Skier of the Week: Utah Invitational!

Elise in the skate race

We usually start this blog post by saying that it was extremely difficult to choose a skier of the week for this race. It's a good problem to have and this week was actually our most difficult choice!

The Utah Invitational is an incredibly competitive field. It is a NCAA Division I Invitational with full varsity teams, scholarship athletes with World Cup starts, paid coaches and wax budgets that exceed our entire Club Sports Budget. It takes incredible courage and desire to even want to step onto the course with these athletes. This is why this week was so incredibly exciting!

We could have chosen Sophomore Will Timmons who posted a career best 28th place in the skate race and then followed it up by an incredible 22nd in the classic race.

We could have chosen Sam Wiswell who's trajectory since the first race in December is literally meteoric with every race being magnitudes faster than the previous and who managed a career best top-30 finish in the classic race.

We could have chosen Sierra Jech who, after skiing an incredibly smart and tactical race, had her best NCAA finish of her career with a fantastic 15th place, just being edged out at the line by a woman with a World Cup best finish of 18th and who was the 5th American in the field.

Sierra in the skate race

We could have chosen the women's team who not only had a fantastic day individually by Elise and Sierra and vitally supported by Britta Schroeter but actually beat two teams, University of New Mexico and Montana State University, and were within 2 points of catching University of Alaska-Anchorage and within 4 points of NCAA National Champions Denver University!

Despite all these amazing accolades and results one athlete rose above the others!

After finishing the last race of the NCAA Division I season last year with a career and team best 9th place Elise started 2015 with a bang! In the very first Div I race of the season she started slowly but finished strong with a great 16th place in the 5km skate race. We were all very pleased with this finish and excited that she seemed to be on form already in January.

What we did NOT expect was the girl on fire that arrived for the 10km classic! Not that we doubted this type of race was possible but we thought she might need a few more race weekends to really get ramped.

The seeding for the race was done on FIS points and a mistake at the Bozeman SuperTour resulted in her not getting any points. This put Elise, Sierra and Britta on the very last line of the mass start, 30 women in front of them and no one behind. This didn't seem to bother either Elise nor Sierra in the least. Elise stormed through the field like a demon, catching one racer after another and then dropping them just as quickly. It was a thing of beauty to watch the fire with which she attacked the course and burned up her rivals. The only thing that stood between Elise and a top 5 finish was one more lap to make up more ground.

Elise was so terrifying that other coaches were watching in amazement as their top skiers were hunted and left in the dust! Elise would have been the top skier for all the teams in the race except CU, DU and Utah and beat too many full scholarship athletes to count.

We are looking forward to seeing what she can do at World University Games in a couple of weeks!

Congratulations, Elise Sulser, for inspiring us all!

YOU ROCK OUR WORLD!