Sapporo: Cancer survivor Fletcher gets NC start

Cancer survivor Bryan Fletcher of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, will compete Friday in his first World Championships event — the nordic combined sprint, which includes ski jumping outside and a 7.5 km race in the Sapporo Dome.
SAPPORO, Japan — Cancer survivor Bryan Fletcher of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, will compete Friday in his first World Championships event — the nordic combined sprint, which includes ski jumping outside and a 7.5 km race in the Sapporo Dome.
    The unheralded Fletcher, diagnosed at 3 with acute lymphatic leukemia and having undergone a year of chemotherapy, will be joining two three-time Olympians — former sprint world champion Johnny and Bill Demong — and 2006 Olympic competitor Eric Camerota.
    The jumping will begin at 1 a.m. ET with the indoors/outdoors sprint action at the dome beginning a 5 a.m. ET. The cross-country races begin indoors and head out through a wall which has been removed, and then the course leads back into the dome for the final charge to the finish.

In between the combined jumping and the cross-country finale, the men’s and women’s team sprints (free technique) and qualifying for Saturday night’s large-hill ski jumping will take place.
    The team (i.e., two-skier) cross-country sprint begins at 2 a.m. ET at the dome and jump qualifying will start at 4 a.m. ET at the Okurayama jumping hill. Clint Jones and Alan Alborn will attempt to qualify in jumping while the cross-country tandems will be Andy Newell and Torin Koos in the men’s event and Kikkan Randall teamed with Laura Valaas in the women’s competition.
    “The atmosphere in the dome is unreal. It’s crazy,” Newell said after finishing fifth Thursday night in the classic technique sprint, which opened the championships. “Before we raced in finals, the organizers lined us up and we marched out to the start like gladiators; the people went wild.” The crowd of some 30,000 was bigger than the Olympic crowd a year ago in Pragelato Plan, Italy.

The technical delegate for cross-country races is John Aalberg, co-designer of the 2002 Olympic trails at Soldier Hollow, Utah, and on-site supervisor for the trails he and Norwegian Hermod Bjoerkestoel have designed for the 2010 Olympics in the Callaghan Valley, north of Vancouver.
    Aalberg, a native Norwegian who came to the United States more than two decades ago to ski and run cross-country for the University of Utah, is a former U.S. ski champion who gained his American citizenship before the 1992 Olympics. He also raced in Lillehammer, Norway, in 1994 before retiring. He is married to former women’s speedskiing record-holder Kirsten Culver; they have one daughter.

The 2007 World Championships mark the first standalone nordic worlds in Japan, although the 1972 Winter Olympics were held in the era when the Winter Games doubled as World Championships. Olympic medalists received the same medals as World Championships podium performers, too; gold medalists were — and still are — recognized as both Olympic champion and world champion.
    The 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, were the last time the Olympics served as World Championships; standalone worlds began with the 1985 season and have been held in odd-numbered years since then … except for the 1996 alpine championships, which were postponed a year because of poor snow in Sierra Nevada, Spain.