2008 New England Junior Olympic team

The week is over – it is always amazing how fast the week goes but how long the days feel for the wax techs and coaching staff! But its all good- the staff worked really well together and the end results of watching our skiers race hard and race well, day after day, made up for all of the hours.

A great race for New England yesterday, but this is a pretty tight event right now. A mere two points separate us from Alaska, and Inter-Mountain is a close third. Happily, our wax techs nailed the kick and the glide, and our athletes were on their game.

We got to Anchorage on Thursday, mostly en masse, with a few of the college guys trickling in after finishing out the week. Five minutes of seeing the mountains here are worth the whole uncomfortable plane ride up here. The team is pretty fired up, we’ve been hitting the trails in the mornings, and getting little tastes of Anchorage in our afternoons (for Kyle Dewey, these tastes have come mostly courtesy of Burger King). The snow is pretty thin. And pretty crusty. And pretty dirty. And that’s where there aren’t lakes of standing water. But thats ski racing, and no one knows how to ski the ghetto conditions like New Englanders.