Beitostolen

Kris Freeman

Sat, Nov  24, 2007 - By Zach Caldwell

November 23: It’s been a busy day here in Beitostolen, getting ready for tomorrow’s World Cup distance opener. We had a long day in the wax room and two sessions on snow testing structures, wax, and race skis for the athletes. Kris had a light intensity session today and looked good. Not great, but good.

The original plan was to have the intensity on Wednesday, but Kris woke up Wednesday morning after ten hours of sleep and felt very tired. He says that in the past he would have likely gone out and done the workout, and then woken up sick on Thursday. Instead he went back to bed, and woke up after another couple hours sleep feeling better. He skied Thursday and felt so-so. Today was the best he’s felt in a while, and this evening he’s feeling downright bouncy. Tomorrow should be a solid day, but I think his best races will come in a couple of weeks.

This evening was a bit of a cluster. Pete found out at the coaches meeting that Lars Flora (who has a start right based on being the overall supertour winner from last season) was one of ten atheletes who made the trip but are ineligible to start the race because of insufficiently good FIS points. In the past the regional continental cup winners were not required to meet the same standard as the international group skiers. This year they guys need to have a single sub-60-point race in the previous twelve months. The thing is, Lars HAS a sub-60-point race, but it was on the second page of his point profile on the FIS website, so the race secretary didn’t find it. Oops. They decided not to do a re-draw and instead are inserting Lars into the correct place in the running order with an out-of-order bib.

Well, that’s about it for now. Tomorrow will be the more interesting report.