World Champ team Race report

We woke up to cloudy sky this morning in Claut. We have been blessed with amazing weather so far to do course inspections. After the sprint race has been moved from yesterday to this coming Wednesday, we had an additional day to get things ready and organized. Today was then the first event of 5 in the World Championships with the pairs race. Our country was well represented with 3 men team and one women team. The race started at low elevation just pass the town of Claut. We had a short ascent right off the start followed by a bootpack in the forest (on about 5 cm of snow….) then a short descent in a bobsled type trail and off we were… we had 2 long ascents to complete with a bootpack in each one of them. The descents were quite something with a mix of moguls, ice and powder. To add to the difficulty level, it was a complete whiteout at the top so it was quite hard to navigate. The longest and 3^rd descent took us down to the start where we were far from being done yet. We had a cross a bridge skis in hand and run for a while then skate a flat section. Climb in the trees again (where we executed kick turns on grass and leaves. Then down again, a bootpack to the road then down again and up to the finish line… It was the race that would never end!!! The overall race was 2200m of positive gain and the top teams completed the course in 2:30 (M) and 3:00 (W).

Congratulations to all the racers and specially the Canadians.

Reiner and Andrew finished with an amazing time in 16^th place. Congrats to Steve and Stano and Alex and James. As for Julie and myself, we took the 9^th place. We had a great time playing in the trees, in the leaves and in the rocks…. Oh and of course in the snow!!!!

Next race is the vertical on Tuesday… we have a day to rest and recharge the batteries before the rest of the events.

Full results at http://www.claut2011.org/en/

And pictures to come!