World Cup Racers Compete at NCAA Champs in Stowe
All season long, Canadian ski team racer Laurence St. Germain and U.S. ski team’s Paula Moltzan have been competing against each other on the World Cup. This week the good friends and teammates at the University of Vermont were cheering for each other as both helped the Catamounts score points in the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships for skiing, held in Stowe.
It wasn’t a World Cup, but it was pretty darn close. On Thursday, March 7, some of the top ski racers in the world sliced down the course on Spruce Peak as Vermont hosted the first NCAA Championship in eight years. While 22 colleges participated and the race is a challenge between teams, halfway through the event it looked more like a showdown between the U.S. and Canadian national teams in the bright sun and bitter cold.
University of Vermont’s Catamounts alone fielded two World Cup racers on its women’s team. Laurence St. Germain, a Canadian Olympic veteran currently ranked 12 in the World Cup slalom standings, skied to first place in Thursday’s giant slalom. Just behind her, was another Canadian, University of Utah’s Roni Remme who is fresh off a silver medal in alpine combined at the World Cup in Crans-Montana, Switzerland on Feb. 24., and UVM’s Paula Moltzan, a U.S. Ski teamer also competing on the World Cup in fifth. In between, were Trisha Mangan a Dartmouth ski racer with World Cup points and Colorado U.’s Mikaela Tommy, another Canadian Ski Team racer.
In the men’s giant slalom, Dartmouth dominated with Swiss World Cup racer Tanguy Nef continuing his winning NCAA season. Dartmouth skiers James Ferri and Drew Duffy, a U.S. Ski Team veteran out of Waitsfield took third and fourth – with DU’s Tobias Kogler in fifth.
Photo: U.S. Ski Team
Meanwhile, the day before, the cross-country teams had competed in freestyle at the Trapp Family Lodge. There too the Catamount’s Evelina Sutro, who is half Swedish, turned in the best finish, of 3rd, with the win going to Utah’s Julia Richter. Katherine Ogden, a Vermont native who’s on the U.S. Team, skied for Dartmouth and finished fourth. In the men’s race, Bill Harmeyer was the top scoring Catamount with a fifth.
The combined results put University of Vermont in third place overall going into the third day of races, with 245 points behind University of Utah (252) and leader, Dartmouth (259).
Today, the Nordic teams compete at Trapp Family Lodge again in classic races and the final race will be the slalom, tomorrow, again at Stowe’s Spruce Peak.
Click here for live broadcasts and full results, see: https://www.ncaa.com/news/skiing/2019-03-05/ncaa-skiing-championships-schedule-live-stream-results-and-highlights
Opening photo: UVM computer science major Laurence St. Germain competing for Canada at the 2018 Women’s World Cup in Killington. Photo by Angelo Lynn.
