Last weekend the team was in action at the UVM Carnival in Stowe, Vermont, where both alpine and nordic women posted historic finishes!

The Men’s Alpine squad continued to ski extremely fast, but suffer untimely mistakes that thwarted some otherwise good skiing.  Chris Kinner had the most consistent weekend, finishing 36th in GS and 31st in slalom.  Kevin McNamara chipped in a 38th in GS, with Andrew Spielvogel notching the men’s best finish of the weekend with 29th in slalom.  Sam Harrison showed his continually improving form with 33rd in slalom and Brad Alvarez followed that up with a 38th in slalom.

Catherine on the Eastern Cup podium

A number of our skiers also competed in a FIS Eastern Cup slalom race on Sunday, with almost the entire collegiate field in attendance, as well as a few Olympians you’ll see racing for the US in Vancouver in a few weeks.  So needless to say, the fields were very strong.  Kevin McNamara overcame a start spot of 66 and deteriorating course conditions to rally to an impressive 22nd place finish, some of the best skiing we’ve seen from him to date.  The women had a tremendously successful day as well, with Tenley Malmquist making a big move up to finish 17th, and Catherine Sheils linking two nearly flawless runs for 3rd place and a podium finish!  In the process, these three Harvard skiers beat a good chunk of the regular collegiate field, so this should prove a valuable confidence booster heading into the upcoming Dartmouth Carnival.  The teams are headed in the right direction, and we couldn’t be more excited!!!

Nordic Report by Coach City

Last weekend saw perfect race-time temperatures in the 20s and fresh powder that fell in the days leading up to the carnival.  The highlight of our weekend was the women’s 5km Classic on Saturday when we put three skiers into the top 25 (Alena Tofte – 18, Audrey Mangan – 20, Esther Kennedy – 24). I’m certain we’ve never placed 3 women in the top 25 before, but would love to hear from any alums who can tell me otherwise!  To give you a sense of how tough EISA is, it was only good for a team finish of 7th on the day (although just one spot behind Middlebury and a few points out of 5th).  The 5km classic was a breakout race for Alena, a freshman whose previous classic best was a 36th.  Cara Sprague and Anika Petach were not far behind our scorers in 34th and 41st, respectively. In Sunday’s 10km skate, Esther significantly improved on her previous skate finishes this year to lead the team with a 25th place finish.  Alena was close behind her in 33rd, and Clare Miller scored for the first time for us with a 46th place finish.  Audrey missed Sunday’s race due to illness.

Things are also looking promising on the men’s side. Freshman Tony Ryerson jumped into 41st in his second 10km classic race of the season (from a previous best 62nd). Trevor Petach led the men in Sunday’s 10km skate with a solid 43rd, a minute out of 27th.  The guys looked much sharper after the rest week.  Indeed, most of the team improved their previous placings in one technique or the other, which suggests that we’re rounding into peak fitness.  Where we didn’t improve our placings, it was because we weren’t aggressive enough in passing slower skiers at the first opportunity.  In an individual start race, like both events at UVM, one has to ski one’s best pace the whole time.  By drafting or cruising for a few seconds behind a slower skier when you don’t need to, you can lose several places in a short race very quickly.

Esther

Team with the Laval (Quebec) coach - who jumped into the photo.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 12:20 am 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.