Special Edition tonight. Kids are matched with elite juniors and adults.
The Minnesota...
Our celebration of winter. The Festival events are all day Saturday (including the Fishscale...
Hello MYSL skiers! I hope you’re getting excited for winter and the ski season, because I sure am! I’m writing to you from Rovaniemi, Finland. It’s right on the Arctic Circle, and it’s known as Santa’s official village and airport! We are staying at a hotel called “Santa-sport”, and there is a 9 kilometer ribbon of snow in the woods to ski on. It’s man-made snow that they store in a big pile all through the summer, and a few weeks ago they spread out the snow on the trails so skiers could be out skiing in early November! Today it was snowing so we might have more “real snow” on the ski trail soon.
This is your last blog post from me…because the World Cup season is now finished! It was a big year and I got to race over 40 times in 9 different countries! These are all the countries I trained and raced in, although I went to some of them more than once: Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Canada, USA. I had some great races and got 5 World Cup podiums, but I also had some races that weren’t so great and I learned a lot of lessons from them. Having bad races and then learning from them is what made me faster for the next ones! Overall, I’m very happy with how the year went, and I had a lot of fun traveling and racing with my teammates. We work hard to be good teammates to each other and it makes the long season a lot more fun when you are friends with the people you live with!
This past week we’ve had three very exciting races in Sweden! We first flew to Stockholm for a city sprint, like the one I told you about in Drammen, Norway. They closed off streets and laid down snow, with banners and fences all along the side of the course. But what made the Stockholm sprint extra special was that it went around the Royal Palace! We got to race right in front of the palace, then they spread snow up and over the steps to form a hill so we went up one side, back down and around the palace, and then up the other side in a “U” shape. There were royal guards in uniform guarding the course, and the King himself handed out medals to the winners. That’s a pretty cool race, and I wish we had a race like this back home. Can you imagine if we raced around the White House and the President of the United States came to watch and hand out the medals at the end? That’s what it was like for the Swedish skiers racing in their home country.
The past two weeks, I have been training, traveling and racing in Norway. The first week I was just training, because we had a weekend off from World Cup racing. I drove with my teammates to Sjusjøen, which is where part of the Norwegian Birkiebeiner trails are. You might have heard of the American Birkie (and I bet your parents probably have!) but the Norwegian Birkie race is where it all started. There are hundreds of kilometers of groomed ski trails in Sjusjøen, and I only skied a fraction of them in the week that I stayed there.
