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{ Category Archives } Career Retrospective

Career Retrospective: Silvana Bucher

Another retiring skier that I’m only passingly familiar with, Switzerland’s Silvana Bucher. Like Vina the other day, she hasn’t raced a ton at the WC level in distance events: Or sprints:

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Career Retrospective: Emilie Vina

A few other athletes that I was less familiar with are also retiring, according to FIS, beginning with France’s Emilie Vina. Naturally, I head over to Wikipedia and discover that apparently she’s a non-commissioned officer? Huh. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she were a biathlete, I suppose, but that’s not a combination you see […]

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Career Retrospective: Ivan Batory

Woo hoo! Another classic specialist! Ivan Batory has been around the block a few times. The first WC race I have for him is all the way back in the 1994 season. Let’s see, I think I was a freshmen in high school that year. Among Batory’s top 30 results, 63 were classic, 31 freestyle […]

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Career Retrospective: Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset

A skier after my own heart, he was! Skating? Bah! That’s for losers! Hjelmeset was the quintessential classic specialist: If you’re basically only going to do classic races, you’d better be pretty good at them, and Hjelmeset certainly was. His World Cup career included 119 classic starts, only 26 freestyle starts and another 9 pursuits […]

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Jenny Olsson

    Unfortunately, we have a distinct theme for this week’s posts. Jenny Olsson also passed away recently, apparently from breast cancer. She raced, quite successfully, for Sweden for much of the mid-00’s: These are just her WC level distance results (she didn’t sprint much). As you can see, 2002-2003 was her best effort, but […]

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Mika Myllylä

Most everyone has probably heard by now that former Finnish skier and convicted doper Mika Myllylä was found dead in his home earlier this week. There had been a very large court case taking place in Finland involving numerous people’s involvement in past Finnish doping scandals and Myllylä had testified, admitting to drug use during […]

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Career Retrospective: Jens Arne Svartedal

Another accomplished specialist, Jens Arne Svartedal, is retiring as well. While no slouch in distance events, he had more success in sprinting. But his real specialty was classic skiing. My records show 25 WC level podium finishes for him, 7 in distance events and 18 in sprints. That includes his WSC Gold medal in the […]

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