Sprint Relays Offer Few Surprises
By Cory Smith

April 4, 2002

They say that anything can happen in a sprint. But what happens when you put 10 sprints back to back? Does some sort of order appear, or does all hell break loose? The athletes at Spring Series were looking for an answer today when they lined up for the 2-person Sprint Relay.

Kris Freeman joined forces with Andrew Johnson to win the Sprint Relay

The format was frantic, yet simple. One person starts and skis a 0.8 K sprint course. They tag their partner, who then does the same thing. The partner then finishes his loop and tags the first skier, who goes out for a second loop. This continues until all skiers have skied 5 laps. The stop-go format is extremely exciting and extremely painful for the racers.

If you have been following the Spring Series results, then you can tell from the sprint relay results that if you do 10 sprints back to back, a certain order does indeed appear. Apparently, when you do a very hard race such as this one, the best skiers win. Imagine that.

Case in point: the US Ski Team's Kris Freeman and Andrew Johnson, who have won a combined 4 out of five races in the past week, won the men's race. They were able to stop trying to beat each other for about twenty minutes and focus on putting the hurt on the rest of the field instead. There was a fierce battle going on for second place between the Canadians (Chris Jeffries and George Grey) and Team Dave, aka Subaru Factory Team, consisting of Daves Chamberlain and Stewart. But on his final lap Dave Stewart made a critical error by skiing into the finish, instead of tagging off to anchor leg Chamberlain. He lost a few places in this miscue and lost all hope for second. Chamberlain did manage to salvage a third place once he got out on course for his final lap. Noticeably absent from the top 3 was Team XC Oregon, which had won this event every year since its inception five years ago. The absence of XC Oregon's Justin Wadsworth made a repeat victory very difficult, even thought Wadsworth's teammate Pat Weaver did replace him with sprint specialist Colin Mahood.

Ivanova, shown here in Sunday's classic race, teamed up to win the Sprint Relay

It should be noted that sprinting superstars Andrew Newell and Ryan Foster of Stratton did not enter the men's Senior event and decided to beat up on other juniors instead. They did have their hand full though with Newell just beating Czech's Jan Vykoukal to the line for the victory.

In the women's race, the "current UVM/former UVM" team of Claudia Reithofer and Ekaternia Ivanova managed to beat out the Northern Michigan team of Melissa Oram and Aubrey Smith, while Team Alpina/Madshus took third with Aelin Peterson and Natalie Cartwright. For Ivanova it was the continuation of a very successful spring.

Stratton also won the Junior women's race with the team of Molly Gray and Morgan Smyth.