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Canadian Ski Team: 2011-2012 Preview

A quick look at our lovely neighbors to the north! I’m going to focus on the folks on the World Cup squad, starting with the men: These are the WC level distance results (excluding Len Valjas). I confess I’m a little worried about Ivan Babikov, who had a rough season last year. His trend over […]

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USST 2011-2012 Preview

Another season is just around the corner! While the USST saw some changes over the off season, the folks we are most likely to see top results from are still the Big Three: Kikkan Randall, Andy Newell and Kris Freeman. My expectations and questions for Freeman are summed up in this graph: This shows his […]

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Short Post On Slovenia And Czech Republic

I had hoped to have actual racing to write about by this week, but as we all know the snow situation in Europe hasn’t been cooperating. Hopefully we’ll finally get some racing done this weekend. In the meantime, everyone keeps writing their little nation previews. FasterSkier’s piece on Slovenia mentioned an up and coming junior […]

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Signs Of Kazahk Greatness To Come?

I’m continuing to pick and choose which nations in Fasterskier’s countdown to write about. The US and Canada I’ll cover later in more detail, and I’m written about Japan a fair bit in the past. A couple of comments in their write up about Kazahkstan stuck out to me. The first was the comment about […]

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Team Ukraine

The FasterSkier countdown continues (and is joined by NordicXplained). Per usual, I like reading about the nations I don’t always follow as closely, like the Ukranians. The distance results for the four skiers mentioned in the FasterSkier article are below: Roman Leybyuk had a string of strong results between 2002 and 2006, but has been […]

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The Belarussians Are Mysterious

FasterSkier’s piece on Belarus over the weekend naturally got me thinking about their performances. As they note in that article, they’ve had some wild times, including the famous “lucky” silver medal by Leanid Karneyenka in 2007 thanks to an early start position and a freak snowstorm, and their mishap in the team sprint relay in […]

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Lithuania And Co.

In the same vein as my previous post following up on Spain’s WC prospects, the FasterSkier series next looked at Lithuania. I’m sometimes curious why some of the former Soviet republics aren’t better represented in cross country skiing. I imagine many of them have struggled economically since the breakup of the USSR and national sports […]

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