By Anne Duggan
Just as no snowflake ever looks the same, no national club championship ever feels the same for Nakkertok Nordic – not even after six in a row.
“It got a little tense there when the athletes realized that we were leading by only 56 points going into the final race,” recounts coach Kieran Jones, whose Nakkertok bunch had become accustomed to a larger margin of victory in recent years but wound up prevailing with 2,531 ahead of Skibec’s 2,387. “It is great to win the banner. The athletes had that as a goal, and the coaches and waxers and other volunteers tried to support this goal.”
Out of the 46 Nakkertok competitors, the performance of the club’s junior girls sticks out in particular for Jones.
“I can’t say enough about the commitment of our junior girls,” underlines Jones, noting that Nakkertok had the greatest number of representatives, with eight, in the 17- and 18-year-old girls’ category – the age group where all sports tend to get hit by drop-outs.
“It is tough to watch,” adds Jones, tipping his hat to the dedicated volunteers and depth of coaching responsible for the club’s continued success. “At Nakkertok, we have been able to keep them engaged. And their results were pivotal to our success with the club banner.”
Team sprint silver medallists Alison Pouw (3rd overall out of 1998-born girls) and Zoe Williams (4th out of 1997s, and 10 km skate gold and classic sprint silver medal winner) led the way for the junior girls.
Katherine Stewart-Jones (3rd 1995 women) was the other Nakkertok skier to hit the overall podium in junior competition, while Julian Alexander-Cook, Aidan Kirkham, Nelson Allan, Avery Vreugdenhil-Beaucler, Katherine Denis, Pierre Grall–Johnson and Tove Halvorsen were the club’s top performers in other age-group categories.
Perianne Jones got to raise her arms one final time as a national champion, earning the senior women’s crown on the strength of her victory in the classic sprint and 2nd-place finishes in the 5 km free and 10 km classic events. The 30-year-old Olympian recently announced her retirement from competitive skiing after a career highlighted by two Olympic appearances and two World Cup medals.
World Cup coming to town
While a half-dozen consecutive national crowns is quite the performance, Nakkertok will endeavour to put on an even bigger show next season featuring the world’s best cross-country skiers.
The club will be a driving force behind a FIS World Cup event set for March 1, 2016 – the opening race of an 8-stage Canadian tour that will then head to Montreal, Quebec City and Alberta.
With no World Championships or Olympics on the slate for 2016, the local competition will figure prominently in the quest for the season’s biggest prize: the Crystal Globes that go to the overall World Cup champions (to be awarded after the March 12 conclusion of the Canadian events).
Dirk van Wjik, who previously groomed the 2010 Olympic course in Whistler,
has been charged with the role of course preparation chief.
The man who envisioned and brought to life the Nakkertok South race facilities in Cantley is dreaming big again, set to create a World Cup course at Jacques Cartier Park with Parliament Hill as a backdrop.
Bringing the concept of recycling to a new level, the 30,000 cubic metres of man-made snow from the Snowflake Kingdom will be used to create an 800 m long sprint course once Winterlude is complete.
But this daunting task is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hosting an international World Cup event, van Wijk indicates.
For one, a test run had to be held a year earlier. While test event preparations were much simpler than what will be needed for next year’s race, van Wijk says it was still a complicated and labour-intensive seven-day effort to create the course.
Once the snow park had been cleared of Winterlude signs and kiosks, bulldozers took the tops off of slides, some of them 56 m tall. Thirty hours of grooming using Camp Fortune’s Piston Bully 400 and Nakkertok’s Piston Bully 100 followed.
But the end result received rave reviews. John Alberg, a course homologation expert who also worked on developing the Whistler Olympic course, considers the course the most interesting and challenging that he has seen, mostly due to the slope, which was created from the Winterlude tube slide, and the abundance of snow.
On the day of the test sprint, volunteers from the region’s ski clubs filled their traditional roles such as timing, distributing bibs and supervising the start and finish lines.
Preparing the course will take 2-3 times as long to bring it up to World Cup standards next time, van Wijk believes.
“This year I did the bare minimum to put in the course,” he says. “Next year, it will also include cosmetic details.”
Two tunnels will also be part of the operation the next time around – one for the racers and officials to access the back of the starts, and one for use by spectators.
World Cup events always have fencing lining the course, so 1.6 km of fencing will have to be erected along both sides, and a warm-up loop for the athletes will be created in front of the nearby Museum of History. The marina parking lot be taken over by athlete and waxing services.
“Television production is going to be present including those huge (video screens),” van Wijk adds. “Everything’s got to be perfect.”