The teams ended their January break by racing in the St. Michael’s Carnival in Vermont. The Alpine events were held at Smuggler’s Notch, while the Nordic events were at Sleepy Hollow Inn in Huntington.

Alpine Report by Tim Mitchell

The weather and snow conditions were ideal both days and the team is skiing better every race.  The men’s team is still finding its feet in terms of consistency; there is plenty of fast skiing, but we’re just not finding the finish line cleanly right now… Despite a few bobbles here and there, there were some encouraging results.  Chris Kinner led the way in GS with a 35th, followed closely bay Sam Harrison in 40th and Andre Spielvogel in 41st.  Alec Boardman put two solid runs together for a 35th place in slalom, a career best result, followed by Sam Harrison in 38th.  On the women’s side, the alpine squad was led by Catherine Sheils, who finsihed with two strong results, 17th in slalom and 21st in GS.  The women’s performance was supported by a 27th in GS from Meghan Luck and a 31st in slalom by Margie Thorp.  Things are starting to come together for the alpine team, and they continued to roll along with a strong performance by Catherine Sheils on Sunday at a FIS Eastern Cup SL race with the majority of the collegiate field plus other top Eastern athletes.  Sheils was 8th after the first run, and despite a brief “hip check” fall in the second run, held on for 13th place.  Next up, the team takes to the hill at Stowe, VT for the UVM winter carnival.  Don’t forget, you can “watch” the race results in real-time at www.live-timing.com!

Nordic Report by Chris City

Our headline result this weekend was the team’s 5th place finish in the women’s classic sprint relay on Saturday.  It was an unusual format for us: teams of 3 skiers, with each skier racing 1 km and then tagging off in the stadium to the next leg.  Each skier raced three legs.   Esther Kennedy got pinched between other skiers at the start and finished her first lap in 11th, but within sight of a number of other racers.  Audrey Mangan picked up a few of these spots, moving us to 8th.  In their second laps, Cara and Esther continued to close the gap to the skiers in front of them while holding off the teams Audrey had passed.  On her second lap, Audrey moved the team up to 6th.  Esther stumbled going out of the stadium for the final lap, but still managed to close on Dartmouth’s B relay skier in 5th.  Audrey caught the Dartmouth skier as she came into the stadium to tag off to Cara and then Cara opened up the gap by a few more seconds.  It was really exciting to watch our team race through the pack!  It was a team effort: Audrey passed the teams in front of her and Esther and Cara helped make that possible by skiing consistently fast splits even as other teams started to fade on their second and third laps.   We finished ahead of all but 4 A teams (Dart, Midd, UVM and UNH).

Our women’s B relay team skied very well, too, finishing ahead of two A teams (St. Mike’s and UMPI) and a number of B teams. Anchoring our B team, Alena Tofte skied splits that were as fast as those on our A team, and Anika Petach’s were not far behind.  Our guys skied fast early splits but faded as the race went on.  They finished ahead of Bowdoin and were battling with St. Mike’s through the last few laps, but just couldn’t hang onto them near the end of the race.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Race Reports . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.