Bad Month for Norway

I'm preparing a longer post on off-season developments in the cross-country skiing world (stayed tuned for the renewed Norwegian-Swedish rivalry!), but I've gotta post this news about the Norwegian team's bad June. First, on June 3, Jens-Arne Svartedal suffered a broken rib and a punctured lung in a boating accident at his bachelor party. Nobody had been drinking, so this was just incompetence on the part of the boat's driver. Having finished in seventh place in the overall World Cup standings last year (eighth in sprinting, twenty-first in distance), Svartedal is pissed, saying, "Half my season is spoiled. I’m out for a minimum of 4-6 weeks. I hope I can get back in shape and make the Olympic team."

Then, last week, Trond Iversen was injured when he accidentally collided with a little boy who'd climbed onto a sprint track at a race in Norway (where they can still compete on snow in June!). The boy wasn't hurt, but Iversen, who finished third in the sprint World Cup last season, is apparently going to have to take about a month off to recover.

Who says cross-country skiing is a low-impact sport?