When you catch Max Hollmann after a long day of training, chances are he’s exhausted, but smiling. This last month has been a blur of double threshold sessions, long hours, and gym work: a training block designed to push him right to the edge. “It’s been a big month,” Max laughs, “the training load is full-on right now.” It’s the kind of grind few people would willingly sign up for. But for Max, a 23-year-old rising star in Canadian cross-country skiing, it’s all...
Reid Carter had a decision to make. Four months before the first race start of the Nordic Junior & U23 World Ski Championships in Whistler, the event was in jeopardy of being shut down. Carter was torn. Fold or fight. He hadn’t established the Black Tusk Nordic Events Society to walk away with the dream of Canada hosting the prestigious event unfulfilled. A long-time cross country skier, and Division chair of Cross Country BC, Carter had been...
“In the off-season, our athletes would hop on cross country skis,’ Keisha Lewis explains. “They use it as their cross training. I saw our competitive guys do it, and then I had some homeschoolers say to me: ‘Oh, I’d love it if my kids could do something like that,’ I reached out to Kanata Nordic and launched a home-schoolers cross country program for the kids.” “Problem being, as so often happens, there was no one willing or available to implement what was...
The return on investment is there, in plain view. You can see it in precious medals hanging around necks and in places of pride on podiums. You can see it in growing recognition of the names, the progress, abilities, and accomplishments of Canadian skiers. Just this past February, the return on investment was seen in the Alpine valley of Planica, Slovenia, when 21-year-old Sonjaa Schmidt from Whitehorse YT. made history by becoming the first Canadian woman...
For Morgan Rogers, the problem strikes a very personal chord; hits a raw nerve. “This issue,’’ emphasizes the newest chairperson of Nordiq Canada’s board of directors, “is something I’m very passionate about, something I think about and work on a lot. “I myself have experienced not feeling safe or included in a workplace – that happened to me in a non-sport summer job. “So I lived it, what it’s like to be on the receiving end of those feelings. Because of...
