FasterSkier

Visit FasterSkier.com →

From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.

Tag: Akira Lenting

  • Japanese Skier’s One Race at the Olympics Ends on the Start Line

    Japanese Skier’s One Race at the Olympics Ends on the Start Line

    Japanese skier Akira Lenting at the cross-country venue at the Olympics on Tuesday.
    Japanese skier Akira Lenting at the cross-country venue at the Olympics on Tuesday.

    FasterSkier’s coverage is made possible through the generous support of Swix.

    KRASNAYA POLYANA, Russia – Japanese cross-country skier Akira Lenting traveled all the way to the Sochi Olympics for one race: the 20-minute, 10-kilometer anchor leg of the men’s relay.

    There wasn’t a huge amount of pressure on the Japanese team at the games—their skiers are good, but not great. And Lenting’s own goals for the relay were modest. A finish in the top six, he said, would have been a success, after two eighth-place finishes in Japan’s last two races.

    In short, in Lenting’s athletic pantry here, there were none of the ingredients in the recipe for classic Olympic disappointment.

    When Lenting, a tall, cheerful 23-year-old, arrived at the cross-country venue on Sunday, he started his warmup.

    His teammates were already out on the race course, where, unbeknownst to Lenting, things had gone wrong from the beginning.

    Hiroyuki Miyazawa, Japan’s first skier, dropped two minutes to the leaders; he was stuck with skis that were gliding more slowly than his competition’s. His team had chosen either the wrong skis for the conditions, the wrong structure ground into the skis’ plastic bases, or the wrong wax—a problem that afflicted more than one country that day.

    Keishin Yoshida, the team’s second skier, fell two minutes further back before passing off to Nobu Naruse—the man who was supposed to tag off to Lenting for Japan’s fourth and final 10-kilometer segment.

    Lenting hadn’t seen what was happening. He ended his warmup, then went to the finish, where he waited in his racing spandex for Naruse to arrive, and tag him.

    Lenting is a good skier. Earlier this month, he placed in the top 30 on the World Cup—the benchmark for being internationally competitive—for the second time.

    He’d trained specifically for the relay, since it would be his only race at the games.

    But as Naruse made his way around the course on Sunday, the men from Sweden, the leading team, were skiing their 3.3-kilometer laps so much faster that they were threating to catch Japan from behind.

    The loop here was short enough that if Japan fell more than seven minutes back, they’d get lapped, and officials would pull them out of the race.

    Eventually, Naruse approached the finish. But as he did, he was in last place, trailing by six-and-a-half minutes. Marcus Hellner, Sweden’s anchor, was already in sight, nearing the end of his first lap before Lenting had even had a chance to start his own.

    That’s when a race official found Lenting.

    “Sweden is coming. So you can’t start the relay,” Lenting was told.

    He hadn’t even begun racing, but his Olympics were over.

    “At first, I can’t say anything,” said Lenting, who speaks functional English and spent five months last summer living and training in Sweden.

    Since he couldn’t race, he went back out and skied for another hour. Then, before he could go back to the athletes’ village, he was selected for a drug test, which took another 45 minutes. He watched the post-race recognition ceremony on a television while he waited.

    When he found his teammates afterwards, Lenting said, they apologized.

    He was initially disappointed, and sad, he said.

    But by Tuesday, he seemed to be doing fine. Even without the race, he was glad he had made the trip to Russia.

    “I am still happy,” he said. “This experience is good for me, I think, to be more strong for the next Olympics.”

    There are two more men’s cross-country ski races left here: the team sprint, and the individual 50-kilometer freestyle race.

    But Japan already has two other men entered in the team sprint, and Lenting did not meet his country’s strict qualification criteria to compete in any of the individual races at the games. He’s leaving the Olympics on Thursday.

    American cross-country skier Erik Bjornsen knows Lenting from competing in international junior races together.

    Bjornsen saw Lenting standing at the start on Sunday, waiting for Naruse to get there, when the officials pulled him from the race.

    “I was just like, ‘Oh, man.’ I felt so bad for him,” Bjornsen said. “He’s a fast skier. But it’s just, like, wrong place, wrong position at the wrong time. Coming so close to being able to race at the Olympics, and then not getting that start—it’s sad to see.”

  • Japanese Men’s Team Puts in Hours on the Glacier in Quest for Olympic Qualification

    Japanese Men’s Team Puts in Hours on the Glacier in Quest for Olympic Qualification

    The Japanese men's cross country ski team training on the Crisallo trails in Stelvio.
    The Japanese men’s cross country ski team training on the Crisallo trails in Stelvio.

    PASSO DELLO STELVIO, Italy— For most small ski countries, the Olympic Games are a one-time chance to shine. Get on television, do some interviews, perhaps gain a few more fans. People care more about the Olympics, and the Games are about participation.

    But for the Japanese cross country team, things aren’t quite so easy. Regardless of how many quota spots the International Ski Federation doles out to the country, the skiers face an uphill battle to get to the starting line.

    First, there’s the budget. It’s always small – the team can’t attend every World Cup weekend and must pick and choose the most important ones – and doesn’t improve in an Olympic year, even though many teams see an uptick in funds when the Games roll around.

    “Our problem in Japan is that in winter sport, there is already not so much of a budget,” says Fabio Ghisafi, a wax technician and women’s team coach for Japan. “Especially for the Olympic Games they have quite big hopes for ski jumping, where the level is quite high, and also for nordic combined. So they decided to give the budget according to the chances of medals. As we don’t have so many chances, our budget is still very very tiny.”

    Secondly, Japan sets draconian qualification standards for its athletes. If they can’t earn the honor of representing their country, then the team’s quota spots will go unfilled when the Games kick off.

    To earn start rights in an individual race, an athlete must have one top-8 finish on the World Cup, two top-10’s, or three top-12’s.

    “From twelve to twenty is not considered at all,” Ghisafi laments.

    That’s even more challenging when the team doesn’t attend a full season of World Cups, so the athletes have fewer chances to rack up results. So far, just two Japanese have met the qualification standards: Masako Ishida, the women’s distance specialist, and Yuichi Onda, the male sprinter.

    The standards have been particularly tough for Keishin Yoshida, the world’s 37th-ranked distance skier, who finished 11th in both the World Championships 50 k and the Davos, Switzerland, distance race. If both of those finishes had been 10th, not 11th, he’d be in. Or if he had finished 11th one more time. But as it is, his results are not yet enough to earn an individual start.

    “We will use all our small budget in the early season to try to have a good shot of making it,” Ghisafi says.

    Luckily for the men, Japan has been strong in relays. They were eighth at World Championships, and so have qualified as a team. So, with four trips to Sochi guaranteed for the team event if nothing else, the squad is hard at work this summer to try to earn start rights in the individual races.

    “Yes, there’s a little more motivation this year, because of the Olympics,” says Akira Lenting, a top developing skier just finishing his under-23 eligibility. “And if we have a good result, then we have a chance to get more popular I think.”

    That hard work has brought them here, to Italy – the country Ghisafi originally hails from. In years past, he has brought the team to a summer training camp in Aosta, where they ski on the glacier in nearby Tignes, France. It’s so hot in Japan in the summer that getting to Europe is a necessity, even with their tight budget. This year, the team picked Passo dello Stelvio because it’s 10,000 feet of elevation add a bonus for training.

    “It’s not so difficult because the weather is good every day,” says Akira. “The altitude is okay for me.”

    “No!” interjects Nobu Naruse, laughing.

    The five men at the camp have been spending every morning skiing a few hours on the glacier. It’s mostly slow distance and technique work, due to the elevation and the wet, slow snow. But Ghisafi says they have been throwing in a little bit of speed work, too. Many afternoons they head down to the valley to rollerski, and sometimes they do ski-bounding in the nearby national park.

    Overall, the men are happy with the location and the atmosphere. Despite spending much of the winter on the road and away from their families, it’s still exciting to see Europe in summer. The one who misses home the most is Keishin, whose wife had twins three months ago. The training here is an improvement for him, but it’s hard to be away from his children.

    “I can concentrate better for training if I go away,” he says. “So it’s very good to be here. But of course sometimes I want to go back to Japan. It will be even harder in the winter.”

    They are also happy to have the chance to train together. With such a small national team budget, they don’t have many training camps. Keishin has a good training partner where he is posted in the army, and Akira is spending the year in Falun, Sweden, where he has a strong team to work with. But for others, like Nobu, most training is done alone.

    “My hometown is where the Nagano Olympics were,” Nobu says. “I don’t have a teammate, so it’s only alone training. This camp is for me, so good – to finally have a national camp.”

    Hisashi Yamaguchi, the head coach, talks about how limited the team’s schedule is. After this, they will have a rollerski camp in Japan, and then that’s basically it for training camps. Twice a year, they meet for physiology testing. The women, who are at home now, had a separate camp earlier in Aosta; with only three staff members, it’s easier to do camps one at a time. They didn’t have enough money to bring a physiotherapist with them.

    But they are still looking forward to Sochi as a golden opportunity. Keishin and Nobu both participated in the World Cup test event this past season, and liked what they saw – at least for courses.

    “It’s a very tough uphill, but it’s good,” Nobu says.

    “It’s hard, but I like it very much,” Keishin agrees.

    In general, the difficulty of the Sochi courses play to Japan’s favor.

    “The harder it is, the better it is for them,” Ghisafi says. “They don’t like so much the flat and double-poling, but in the uphill, they are strong. So they like very much this course. Or at least, we will see.”

    Other things, like the food, don’t agree with them so much. With no food from their homeland and no grocery stores in the Olympic village, Keishin says that it wasn’t very good in Sochi, “at least not for Japanese.” In that respect, Sochi feels very far from home.

    But the team, with its small budget, has one more thing going for it at the new Russian venue, and that’s the unpredictable conditions. Just as the men like tough uphills, Ghisafi says they do well in less-than-perfect snow, too.

    And the wax maestro was happy when he saw the weather and snow at the Olympic venue.

    “I remembered when I was young and we would sometimes have the Italian championships in the middle of winter in the south of Italy,” he says. “There was this strange snow, near to the sea – it’s a little familiar.”

    The unpredictability of the conditions levels the playing field, too. The Japanese wax crew is good – it’s just small. So when nobody knows what is coming, they finally have a chance to shine.

    “If you have stable conditions, and they can test every single thing, and we have no chance against the big countries with such huge budgets,” Ghisafi says. “But if you come in the morning and there is a new situation, then we can find the right combination. It’s the only way we can do it. So this is better for us. We hope the weather will be bad!”

    That’s one thing coming from a coach standing on the sidelines. What about the skiers – are they looking forward to slogging through some nasty weather?

    In a word, yes.

    “We trust him,” Keishin laughs.

    Watch out, Sochi.