Winter Camp - Race Reports

The timing of the UW winter camp this year corresponded with OCUP#1 held at Highlands Nordic on the weekend of December 18/19th. As a result, the format for the weekend was a little bit different than a normal camp, with a bunch of racing involved.

So UWNN will start with a race report from the skate sprint and the medium distance skate race and will follow up with more comments on the weekend. While this report is dated, things like Christmas break got in the way. So read it anyway, even if you already know the results and what happened, we will attempt to provide something humorous or insightful (the latter is probably not going to happen).

On to the race report...

The Saturday morning got going with a skate sprint qualifier 1.3 km for both the men and the women. The sprint qualifier was a new experience for a number of the athletes and so it was treated as a learning experience for them. 4 men (Tim R, Glenn, Nolan and Ryan), two women (Alison, Katie) and one head coach took to the start line.
Some decent results were turned in from the group with Nolan placing just ahead of Tim, in 7th and 8th place respectively in the Senior Male field. In the same field Colin placed 16th, just edging out archrival and U of T head coach Hans Fischer by 0.7s. Glenn placed 10th in the Junior Male field, while Ryan followed up in 14th place.
On the womens side, Alison was 7th and Katie 9th in the Junior Female field. Full results can be found on Zone4 (zone4.ca)

As a result of less than full fields in the junior and senior male and female fields, there was some deviation from the standard sprint heat set up. With 17 or 18 racers in each of these 4 fields, it meant that the set-up was 4 heats of 4 or 5 racers in each of the categories. Top 2 from each heat advanced to the semi-final. From the semi-finals, top 2 went to the A Final and 3rd and 4th from each semi-final went to the B final.

With this as the set-up, the heats got off to a start. In one of the senior male heats, Tim, Colin and Hans were all matched up, which resulted in a very interesting heat for Waterloo supporters. Tim skied to a fairly convincing victory to move onto the semi-final, while Hans and Colin battled it out for supremacy. Overall the last climb and entering into the final 150 m home stretch, Colin manage to open a small gap over Hans and managed to hold it as the both struggled towards the line. Both obviously realizing that sprinting is hard, especially when you get less hours of training than you would like as a result of things like full time jobs and being a ski coach. Neither was available for comment after the race to determine if they wished that they had just stayed on the sidelines and coached or whether the sprint was worth it.

Nolan also managed to ski well and move onto the semi-final, while all of the other Waterloo skiers were unable to advance past the quarterfinal heats.

Now some our competitors over at the University of Guelph had a little bit more of an interesting sprint experience. The four categories were the last events of the day, which meant that the schedule was off slightly by the time the races got to this point. So, after having heard that the heats were running behind, they went with the estimated time they had heard for the delay and did not bother to check back in for the actual timing. So when one of the senior male heats rolled around which had all 4 skiers being from Guelph, 3 were nowhere to be found. The organizers delayed this heat and just before they were going to start the heat with 1 skier, the other 3 decided to show up and proceeded to try and get to the start line. Organizers, for some unknown reason, require that the racers have bibs so that entailed some more last minute scrambling. The heat managed to get going eventually, with most of the racers on their warm-up/rock skis. Hopefully, this punctuality things does not carry over to the travel arrangements on the bus this year...

And on to the semi-finals. From the UW side of things, Nolan and Tim were both unable to get in the top two and therefore were on to the B Final.
In the B Final, it was a tight race between 2 UW skiers and two Guelph skiers. Down the hill into the sprint hill at Highlands, Tim, Nolan and one of the Guelph skiers were battling for second place. Coming up the hill into the finishing stretch, only Nolan emerged, apparently having won some sort of roller derby over the sprint hill. Tim then emerged with a pole grip sans shaft and an extra pole in one hand and finally the Guelph skier emerged as well after a delay.

What had transpired was a typical sprint racing crash, which had been few and far between on the day, with a pole being stepped on and the shaft coming out of the pole grip, resulting in those two skiers going done and Nolan emerging looking like someone you don't want to mess with...