Skiing News

The men's World Cup downhill and super-combi races scheduled for Dec. 9-10 were cancelled Wednesday because of a lack of snow and warm temperatures. Organizers said they would soon decide on a possible replacement site for the races. Two other World Cup events have already been cancelled due to warm weather. The season-opening races on the glacier in Soelden, Austria, in October were wiped out because of heavy rain, while ...

Skier Allison Forsyth of Canmore, Alta., will miss the entire season because of a left knee injury that she suffered at the Turin Olympics. Speaking today during a conference call, Forsyth says her knee is not ready yet, calling her decision to skip the season ``sad and frustrating.'' The 28-year-old needed surgery after tearing her anterior cruciate ligament when she fell during downhill training in Italy last February. She will ...

Men's downhill World Cup ski training was cancelled Tuesday because of a heavy snowstorm. Organizers called off the session after about 60 centimetres of snow covered the Birds of Prey course overnight. Workers have been unable to clear the snow because of the threat of an avalanche. ``We have avalanche control happening on the course so we can't even have crews on there,'' International Ski Federation official Mike Kertesz said. ...

Austrians swept the top five spots in Friday's training run for the men's season-opening World Cup downhill event. Andreas Buder was the fastest down the 3.1-kilometre track at Lake Louise Mountain Resort in one minute 51.56 seconds. It's a measure of how competitive the Austrian team is that Buder was not chosen by that country's coaches to race Saturday after he finished 22nd in Thursday's training session. Hans Grugger was ...

Steve Nyman of the U.S. posted the fastest time in training Thursday for the season-opening World Cup downhill. The 24-year-old from Provo, Utah, covered the 3,136-metre course in one minute, 49.88 seconds in the second training session for Saturday's World Cup downhill. ``I improved in areas where I was horrible yesterday, but there were some areas where I messed up today that I was great in yesterday,'' Nyman said. ``It's ...

Erik Guay says the Canadian men's ski team does not enjoy a home-mountain advantage at Lake Louise, even though he won his first ever World Cup medal on this hill. ``Definitely not. That's something they need to work on in Canada,'' Guay said Thursday after a training run for Saturday's World Cup downhill. ``You go to Austria and these guys would have been training on the hill 10 days in ...

The next generation of the world's best biathletes will compete at the Canmore Nordic Centre in 2009 at the youth/junior world biathlon championship. The International Biathlon Union approved the Nordic Centre as the host site Monday. The dates have yet to be determined, but the event will run in either late January or early February. The competition will feature 275 athletes from 30 countries racing in junior (19-20) and youth ...

Freestyle skier Deidra Dionne's comeback to compete at the Turin Games was one of Canada's most inspirational stories at the 2006 Olympics. It was a mere five months earlier that she had broken her neck in a frightening fall while training for a World Cup aerials event in Australia, an injury that required seven hours of surgery, grafted bone from her hip, a titanium plate and screws to repair. A ...

Loveland and Arapahoe Basin ski resorts have begun making snow, signalling the start of the annual race to be the first in the United States to open. ``It's looking like winter up here. Everything is white,'' Loveland spokesman John Sellers said Thursday. Loveland won the race last season for the sixth straight year, opening on Oct. 14. Loveland began making snow Wednesday. Arapahoe Basin fired up its snow guns Sunday ...

VERMILION, Alta. (CP) _ Vermilion is honouring Beckie Scott, the Olympic gold medallist who helped put her Alberta hometown on the map. The cross-country skiing star will be feted in a retirement and tribute ceremony Thursday at Lakeland College. Scott, who won gold at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics and silver in 2006 in Turin, grew up skiing in Vermilion en route to rewriting the record books as Canada's most ...