The World Cup goes on but with no more Australian competitors. Esther Bottomley and Clare-Louise Brumley went straight back to Australia after the Winter Olympics. Paul Murray and Ben Derrick were supposed to have raced this week in the Sprint in Borlange and the 50km in Holmenkollen (no prizes for guessing who in which race) but things haven't gone to plan. Paul hasn't trained for two weeks after getting sick at the end of the Olympics and has decided to pack up his appartment in Borlange and go home. BD did some soul-searching after the Skate-Vasa last week (in which he was 17th) and found that there was no desire left for Holmenkoll, so he is slowly on his way home as well.

The World Cup goes to China and Japan next week but the finances weren't there to go to those events anyway. So that's it for World Cup 05/06. There were highs (people qualifying for Torino) and lows (people not qualifying for Torino), generally we can say there are lots of Australian athletes hungry to do better.

Next year is going to be a funny year with World Cup - after the normal November/early December races traditional World Cup will take a pause until after the new Tour-de-Ski World Cups at the start of January. It is unsure yet if any Australians will take part in this new tour, as it will be a very expensive and demanding 10 days. And then the World Championships are in Japan in February, followed by World Cups back in Scandinavia in March, so it could be very difficult (or some might say interesting) to pick out a good affordable competition schedule. We will see after the FIS calendar is finalised in June.

A quick summary of other Australian Team athletes over recent weeks. Chris Darlington raced the Vasaloppet in Sweden along with Borlange house-mate Leon Spiller. After a bad start (his estimate was that he was back around 1000) Darlo was about 500th at the first drink station and moved up steadily from there to be 253rd at the 90km finish. Spiller on the other hand went the other way, around 300 at the first drink station down to about 500th at the finish. Down in Switzerland James Rickard was supposed to have raced the Swiss Championships in the Goms last week, but he picked up a cold and pulled the pin a la Paul Murray. Still racing we have Andrew Wynd currently at the Canadian Championships in Thunder Bay - to check his progress go to www.zone4.ca. And KT Calder may or may not be in Switzerland somewhere getting ready for the Engadin Ski Marathon.

Courtesy The XC Files