Garrett Beckrich of the United States racing to at the IBU Junior Cup in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, earlier this season. (Courtesy photo)
In an effort to showcase the North Americans competing at this week’s International Biathlon Union (IBU) 2018 Youth and Junior World Championships in Otepää, Estonia, we asked those qualifying athletes several questions about themselves — actually, we had them fill in the blanks. Here we have 17-year-old Garrett Beckrich, of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, who is representing the United States at his first World Youth Championships.
Today in Otepää, Beckrich finished 48th in the youth men’s 12.5 k individual, +6:03.9 with five penalties.
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“My full name is Garrett Beckrich but you can call me Garrett.
I was born and raised in Grand Rapids, MN and I learned to ski at Mt. Itasca Nordic Ski Center with Petra Cervenka.
I spent the time between World Youth/Junior trials and Worlds racing in Czechia and Slovenia in the Junior Cup and Open Euro Championships respectively. I also raced in Minnesota High School races.
The most brutal workout I did in the last training year to prepare for this was a 100 mile bike ride with the Midwest team and Vlad.
One thing I’m working on this season to improve my biathlon is to learn how to calm myself during shooting, because this is my first year in biathlon. I picked up shooting very quickly since I have been doing that since I was young. I have a hard time mentally switching between aggressive skiing and calm and relaxed shooting.
This is my first time in Estonia and second time racing internationally, and so far it’s been a great experience. The coaches are very knowledgeable and have everything well organized.
One difference I’ve noticed between Estonia and the United States is that skiing is very popular here. The Otepää stadium has lots of room for spectators.
One of the things I’m most excited about for World Youth/Junior Championships in Otepää is the youth relay. We have a good chance in placing well in that event if we all are feeling well.
One race I’m especially targeting there is the sprint. I want to make my first international pursuit race after missing out on that at the Open European Championships.
Watching the Olympics in the leadup to my own races was very inspiring. Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall winning the team sprint showed that the US can compete with other teams on cross country skis instead of downhill.
I want to be like Jessie Diggins, because we are both Minnesotans and state champions.
At Worlds, I really hope I can chat/make friends with someone from Brazil and ask them how they train for biathlon when they don’t have any snow.
My favorite thing at the breakfast where we are staying is the cucumber lemonade. It tasted weird at first but after awhile you learn to dig the taste.
Before this trip, if you said “Estonia”, the first thing I’d think of would have been where my grandma’s family originated from. They came to the US from Latvia and that is just south of us.
Now that I’m here, I’m pretty sure something I’ll always remember will be how similar it is to northern MN. There are lots of pine trees and it’s very cold.
If I had a totally free day here and didn’t have to worry about race fitness or training, I’d spend it going across the border to Latvia to say I had been there.
The best way to follow me on social media is Instagram @grbeckrich.”
American Siena Ellingson (48) at the start of the junior women’s pursuit at 2016 IBU Junior World Championships in Cheile Gradistei, Romania. (Courtesy photo)
In another 20-something-question, fill-in-the-blanks series, we checked in with the world-class U.S. and Canadian biathletes that will be competing at 2017 International Biathlon Union (IBU) Youth & Junior World Championships Feb. 22-28 in Osrblie (also known as Brezno-Osrblie), Slovakia.
Here’s 20-year-old Siena Ellingson, of Minnesota, who is representing the U.S. at her fourth Youth/Junior Worlds. On Thursday, Ellingson finished 50th to lead two Americans in the junior women’s 12.5 k individual.
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American Siena Ellingson during her standing stage of the women’s 3 x 6 k relay at IBU Junior World Championships in Cheile Gradistei, Romania. (Photo: IBU YJWCH Cheile Gradistei 2016/Facebook)
“My full name is Siena Ellingson, but you can call me Siena. I was born in Lauderdale, Minn., raised in Minnetonka, and one thing you should know about my hometown is the name means big water!
I started cross-country skiing when I was 13 and started biathlon when I was 14, thanks to Piotr Bednarski. I currently train in Grand Rapids, Minn., with Vlad Cervenka.
If I’m not skiing, you might find me making things!
If I had to pick a favorite book, it would be ‘Anna Karenina‘.
One of the things I’m most excited about for Youth/Junior World Championships in Brezno-Osrblie is having such large and competitive fields to race.
This will be my fourth Youth/Junior World Championships, and this year, I’m competing as a junior.
One race I’m especially targeting there is the sprint, because making the pursuit and getting a good start position depends on the results of the sprint.
The best advice anyone ever gave me about skiing or racing was tone down the suck.
One of the best race memories I have is my first race at my first Junior Worlds. I remember starting with a big smile on my face, and not being nervous about how it was going to go, but just excited to be there.
If I don’t end up being a professional skier, I’ll probably be… not exactly sure, but definitely working with kids.
I’m missing zero days of school to be here; I’m currently un-schooling.”
Jake Ellingson of Mount Itasca Biathlon shot a flawless race in the mass start of the North American Rollerski Cup in Jericho, Vermont, to place second overall and the top American. (Photo: Paul Bierman)
Editor’s Note: This ‘Pros of Tomorrow’ series, brought to you by the generous support of Fischer Sports, aims to highlight some of the most notable up-and-coming athletes around the world, which may or may not be Fischer-sponsored skiers. Have an idea for a top-notch skier you’re itching to read more about? Email info@fasterskier.com with the subject line: Pros of Tomorrow. Ideas for intriguing juniors or collegiate skiers, or lesser-known athletes are welcome as well — subject line: From the Pack.
Jakob Ellingson has made some changes this year. The 20-year-old biathlete from Minneapolis finished high school, switched to training full time, revamped his approach to shooting, and attended training camps in Lake Placid with the national team.
“I’m actually feeling really good at this point,” he said of a year where he’s increasing his training volume.
Seems like it. Ellingson turned heads last weekend in Jericho, Vermont, with a pair of strong finishes in the North American Rollerski Cup races.
Missing three shots in the sprint, he placed seventh; in the mass start the next day, he placed second behind World Championships silver medalist Nathan Smith. He two penalties over 20 shots represented the best shooting of any of the 80 or so athletes competing, male or female, in any age category.
Ellingson (center) on the U.S. podium in Jericho, flanked by 2014 Olympians Sean Doherty (left) and Leif Nordgren. (Photo: Jake Ellingson)
Landing as the top American in his first year competing as a senior surprised even Ellingson.
The last time he had talked to FasterSkier, it was after a frustrating sprint race at 2015 World Junior Championships, where he missed five shots and placed 65th, just outside the cutoff for the pursuit.
So the changes have certainly made a difference.
“Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised because all I did was that I didn’t rush it and just did what I had been practicing,” Ellingson said in a phone interview last week.
Part of the result came down to a specific race-day plan. The range approach in Jericho can be tricky, with a long but gradual uphill leading into the shooting range.
“Sometimes I think people go faster than they should because they don’t realize that it is, yeah, a pretty challenging approach,” Ellingson said. “Coming up that hill, Vlad [Cervenka, Ellingson’s coach] was telling me to just calm down and do what I had been training. To not worry about those other guys.”
But lots of athletes go into races with a plan. Having the ability and presence of mind to follow that plan – particularly in the psychologically tough sport of biathlon – shows a level of maturity.
“I was very impressed by his performance,” United States Biathlon Association Chief of Sport Bernd Eisenbichler said after the competitions.
Ellingson said that having trained with the national team athletes in the spring gave him confidence.
“I know that most of those guys will shoot faster than me,” he said. “But I know that when they shoot fast, especially early in the year like this, they can make mistakes. So it’s okay if I take my time and make sure I hit them.”
He also was grateful to end up skiing behind Sean Doherty, a World Junior Champion who has been on several international racing trips with Ellingson as a youth and a junior. A 2014 Olympian and now a World Cup racer, Doherty has experience that Ellingson doesn’t.
But he was a known quantity.
“Skiing behind Sean was nice,” Ellingson said. “He was trying to do the same thing, to control the range approach. And he’s obviously faster than I am and a stronger skier, but I’m getting closer.”
One of Ellingson’s photos from a training trip to Colorado. (Photo: Jake Ellingson/flickr)
Ellingson has been training primarily with Cervenka in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The longtime coach has offered his current star athlete a place in his house to live, and Ellingson only returns to the Twin Cities on rest weeks.
An avid and talented photographer, Ellingson doesn’t feel the need to cram any other pursuits into his schedule, so focusing on biathlon made sense.
“I don’t know what I’d study,” he laughed of the decision to defer college.
Despite training full time, he says his life is not getting dull.
“With Vlad we do a lot of different stuff,” he said of the shift to full-time training. “Not just too much skiing or too much running, we do a lot of biking and a little bit of swimming. We really spread it out and make it fun. It doesn’t seem too much like a job. Just going out and having fun training.”
As the oldest of Cervenka’s athletes, Ellingson knows that although he may be happy with his coach and enjoy helping out with the high school team, he needs a new challenge to continue his upward trajectory.
A group of Minnesota athletes who train with Vlad Cervenka on bagged the Grays and Torreys peaks in Colorao. Ellingson is at right and his sister Siena on the left. (Photo: Jake Ellingson)
“My goal is to get on the X Team or the Development Team so that I can be working with these guys more often,” he said of USBA’s two development programs. “I think that’s the next thing for me, is to spend more time training and racing with the top guys in the U.S.”
That’s very possible. Along with Russell Currier of the Maine Winter Sports Center, Ellingson has been invited to a testing week with the U.S. team in Lake Placid in September. (Casey Smith of the Craftsbury Green Racing Project was also invited, but will be training in Ramsau, Austria, with his team.)
There, it’s possible that either could get named to the American “B” team, which didn’t have any nominations this spring, or that Ellingson could be added to the X team.
“We are really pleased to see this,” Eisenbichler said of the level of all three of those athletes. “These guys showed now that they are ready to perform against the others… After that we see if we have a naming for the B team or what happens. But I think they see that if you perform, then you get a reward.”
And thanks to his strong finishes in Jericho, Ellingson is very much in the running for a pre-season camp in Utah (rescheduled from Canmore, where not enough snow is saved to guarantee skiing in late October). From there it’s possible, with more good performances, to move to a pre-World Cup camp in Sjusjøen, Norway.
The decision to focus on biathlon seems to be working out so far.
“I figure, school will still be there when I’m done,” Ellingson said. “And with biathlon it’s hard to really focus on it when you’re going to school because colleges in the U.S. don’t support it. It’s going well right now, so I don’t see any reason to stop.”
Want a blast from the past? Read some of our previous Pros of Tomorrow profiles:
Anna Kubek (Mount Itasca) racing in the United States last year. Photo: Gregory Haugen/HaugenPhoto.com.
It has been a busy few days for Anna Kubek and the rest of the American biathletes competing at Open European Championships. Ten days ago, they were still in the United States, getting ready for their first international tour of the year. Then they headed to Inzell, Germany, to train at the biathlon complex in Ruhpolding, which just hosted World Cup and then IBU Cup races.
“I really enjoy being in Europe again,” Kubek, who has raced on World Junior Championships and European Championships tours before, wrote in an e-mail. “We were in Inzell, Germany, from Jan. 21 through Jan. 26 and training in Ruhpolding. The day before we left for the Czech Republic, we raced in British Champs. It was good training to prepare us for Open Euro Champs.”
Two days ago, they moved to Nove Mesto, Czech Republic, and today Kubek and the other junior racers got their first starts. The senior (in this case, under-26) racers will start tomorrow.
Kubek started off strong, accumulating only two penalties in the 12.5 k individual competition today, where each missed shot is penalized by a minute of added time. And those two misses could easily have been hits: U.S. coach Vlad Cervenka reported that they were both splits, where part of the bullet hit the edge of the target and part hit the surrounding background.
As it was, Kubek placed sixth in the junior women’s race, just 14 seconds off the podium.
The two misses came in the second of four stages, after Kubek had cleaned the first stage; she kept her focus and hit the next ten targets in a row.
“The race today went great,” she wrote. “I stayed calm the whole race and after I missed two, I kept in mind that in biathlon, it’s not over until you cross the finish line. Shooting conditions were good with a slight wind.”
Her last clean shooting stage moved her from the teens into fifth place. As she headed back out onto course, she knew that she could earn a medal.
“I was told I was 5 or 6 seconds out of third,” she wrote. “It really motivated me and I don’t think I could have pushed much harder. The lactate in my legs burned and my heart rate was through the roof, but I knew I couldn’t stop fighting until I crossed the finish line.”
Russia’s Anastasia Evsyunina was the only competitor to shoot clean through all four stages and won by a landslide, racking up 1:51 over second-place Anastasiya Merkushyna of Ukraine, who had two penalties. There was another big gap to third-place Lisa Vittozzi of Italy, who had three penalties and finished 3:52 behind Evyunina. Kubek was 14 seconds behind that.
“Two split misses in the first standing cost her a medal,” U.S. coach Vlad Cervenka wrote in an e-mail. “But that is a biathlon. The level of competition in the junior category is very high and Anna skied well against older juniors – she is still youth. I’m excited to see how well Anna will do in sprint and pursuit this weekend.”
Kelsey Dickinson, the other U.S. competitor, placed 50th, closely followed by Erin Yungblut of Canada.
In the junior men’s 15 k, Christian Gow placed 23rd with five penalties. He was followed by teammates Brett Davie in 25th, Arthur Roots in 49th, and Matthew Hudec in 52nd.
For the Americans, Jacob Ellingson placed 51st with eight penalties. Brian Halligan finished 57th and Paul Everett 65th.
![](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2017/02/12604827_10153223707527331_890457644871841414_o.jpg")
![](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2016/02/Junior-women-Siena-Ellingson.jpg")
![Jake Ellingson of Mount Itasca Biathlon shot a flawless race in the mass start of the North American Rollerski Cup in Jericho, Vermont, to place second overall and the top American. (Photo: Paul Bierman)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/08/Jakob-Ellingson-Loppet-Nordic-Racing-mass-start.jpg")
![Ellingson (center) on the U.S. podium in Jericho, flanked by 2014 Olympians Sean Doherty (left) and Leif Nordgren. (Photo: Jake Ellingson)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/08/JerichoPodium.jpg")
![One of Ellingson's photos from a training trip to Colorado. (Photo: Jake Ellingson)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/08/JakeEllingson.jpg")
![A group of Minnesota athletes who train with Vlad Cervenka on bagged the Grays and Torreys peaks in Colorao. Ellingson is at right and his sister Siena on the left. (Photo: Jake Ellingson)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/08/MtItascaGroupTorreys.jpg")
![Anna Kubek (Mount Itasca) racing in the United States last year. Photo: Gregory Haugen/HaugenPhoto.com.](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/01/Anna-Kubek.jpg")