SAPPORO, Japan (Feb. 20) - The FIS Nordic World Ski Championships return this week to the Far East for the first time since the 1972 Olympic Winter Games.
The U.S. Ski Team has sent 19 nordic athletes including 12 cross country
skiers, 10 with Olympic experience, five nordic combined skiers - including four
Olympians, and two Olympic ski jumpers to compete over the 11
days.
Racing action starts right away - classic technique sprints
Thursday evening for the first night-time and indoor races at Nordic World
Championships. U.S. cross country skiers have stepped onto three podiums since
last March for the best results since 1983 and U.S. Head Coach Pete Vordenberg
and sprint Coach Chris Grover are looking for strong results.
The
sold-out Thursday night races are the first of six cross country races opening
the three sport competition schedule. Expected to compete for the U.S. that
evening are Chris Cook (Rhinelander, WI), Torin Koos (Leavenworth, WA), Andy
Newell (Shaftsbury, VT) and Lars Flora (Anchorage, AK) for the men, and Kikkan
Randall (Anchorage, AK), Laura Valaas (Wenatchee, WA) for the women.
The
individual sprints open the racing card Thursday and Friday with the team (i.e.
two skiers) sprints in a tag-team format: one skier racing a loop, coming in and
tagging his or her teammate to ski the next loop.
Newell was third in a
freestyle (skating) sprint in Changchun, China, after the 2006 Olympics, Randall
scrambled her way to third in another skating sprint last month in Rybinsk,
Russia, making her the first American woman to be on a World Cup podium, and
Koos followed a week later with the third third-place result for the Team, this
time in a classic technique sprint in Otepaeae, Estonia.
In March 1983,
Tim Caldwell was second to the great Gunde Svan of Sweden in a 15K race in
Anchorage, AK, with Bill Koch third. The previous year, Koch won a 30K race in
Falun, Sweden, with Dan Simoneau second. This current grouping of Newell, Koos
and Randall is only the second time in history that the U.S. Cross Country Ski
Team has had three skiers reach the World Cup podium.
Friday nordic
combined and ski jumping will have their opening competitions. For a complete
schedule visit sapporo2007.com.
Historic Moments
In 1972,
the Olympics (on the northern island of Hokkaido) doubled as the World
Championships; the men had three individual races and the women had two - and
each had a relay. By 1998, when the Olympics returned to Japan in Nagano (on the
main Japanese island of Honshu, where Tokyo is located), the schedule had
changed - Worlds shifted to odd-numbered years with the 1985 season, so the
Nagano Games did not double as World Championships.
On another historic
note, it was in 1972 that the U.S. women's cross country team made its Olympic
debut. The squad, formed in the late Sixties, competed in the 1970 World
Championships in Vysoke Tatry, then-Czechoslovakia, and skied in its first
Winter Games in Sapporo.
The Sapporo Dome will host the opening ceremony
Thursday night and then the first indoor cross country races - and the first
nighttime cross country races - in Worlds history. Thursday's sprint is already
sold out with an expected capacity crowd of 30,000. One of four venues, it will
be used for nordic combined sprint races, too.
The four competition
venues include not only Sapporo Dome, but Shirahata cross country courses and
the large hill jump at Okurayama and the normal hill jump at
Miyanomouri.
For sport-specific information:
www.fis-ski.com
For further details (e.g., event
information):
www.sapporo2007.com/english/index.html