Monday, January 11, 2010

A weekend of skiing noteworthy-ness

Hey,

What a weekend it was for skiing all over the world.

Tim Burke made history again! With his 2nd place in Sunday's World Cup Biathlon race, he became the first American to podium in a Biathlon Mass Start event. He was 2nd behind the great Ole Einar Bjoerdalen of Norway. Holy Cow!

Check out the video below for a short behind the scenes video from the event. Timmy is wearing a dark blue Adidas suit. This race was in Germany wear the sport of Biathlon is huge. It is shown on primetime television and their athletes are very well known to the public. In the U.S. we have never done extremely well until now. The whole team has experienced forward momentum with new coaches and funding to help these US guys compete on the world level. It's exciting to see.

Tim Burke from J Teela on Vimeo.



In Italy, Billy Demong and another US skier, Todd Lodwick made history by placing 1 and 2 in Sunday's Nordic Combine World Cup race. Way to go Billy.

My weekend was spent in Cable Wisconsin attending the 24 Hours of Telemark. While I was not competing, I had an enjoyable time working with the set-up and tear down crew. It was not all work though. I got in plenty of skiing. Northern Wisconsin has tons of snow. It bought back memories of snowy Lake Placid winters. There were two highlights of the weekend. One was the excellent classic skiing conditions. It wasn't hard to find the right kick wax at -18 below one morning to watch the sun rise or to ski out onto the Telemark's vast network of trails at night where it was totally quite and still. The other highlight had to be cranking Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled Banner before the race start. I pegged the volume on PA system to eleven! (I'm waiting to post a video or two once my camera battery charges up so check back.)

Cheers,
DJB

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