My thermometer in the back didn’t budge from -28 all day. I’m not expecting a whole lot of trip reports today, and I didn’t ski today. 🙁 Helen’s snowshoe trip on Healy Creek was interesting for the fact that it’s the final leg of the Lake Louise to Banff loppet. That leg obviously still needs more snow.
You may have seen the comment from Lyle Wilson at Nipika on the Trip Reports. They received an additional 10 cm overnight. Groomers are working non-stop, and they aren’t getting this cold weather. The temperature at Radium at 9 pm is -8.
If you want to read something interesting, check out the Sasseville Report. Jack Sasseville is a well-known ski commentator who weighs in on all things to do with World Cup xc skiing, and in this column he talks about the success the Canadians and American skiers are having this winter. Sasseville Report – Milan sprints and other things. There’s a good comment at the end from a Calgary reader.
Lyle Wilson from Nipika giving a ski lesson
For all the bike riders, he has a question: “do you think that the Tour de Ski with 8 races over 11 days is as hard as a professional cycling tour that would be the same number of races? Do you think that it is as hard as the Tour de France or the Giro d’Italia? And finally what makes it harder or easier?”
RE: Tour de France (TdF) vs. Tour de Ski (TdS) – as noted by Larry on the skitrax.com site, is difficult to compare the two events. Both require a supreme athletic effort to complete and astounding ability to win.
Primary differences between the two is teamwork and drafting. We saw some teamwork between the Canadians at the TdS by not challenging each other for sprint points/bonus seconds and running interference for each other. However, unlike the TdF, pretty rare to see a large team (e.g. Russia) send a few ‘domestiques’ off the front in a mass-start event in order to incent the TdS leader (e.g. Cologna – pretty much a one-man SUI show) to chase and tire himself out.
However, perhaps the concept of early attacking introduces an opportunity for teams to shake things up. Within the TdS, it’s quite clear that reaching the finals in the sprint events doesn’t gain a competitor much additional time (vs. attacking for the bonus seconds during the distance events) and risks wearing the racer out (Devon commented on this in one of his interviews – winning the sprints could gain a racer 60 seconds vs. skiing at the front of a distance race and collecting 45-90 bonus seconds + final sprint bonus seconds). If a team was willing to risk a racer dropping out, could send him/her off the front early on in a distance race to entice a chase from other teams while the ‘protected’ leader stays in the ‘draft’ of the group. With smaller teams (e.g. Canada = 3), this is a high-risk proposition.
In addition, pretty tough to move through the ‘peloton’ on a double-trackset from 50th spot on the starting grid and then launch an attack. By the time you reach the front, you’ve burnt most of your matches.