Watching the World Championships this year along with the Norwegians provided me with a new perspective on the sport of skiing—and in saying ‘skiing’ I’m including all the different disciplines: downhill, cross-country, jumping, and Nordic combined. All in all, the Norwegian media did a great job showing all the winter sports without stressing any single event or discipline to the extent of overshadowing another. Put together, the championships felt like it had a greater competitive spirit, which in my opinion carried some similarity to the Olympic games.

The sporting highlight for me was watching the US take six medals at the championships—truly a historic achievement. This is a huge step forward for the US Ski Team, and is truly well deserved. Let’s keep the momentum going! The question is… where’s the biathlon success?? And why weren’t they part of the championships in Liberec? Truly an interesting question that is open for debate. It is important to remember that biathlon does have a well-established foundation apart from the other ski sports, and has functioned this way for many years, but remains a ski sport nonetheless. Anyway, hopefully we will see some accomplishments from US biathlon soon, especially considering the talented group of athletes in the US program. At least I’m trying to do my part

Petter Northug was undoubtedly the star of the World Championships for the Norwegians. His three individual gold medals provided the impression that he could be the next Bjørn Dæhli. A statistic that I found at the beginning of this season in one of the national newspapers was that Petter trained 920 hours this past year. Incredible. However, even though the Norwegians like him, much of his competition sees him as a bit arrogant, but no matter how one looks at it, Petter’s accomplishments are very impressive.

This past weekend I also watched Hovedlandsrennet (literally–’the mainland’s race’) here in Lillehammer, which is the national championships for 15 and 16 year-olds. The total number of participants was around 300 per class for both boys and girls. In watching these competitions, it was amazing to see such a high level of competition and really illustrated the strength of the “pipeline” which feeds into the higher levels of Norwegian skiing. Here are a couple pictures from the race.

A view of Birkebeiner ski stadium–cross-country side

Parent’s wax camp…

16 year-olds classic sprint final

The organizing committee also had a “ski-cross” competition at Hovedlandsrennet. The event was simply a 1.5 km sprint course full of obstacles that require finesse and agility on skis… a good idea, in my opinion, that teaches control and stability on skis, and is fun besides!

Organ-peddling: classic track with alternately changing depths for each ski.

Jungle: several down-hill slalom poles that need to be passed through. Several

competitors approached too fast and ended up getting tangled up… extremely entertaining to watch!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under Norway, Racing. 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.