Saturday, February 26, 2011

Oslo 2011

The crowds are out, the tents are up, the fires are burning, and the Norwegian flags are flying high. Oslo 2011 is underway!



Stadium crowds on sprint day- this photo doesn’t even come close to showing just how many pumped Norwegians there were out to watch the races.

Yesterday was day one of the championships, with the sprint race kicking things off. I’ve been looking forward to this day for a while, after spending most of the season racing Nor-Ams in Canada I was excited to test my sprinting legs against the rest of the world. I ended up being on of the first starters of the day with bib 9, so it was a little suspenseful as I waited to see if I would remain in the top 30 as the big guns came across the line one by one.
We managed to qualify all three of the women in the top 30, Chandra 23, Me 24, and Dasha 27.
The heats were scrappy, it seemed like everyone was getting skis stepped on, or crashing, or stepping on others. Dasha came away with a top 20, while Chandra and I ended up 28, and 29th respectively.

In other news our new teammate Brooke and I have been crafting like crazy, and fashioned some pompoms for our training tuques!


Chandra and I modeling our new look- new sauce headwear, and little white pompoms with a tiny bit of sparkle!

The women’s pursuit went off today with Brooke as our lone Canadian skier, she was faced with the heaviest pea soup fog I have ever seen. Congratulations to Brooke for competing in her first world Championship race, it looked brutal out there as the ladies pushed the pace from the gun.


This is a photo taken looking at the big screen in the stadium, I wasn’t more than 50 metres away, it was part skiing part swimming out there today.

The boys are off tomorrow hopefully in the sun for their 30km pursuit, and then we are up again (all 4 ladies this time) in the 10km Classic on Monday.

Thanks for stopping by,
Hopefully more photos will be up soon, Brad is out on course snapping photos so quickly that it takes him a while to sift through them at the end of the day.
Stay tuned!