Planica World Cup skiing on channels 22.2.–5.3.2023. See the program and broadcast information of the World Ski Championships at this link.
PLANICA. Swedish women have recently dominated sprint competitions, both individual and pair sprints. At the World Championships, Sweden has won gold in the pair sprint both in Seefeld, Oberstdorf and now in Planica. In the sprint, Sweden took a triple victory in Planica, in Oberstdorf the result was World Championship silver and in Seefeld the World Championship bronze.
The Swedes have also won sprint medals at the Olympics in both Beijing and Pyeongchang, not to mention the World Cup competitions.
Why are Swedes so superior? Jasmi in Joensuu and Krista in Pärmäkoski has a clear vision for this: enough talented athletes and enough group training.
– Because there are many tough guys in the same team, they can beat each other up. In every workout, especially hard workouts, everyone wants to be the best. The competition is so fierce that it pushes everyone forward, Pärmäkoski said.
– They train quite a lot together also outside the national team camps, Joensuu continued.
The tactical eye needs help
According to Pärmäkoski, the Finnish national team does group training, especially when there are more and more sprinters in the team. Still, he would like more group training.
– I think that the young skiers of the B national team should be boldly brought to the camps. That there would actually be challengers and they would get to see what the pace is, what should be going, Pärmäkoski stated.
Joensuu admits that he has had to do too many exercises alone. You can develop your physical condition on your own, but developing a tactical eye requires help from others as well.
– If you compare it to Sweden, for example, they do every sprint exercise together as a group. It develops the tactical side, and that’s a really important thing in this job, Joensuu said.
Halonen: Breeding through speed
Women’s coach Juho Halonen could not immediately promise the women more group training and B national team skiers to the camps. However, he admitted that there is room for improvement.
– We need to think about how we can make the camps and the daily training of the coaching centers more effective, Halonen said.
He reminded that during the previous two seasons, the A national team has camped a lot abroad, and a smaller team has been in high-ranking camps. Group training has been less then, because normal trips have been more clearly emphasized in some cases.
– The majority of Swedish female skiers come through speed, from the sprint side, and through that, breakthroughs have been made for the normal distance as well. There are no direct and certain answers as to how women can be refined. That endurance can be developed, but that the speed side would come along well with it. Speed is one of Swedish women’s great strengths, Halonen said.
More roller coasters with the right profile
Even in charge of the women’s national team last season Ville Oksanen according to Sweden has found a good and functional training model for women’s skiing. A large number of skiers live in or near training centers and thus get to do a lot of joint training.
In Swedish centers such as Östersund, Sollefteå, Umeå and Falun there are really good training conditions. They can also be found in Finland, but what Finnish training centers often lack is a good roller track with a sufficiently hard profile.
– Then it would be possible to do sports-like training as much as possible throughout the year. We have roller rinks, but if they really have a good profile, then they are not terribly useful to the common people, and that in turn affects the fact that they are not so easily made.
According to Oksanen, roller rink training would also improve Finns’ calculation skills, because it’s a different thing to train at high speed on a bike path than on a winding roller rink. According to him, this was seen, for example, in the World Junior Championships, where Finnish skiers were better skiers compared to the average.
– One of the reasons for that is certainly that the activities of the Juniors are concentrated in Vuokatti, and there has been a lot of focus on that issue. In winter, there are a lot of races on the Tekniikkarinte terrain, which has a lot of curves, Oksanen said.
– I would argue that we are going in a good direction, and yes, there has been a focus on that.