Today was my first ski of the season in the Arb, a nice session tooling around the only good snow in the Upper Arb. I was happy that my arms didn’t fall off, since this suggests that I might have a chance to get in decent skiing shape for the the City of Lakes Loppet. Having my arms fall off would have definitely impeded my ability to ski in the race.
Just as exciting is that tomorrow will see the culmination of the third Tour de Ski, a multi-stage cross-country ski race that is one of the two high points of the World Cup. I’ve blogged embarrassingly extensively on the Tour in previous years on my previous blogs and this year on the “Nordic Commentary Project” that I share with another ski fan. Suffice to say here that tomorow’s last event is the hardest one in skiing, a race up a steep ski hill, the Alpe Cermis, in northern Italy.
Here’s the overall stage, 9k for women and 10k for men:
Here’s the big climb itself:
The first man and the first woman to the top of the Alpe Cermis are the respective winners of the Tour de Ski. Last year’s race was good, but not as good as this year promises to be: for the first time, both the men’s and the women’s titles are up for grabs. I can’t wait to see what happens. (And I can actually see it this year: NBC’s “Universal Sports” service is webcasting the men’s and women’s Final Climbs shortly after the races end.)
I’m getting up at 7 am EST to watch it live, you can usually get NRK over Sopcast if you are motivated:
http://myp2p.eu/competition.php?competitionid=&part=sports&discipline=other
Bonus: No English Announcers yapping about “fast skis.”
Enjoy! That sounds fun and enticing, but I’ll be otherwise occupied at seven a.m. (Read: breakfast for the munchkins.) I’ll have to avoid learning who won and then watch the Uni Sports webcasts while the girls nap. Please, girls, NAP! Daddy needs to watch skiing.
(P.S. I’m kinda looking forward to hearing Peter Graves say that someone’s climbing well because of good wax.)
That was pretty entertaining!
The commentary wasn’t too terrible. And Fasterskier held off on writing anything about it until after the Universal broadcast. Or maybe those guys are just in Anchorage being too cold to ski race, much less write anything. Honestly though…how hard is it to find a decent skiing commentator? There’s gotta be someone better than Peter Graves.
Great racing! Man, that is good stuff. And I did hear again that Vassili Rotchev’s dad has two medals from the Lake Placid games. Graves’ knowledge of ski racers seems particularly deep with 1980.