liz stephen, pre season, roller skiing, time trialFollowing up from last time, we’ll look a little more closely at the individual trends among some of the top Swedish women in distance and sprint events. First the distance skiers (click through for a larger version): Not surprisingly, Charlotte Kalla is generally the top performer here. But notice that there’s a bit of a […]
Tagged Distance, individual, sweden, women, World CupReading the recent interview with Rikard Grip, the Swedish women’s coach got me thinking about how they’ve fared recently. From a very broad perspective for the whole team, we have the following in distance events: Clearly their depth has greatly improved, as evidenced by the dramatic rise in the number of top 30 results per […]
Tagged sweden, women, World CupKris Freeman and Kikkan Randall have been basically the top US skiers for quite some time now. (I’m sort of brushing Andrew Newell under the rug here, mostly just due to time contraints. I’ll do a follow up on him next week.) Freeman has been more or less unquestionably the best US male distance skier […]
Tagged Distance, domestic, holly brooks, ida sargent, jessie diggins, kikkan randall, kris freeman, lars flora, liz stephen, noah hoffman, sadie bjornsen, Sprint, sylvan ellefson, tad elliott, USASince the interviews on the FIS websites is one of my main sources of post topics during the off season, we’ll continue in that vein with one from a while back with Øystein Pettersen. In it, he talks about how his focus this season is (unsurprisingly) the classic sprint at World Championships. Pettersen has been […]
Tagged men, norway, oeysein pettersen, Sprint, WSCContinuing with my summer reading of XC news, I again perused an one of FIS’s short interviews, this time with Switzerland’s Laurien Van der Graaff. Unlike Masako Ishida, whom we considered earlier this week, Van der Graaff is a sprint specialist, and a freestyle sprint specialist at that. Van der Graaff really did have a […]
Tagged freestyle, laurien van der graaff, Sprint, women, World Cup