Another Langrenn article suggested some of the best places to rollerski in Norway, and pointed out roller tracks in Sweden and Ramsau, Austria.

Also, FYI: “Too often one can find that motorists in countries such as Italy and Turkey have a relatively aggressive driving style,” according to Langrenn. “But as soon as a cyclist or roller skater pops up, they show a far more relaxed attitude and far greater respect than what may be the case here in Norway.”

– What do you get when three Russian biathletes go on vacation to Thailand? Pictures of lobster dinners and shirtless Dmitry Malyshko, Anton Shipulin and Ilya Trifanova showing off their temporary tattoos. World Cup medalist Malyshko wrote about their leisurely recovery break in a press release published on SkiSport.ru, complete with riding scooters on the beach, renting jet skis, riding elephants and feeding monkeys. The three are already planning their vacation next season: “Where to go next year? Have not decided yet. Certainly not in Thailand. We need to look elsewhere. … The main thing – the company. Although I have a dream – America. I want to see it with my own eyes, not fotochki or pictures on the Internet. Europe – a calm and measured. And what is America – I do not know.”

– Team Norgeshus is growing in Norway. The club recently added three athletes to its roster with the help of team manager Emil Søbak Gundersen. Team Norgeshus’s A-team includes Martin Andersen, Petter Soleng Skinstad, Vetle Thyli, Håkon Ramstad, Torgeir Skare Thygesen, Ånund Lid Byggland and Espen Udjus Frorud. Applications for its elite marathon team are still being accepted.

To read the [translated] article, click here.

— Justyna Kowalczyk (POL) has been training in on the glacier in Ramsau, Austria for the past week and says on her website that she has felt no ill effects from the knee surgery weh underwent in March. She has been training three hours every morning on the glacier and cross training in the afternoons, according to her coach Alexander Wierietielny.

— Among nearly 40,000 other participants in the Holmenkollstafetten on Saturday in Oslo, Norway were local skiing celebrities Marit Bjørgen, Therese Johaug and Odd-Bjørn Hjelmeset. The running event claims to be the biggest relay in the world: it starts at Bislet stadium in the middle of Oslo, climbs uphill through the city to the Holmenkollen ski jump, and finishes back in the stadium for a total distance of 18.4 k. The relay has 15 legs of varying lengths; the shortest being 400 m and the longest 2800 m. The 2,727 teams that participated this year was a record for event organizers.

In a blog post, she wrote that she has been proud to have been a part of the midwestern-based CXC Elite Team for the last few years. Over the last two years, Diggins explained that she took “big steps up” in skiing under the guidance of former CXC head coach Jason Cork and assistant coach Gus Kaeding.

Cork recently accepted a position as men’s coach with the national team, and Kaeding is head coach of the newly formed SMS Elite Team.

“For me, a coach-athlete dynamic has always been a really important thing,” Diggins wrote. “So it was a little overwhelming this spring when both the CXC coaches were offered (and accepted) new coaching positions with other teams. … I’m not going to lie; the changes really shook up the athletes on the CXC team. This was the second time in 3 years that the staff has changed around and although last time it all turned out well, nobody was super pumped about another shake-up.

“Within a week, it looked like there wouldn’t be many athletes on the team. There are a couple of reasons I chose not to remain on CXC, but the main one is that I wanted to stick with coaches that already knew me, my style of skiing, what I need to be working on and how I respond to training. I want everyone to know, however, that the time I spent with CXC was awesome. In no small way was CXC crucial to my development as a skier…and in some ways as a person, since I spent a lot of my time growing up on the road with the ski team.”

She decided to join Stratton because of its flexibility and her familiarity with Kaeding. Diggins wrote that she wanted to be fully committed, but not have to move anywhere full time. She planned to attend training camps with the team and work out in Vermont “quite a lot this summer, as well as going to all the USST camps,” she wrote.

“I still get to be living in Minnesota in between all these camps so my accent is going nowhere fast,” Diggins added. “Don’t worry!”

The Russian-born Austrian skier won two Olympic medals, a silver in the 30 k in 2002 and bronze in the 50 k in 2006. According to the article, Botvinov now has the opportunity to appeal.

Mayer, of course, was found guilty of doping offenses last August and received 15 months in prison.

— The Swedish national team has started their spring training with an unofficial camp in Riksgränsen, where there is still one meter of snow. The training camp is low key — no high intensity, and attendance is optional. The first official camp starts on May 20th in Mallorca.

“The snow conditions are very good. The grooming machine has prepared 20 km of tracks that go through a breath taking mountain terrain,” said Swedish coach Rikard Grip.

— Martin Johnsrud Sundby (NOR) is featured in a new book LØFT written by Sundby’s mother, psychologist Gro Johnsrud Langslet. The book discusses “solution-based approaches” to problem-solving. According to the publisher’s website, the story of Martin Johnsrud Sundby’s fight back to athletic excellence after experiencing heart problems in the fall of 2011 is highlighted throughout the book.

Goodbody posted the follwoing screnshot form The Caucus, a New York Time political blog.

You can find the rest of Goodbody’s post here—An American political analogy the Norwegians can understand.

A worthwhile and entertaining read.

In an email, Crawford wrote that she planned to sign her contract with Cross Country Canada’s World Cup team on Friday and was getting organized after a 10-day trip in Italy.

“I’m on the team and going to do things quite normal-style,” she wrote. “And for sure for sure for sure doing the NST plan and camps like Bend for starters.”

Next week, members from the men’s and women’s World Cup teams will head to Bend, Ore., for a training camp from March 16-28.

Bjørgen said that while she’s had her heart tested following viral diseases, the results are still not 100 percent accurate. For that reason, she didn’t think it was necessary to check healthy athletes as a precautionary measure.

“As long as you have a dialogue with your doctor if it has been heart disease in the family, so I see no point in it,” she said in  translated interview. “Is there latent in the family, it is clear that one should use thorough investigation.”

– Now that the dust has settled and competition ended weeks ago in Kamchatka, Russia, Norwegian biathlete Synnøve Solemdal can crack jokes about her costly misses in Vitaly Fatyanov Prize pursuit. The 25-year-old started the race with a 25-second lead, but 10 missed shots put her in fourth at the finish. Instead of winning a Mercedes for placing first, she took home an iPhone.

“I should have probably concentrated more on race instead of thinking about what to do with the car,” Solemdal told NRK.

“I wanted an iPhone,” she added with a laugh.

“We have to start working again and finish with laziness,” said Kowalczyk’s coach, Alexander Wirietielny. ”The doctors suggested Justyna to spend some more days in Warsaw but she replied she would not get ready for the World Championships at a clinic. Therefore we are leaving fro Austria as we planned.”

“I’m curious how it will look like, how my body will keep up after six weeks without any effort,” Kowalczyk said. “That’s a big question mark, but despite that I am calm. Although I know the implementation of the heavy training regime certainly won’t be easy.”

– Lukas Bauer is on the mend and eager about next season, but he’s not going to jump into training too soon. The Czech Republic’s leading skier told FIS News he’s exercising again after fracturing his heel toward the end of the season. After seven weeks of being in a cast, he had the plaster removed a week and a half ago and easing into walking.

“You would not believe how much I am looking forward to going for a proper walk and a run!” Bauer said in the FIS interview. “The shuffling was killing me.”

While he’s focused on next year’s World Championships, Bauer was cautious about when he’d start training again. He hoped to be back by mid May.

– After several years of budget deficits, the financial outlook looks brighter for the Norwegian Ski Federation, which turned a profit of about $500,000 krone (about $87,000 dollars) in 2011. While relatively small for the cross-country skiing powerhouse, the surplus reflected the Federation’s first profitable year since 2006. It made 12.8 percent more than in 2010 and was up 48 percent from 2008, according to Langrenn.

– While participants in the 53 k Patrouille des Glaciers, a ski mountaineering race based in the Swiss Alps, never got a chance to tackle the second stage of the randonée competition because of unstable conditions, three men emerged as winners last weekend.

Switzerland’s Toni Livers, Martin Jäger and Lukas Huser won the event, which included both military and civilian teams. Race organizers with the Swiss Armed Forces ruled that warm overnight temperatures made the snow unstable in Arolla, Switzerland, and canceled the second stage after 417 teams started in Zermatt.

— We just made it through a season of no major international championship, but starting with World Champs in Val di Fiemme, Italy next winter, there are three years in a row of high-profile ski events to look forward to. The Fiemme 2013 organizers met with FIS, event sponsors, and Eurovision broadcasters last week to plan TV production for the championships, among other things.

According to Fiemme 2013′s press release, “30 Cross-Country Skiing competitions (between February 20th and March 3rd, 2013) will be covered by 35 cameras (fixed, dolly, mobile, snowmobiles etc.), while the ski jumping stadium will be ‘filmed’ by 16 cameras and 21 microphones will be installed to catch any little sound or noise from athletes’ breath to the landing and spectators’ cheering.” Organizers and primary Italian broadcaster RAI Sports hope to reach 500 million viewers worldwide, the same number that tuned into the event when it was last held in Val di Fiemme in 2003.

Environmental sustainability was also on the agenda at this meeting — the 2003 championships was reportedly the first sporting event in the world to earn UNI EN ISO 14001 certification (an Italian third-party standard of good environmental management), and organizers plan to do the same in 2013.

— Tour de Ski evaluation meetings also recently took place. Representatives from the various organizing committees and FIS marketing met in Munich, Germany to review the success of the sixth edition of the event in 2012 in terms of promotion and logistics, and to start suggesting improvements for next winter.

“The sixth edition of the FIS Tour de Ski was a clear highlight of the season in a gap year without Olympics or World Championships. It was the longest and toughest Tour in history with all the best athletes taking part. We can be proud of the TV ratings, the highest ever, the growing online interest and a great number of spectators on site, but we also realize that we still have possibilities to develop further,” FIS Cross-Country Race Director Jürg Capol said.

No word yet on what changes were proposed, but there will definitely be at least one new aspect to the 2013 edition: the Tour de Ski will stop in Switzerland for the first time — Münstertal, to be exact, home of 2012 TdS winner Dario Cologna.

Norway swept the podium with Ola Vigen Hattestad finishing second and Anders Gløersen placing third. The favorite who was expected to be clocked with police radar guns for his speed, Petter Northug ended up fourth in the final. His brother Tomas was fifth and Sweden’s Teodor Peterson placed sixth.

In the women’s race, Van der Graaf bested Slovenia’s Katja Višnar, who was second, Norway’s Heidi Weng in third. Norwegian Kjersti Boe finished fourth and Bettina Gruber of Switzerland took fifth.

Men’s Top 6

1. Erik Brandsdal (NOR)

2. Ola Vigen Hattestad (NOR)

3. Anders Gløersen (NOR)

4. Petter Northug (NOR)

5. Tomas Northug (NOR)

6. Teodor Peterson (SWE)

Men’s results

Women’s Top 6

1. Laurien Van der Graaf (SUI)

2. Katja Višnar (SLO)

3. Heidi Weng (NOR)

4. Kjersti Boe (NOR)

5. Bettina Gruber (SUI)

6. Mari Eide (NOR)

Women’s results