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Podiums for Andrew Musgrave & Andrew Young

This year's snow drought in Norway forced the relocation of the annual BUL Sprint race weekend to Beitostolen. Traditionally the weekend consists of sprint races on the Saturday and a mass start on Sunday but this year an extra 15km freestyle timetrial was held on Friday (for seniors only) to compensate for the lack of Norwegian ranking races at the start of this season. Britain's Andrew Musgrave had a very impressive race to finish fourth, missing out on third place by 1 second and scoring his second best ever FIS points for a distance event. ( The race was won by Norwegian national team member, Martin Johnsrud Sundby.)

On Saturday he was out again in the freestyle sprint prologue and qualified for the heats in 12th place. But with tired legs from the day before he wasn’t able to progress further than the quarter-finals. On Sunday the usual mass start classic race was replaced by a 15km classic timetrial. The event was dominated by some of Norway’s top skiers (Sundby finishing “only” third this time) and Andrew finished 30th of the 117 participants. After the last race Andrew sent these reflections on the weekend :

"In the week leading up to the Beitostolen races I had trained well and felt in good form. Friday's 15km skate was a good race for me. I opened with a fairly even pace and managed to increase my speed throughout the race. After 10km I was leading but I pushed a bit too hard after that and faded a little in the last few kilometres. Saturday's sprint was hard. My legs were fairly beaten up from the 15km the day before and I didn't feel I performed my best. However, I managed a decent enough prologue but the effort from that left me drained and unable to advance further than the quarter final. I was unsure what to expect from Sunday's 15km classic. It was my first classic race of the season and I tend to be a bit stronger in skate races but I knew my distance form was good after Friday's race and was fairly confident. But as soon as I started I knew I wasn't in for a good race as I was way off the pace. Towards the end I felt stronger, managed to pick up my speed and made up a lot of positions in the last 3km which was a good sign, but my poor start meant I had too much ground to make up."

Meanwhile in the Junior events Britain’s Andrew Young was making waves. On Saturday, after qualifying 4th in the sprint prologue he sparked into life in the quarters, going through to the semi-final as the fastest loser, took second place in the semis and then 3rd place in the final. In that final he dropped back from 1st to 4th place before fighting back to his podium position. After the race he said "This was my first race of the season so the prologue had a sort of "dusting off the cobwebs" feeling. I didn't feel great in the quarter-final either and went through as a "lucky-loser". The semi-final was my best race of the day. I felt a lot better, had great skis and skied a good race tactically. It was fun to go in the final, my first one for 2 seasons. I skied pretty well and felt good. I had a bad position on the final climb so had to work really hard into the stadium to take 3rd. Overall I'm happy but there is stuff to work on and I look forward to the next sprint race."

Sunday saw Andrew Y finish in 5th place (out of 65 starters) in the Junior Men’s 15km classic, which seemed pretty good to most people but obviously he had expected more, commenting afterwards "It was an ok race. It was quite hard - the first lap went well then I had a big section in the middle where I wasn't so great before a good final few kilometres. Fifth was ok and I got some good training from racing this weekend and I'm in a good position for this time of the season". But his “ok training race” did score him some of his best FIS points for a classic distance race.

On Saturday Per Nymoen, head of the Nordic section of Norway's Ski Association, commented "Britain is going to have the world's best relay team in a couple of years" after he watched the two Andrews' sprint performances - perhaps with his tongue just a little in his cheek!

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