Canada Part 2

After the race, we waited around for awards and the raffle. A few of the kids on Sun Valley got awards for the race and everyone got a prize from the raffle. That is everyone except for me. That was a bummer, but oh well.

Skiing at Shark Mountain (Photo courtesy of Morgan Smyth) 

The next day, we went on a ski at Shark Mountain, which was the back up site for the 1988 olympics. It was a fun ski, even though it was a little more like a photo shoot than a ski. We skied 10-15k and then we stopped and took photos for awhile.

Later that day, the Sun Valley coach, Mikey, found out where/when the world cup athletes were training, so we went and watched them ski. Which was borderline creepy, but also pretty cool.

Later that night at dinner, one of the kids, Keene, decided that we should all go around the room and say one nice thing about every single person in the room. He started the "game".  He went around giving strange "compliments" like "I like the way you can wear twelve layers and make it look like two". He gets to me and goes "You... you there... yeah you...", which prompted me to respond "Do you know my name?". At that point he just started randomly guessing names, which is really funny considering there were only two people on this trip who he didn't already know. Let's just say my name became Sofia for the rest of the trip.

The next day we watched the world cup sprints. It was pretty cool to get to see everyone race and Morgan (our coach) and Mikey used to race world cup, we got to meet a lot of the US skiers. We went and cheered decked out in USA gear with our posters. One of the USA girls, Jessie Diggins, got 6th in the sprint, which was awesome to watch.

Go USA!! (Photo courtesy of Morgan Smyth)

After the races, we got to ski the world cup course. The courses were a lot harder than they looked, the hills, turns, and corners were substantially more difficult than I thought they would be.

The next day we watched the races again. The second day was a skiathalon, meaning they start out classic skiing and then switch to skate. Mikey had checked out the course the day before, so he knew where the best points to watch were going to be. We would watch at point, cheer and then sprint to the next location and we repeated this process about 10 times.

After the races, we went to the awards ceremony. We made a tunnel for the winners to walk through and we actually got to meet some of them. Karsten, Anja and I got a picture with the winner from the race and the bronze medalist from the Sochi olympics, Martin Sundby from Norway.

Me, Karsten, Sundby, Anja 

The next day we went home after a long, but fun trip.

- Claire