It was an exciting day today at the Kuusamo drag race! This course is pretty sick. The first half consists of the straight away out of the start gate and a screaming down hill with some gnarly corners. The second half is all up hill into the stadium with a massive steep hill known as the Kuusamo drag. Its known as a drag race because the hill is such a force to be reckoned with that the race is basically won or lost depending on how fast you can stride the hill. So if you were looking to watch a thrilling sprint race with crashes, power striding, and close finishes today was your day.

Overall I think it was a good race for me. I ended up 4th but I know I had the strength to make it onto the podium. That’s what makes days like today so tough… when you know you were feeling better than your place on the results list. But either way it was a fun day with some seriously fast striding going down.

Because the course was so technical there were a lot of big names spread throughout the top thirty. Bjorn Lind was looking wicked fast all day but went down pretty hard in our semi-final heat. It was easy cold hard wax conditions, but the downhill was so speedy that people were going down on the corners.

In the final I was in 3rd heading into the down hill and, since there was a skier right next to me on the inside, I tried to hold the track the entire time around the fast corner, and just got shot out of the tracks! I had to put a hand down and slide a little bit to keep myself from flying off the course. It was fun… kind of like alpine racing. On the final drag I was sitting in 4th behind the Finish skier and he started to really bog down on the uphill so I changed tracks and got behind a bonking Russian, so I then had to change tracks again to try to chase down Matts Larsson in third. It wasn’t the fastest way to get up the hill to say the least, but that’s racing. So even though I’m a little bummed out to be getting the ‘wooden’ medal today things are looking up for the next few races.

Peter, Larry, and Oleg did a great job with our skis today. We had bomber kick and they were as fast as anyone else in the field. There is a 15k classic scheduled for tomorrow and Cook and I are going to get in there with Bird and Larse. It’s a very challenging course with a lot of climbing so it should be rad. I haven’t done a 15 race in a while… probably over a year. So we’ll see how it goes.

The US Nordic combined team has been keeping us fired up over the past two days. It’s been a double podium weekend for USSA so far with Johnny placing second yesterday and Billy D third today. Those guys have been training their asses off over the past year and it’s showing in their skiing because they’re hauling. Any time we see US Skiers on the podium whether it’s Alpine, Nordic combined, or jumping it gets everyone motivated and excited. We’re all one team…. All in.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 3:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.