Anna

It's New Year's Day, and let's face it, it's an Olympic year.  We'll spend most of the winter discussing NCAA racing (as we should) on this UAA Ski Team blog.  But this is a bit of a slow week, as the team is in Utah preparing for US Nationals. So let's talk about the Olympics a little bit.

Of course we are following Lasse's attempt to make the Olympic team, which is only natural since he was skiing for us as recently as last winter.  But UAA has plenty of other former skiers who may be competing in this year's Olympics:

Sadie Bjornsen (2009 Seawolf) seems to be a strong candidate. She's had some of the strongest early-season results of anybody on the strong US women's team, with a bunch of top-ten finishes on the World Cup in the last month. It's going to be a tough year to make the American women's Olympic Team, as they're one of the strongest teams in the world.  But Sadie is in a good position right now.

Sadie's little brother Erik (2010 Seawolf) is also hoping to make the team this year.  Coming off a breakthrough year last season in which he won the 15k national championship and competed at the World Championships, he's been racing the domestic circuit so far this winter, and won a sprint race just last week in Canada. The US National Championships in Utah will be an important week of racing for Erik if he is going to make the team.

And how about Martin Kapšo (2011 Seawolf)?  He competed for Slovakia in last year's World Championships and had a chance to visit with his old UAA teammate Lukas Ebner at the World University Games earlier this month in Italy.  I have no idea how the Slovakian qualification criteria are set up or where Gofi fits in to any of it. But if I hear later this winter that he is on the Slovakian Olympic Team, I won't be surprised.

But there is one current Seawolf who will definitely be competing in this year's Olympic Games, and that's Anna Berecz (Seawolf 2011-present). This won't be Anna's first Olympics; she finished 27th in the Super Combined and 35th in the downhill at the Vancouver games in 2010, and has also competed in several World Championships. When I ran into Anna in the ski room a couple months ago, she mentioned (when I inquired) that she had nailed down her spot on the Hungarian Olympic team over the summer at a series of FIS races in South America.  Anna is quite modest. She's not one to toot her own horn, so I sort of had to drag the details out of her. She told me she plans to travel to Sochi as late as possible so she'll be able to race as many college races as possible to try to qualify for NCAA Nationals in March. Congratulations to Anna!  We're looking forward to watching her race in the Olympics!

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And to follow up on another topic:  I know readers of this blog have been wracking their brains trying to figure out the answer to December 18th's trivia question, and probably losing a lot of sleep over it.  It must have been a really tough question because nobody even made an attempt at the answer.  But here it is:  It's Laura Rombach's old Volkswagen Golf under that pile of snow.  (*another correct answer would have been Andreas Adde.)