Icy course tries skiers’ skills Biathletes say conditions make trails extremely fast

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FORT KENT – For the better part of the week, this supposed winter wonderland has been cursed (unless you’re a spectator) with mild temperatures, melting snow, and Maine’s most unmistakable sign of spring: Mud.

The access road into the Maine Winter Sports Center? Mud.

Parking lots? Mud.

Paths? Ice and crushed stone and straw – but you just knew there was mud under there, somewhere, lurking, waiting to suck your boot off.

On Wednesday night, that changed. Temperatures dropped. Puddles froze. And the mud? What mud?

Most importantly, the ski trails – or “tracks” in the vernacular of biathletes everywhere – solidified. When the cool weather prevailed throughout the morning, athletes gathered for the Ruhrgas IBU Biathlon World Cup likely cheered their good fortune. Then they headed afield and found that their celebration may have been a bit premature.

The athletes have been universally complimentary of the Fort Kent venue. But that doesn’t mean that everything they encounter during their daily ski-and-shoot sessions is desirable.

Especially when a weeklong thaw ends and an icy morning dawns.

Ice, you see, is a much faster surface than slush. Especially when you’re going downhill. And most especially when you have to turn sharply at the bottom of those hills.

At the Maine Winter Sports Center, that skill is at a premium. Just ask Jeremy Teela.

“It’s a weird course. It’s very technical, so you don’t have to be such a strong skier, but you do need to be good and balanced on your skis,” said the Anchorage, Alaska, native.

“You have to be able to control your skis, because the corners here are just horrendous,” he said with a chuckle. “[There are] nasty S-turns, and they’re icy today because it’s really hard. It’s just pure ice, and these skis? There’s no metal edges. These things don’t work on ice.”

And when those skis hit ice and don’t work, things can get interesting. Even for some of the best cross country skiers in the world.

“This course isn’t that hard, even when it’s icy,” Teela said. “No one would ever fall [because of the course’s difficulty].”

The problem, he said, is that racers are taking chances, attempting to gain ground on their competitors.

“You’re pushing it, you’re riding the edge, and you’re right there on the line,” Teela said.

And every once in a while, bad things happen.

“Sometimes you eat the snow and you fly off into the trees,” Teela said.

Teela avoided eating snow on Thursday. He didn’t fly off into the trees. And (in this sport this is very important) he shot well, missing just two targets en route to a 29th-place finish.

But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a few anxious moments.

“I had some close calls,” Teela said. “I almost took out a Swede, but I kept it together, and luckily I didn’t push him off into the woods. But it was close.”

American Tim Burke, a Maine Winter Sports Center athlete from Paul Smiths, N.Y., is very familiar with the course. He said racers often have one reaction to the course after seeing it for the first time and later find their perception was wrong.

“I think what sets this course apart is, mainly, when you first ski it [you notice that] there’s not any really big hills,” Burke said. “But that doesn’t mean the course isn’t really tough, because all of the downhills here are really hard, sharp corners, so you really never get a chance to rest.”

The result, on a cool day with an icy surface, is speed, whether or not the racers handle it as well as they might hope.

“Today it was superfast out there,” Burke said. “I think you saw really fast times, and it even made it harder on the downhills.”

Burke’s teammate Jay Hakkinen of Kasilof, Alaska, learned exactly how fast the course was before the race. But the customary pre-race tour of the course taught him a valuable lesson.

“A few of the times I almost went off the course, but that’s why you ski the course before,” Hakkinen said. “You learn it, you learn how to get time advantages on those [corners], but it was amazing how hard you had to work all the time.”

Hakkinen, who wound up in 46th place, discovered that World Cup organizers had left the athletes a few well-placed warning signs, if they chose to heed those warnings.

“Whenever you saw hay bales on the corner, you knew that it was going to be a tough corner,” he said. “And there were quite a few places today [with hay bales].”

At first, Hakkinen admits, he wasn’t paying attention to all the hay on the course. After one particularly hairy pre-race episode, he learned his lesson.

“During the warm-up I didn’t quite notice it at first and I had to do a complete hockey stop because I was going straight off the course,” he said.

During the race, things didn’t get any easier. Hakkinen never saw any skiers eat the snow – or fly into the trees – but he saw plenty of evidence that many skiers were having difficulty.

“It was amazing how many tracks were just on the edge of the trail,” he said.