Brushing off the rainy-day blues, APU’s Michael Earnhart wins SuperTour sprint

Michael Earnhart was not feeling it on Monday.

And who could blame him? Rain poured down on Anchorage as roads and sidewalks turned glossy and slick with ice — hardly ideal skiing weather.

But Earnhart, an APU elite team skier, found his groove by the time he took the starting line at Tuesday’s SuperTour sprint races.

Earnhart took the top spot on the podium on the 1.4K course with a time of 2 minutes, 51.9 seconds, edging out a tight group of racers in the six-skier final.

“I was hoping the race was going to be canceled,” Earnhart said. “I was feeling a little checked out yesterday. I think it showed today in the qualifier, I wasn’t quite in it yet. I kind of had to work into the day. But once we got into the heats, skiing next to people, then the competitive(ness) kind of came out again. All right, I’m racing.”

Earnhart said he would have been happy to reach the finals. After starting the season on the World Cup circuit, finishing a week of racing with his best performance was a major confidence boost.

“Getting (places) like 50s and 60s (in World Cup racing) doesn’t feel that good, so to come back here and having to win a race (was affirming),” he said. “OK, I still know how to race.”

The stadium at Kincaid Park was dotted with puddles as skiers, coaches and race officials delicately tiptoed over icy patches that just two days earlier were snowy for the final day of the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships.

While no national champions were crowned, Tuesday’s races were part of the larger event and Monday’s off-day allowed race officials to prepare for the impending soaking.

“It’s nothing that is any different than a lot of these skiers have faced in their careers,” said Matt Pauli, the event’s chief of competition. “And I knew it was coming. That’s the cool thing about weather forecasting now. It’s a lot more accurate and I knew what was going to happen in regards to water in the stadium. We started realigning everything last night before we did any trail prep.”

That didn’t mean Pauli was thrilled with what he saw Tuesday morning leading up to the 10 a.m. start of the race.

“It was raining to beat hell and the wind was blowing hard,” he said. “You couldn’t see anything and you start looking at water (on the ground). My fear was because the ground was so hard, this was going to be solid ice, but the air temperature brought it up.”

Pauli said the race jury met Tuesday morning and, with safety being the main determining factor, decided to race on Tuesday. Aside from moving the starting line to avoid a patch of sitting water, the sprint course ran just fine. Pauli said that had it been a longer course — or a classic race that necessitated tracks — it may have been a different story.

Kate Oldham earned a national title on Thursday and added a podium finish on Tuesday. Like Pauli, she feared that after a day of rain, the freeze would make Kincaid Park a big sheet of ice.

“I don’t know how they kept it in such good shape but it was pretty amazing,” she said. “Gong Hill was definitely getting slushy, but I’ve done way worse at Junior Nationals. Whatever the race crew did was pretty amazing.”

Earnhart grew up racing at Kincaid and was happy to be able to race in front of friends and family over the past week.

“I think the races turned out quite well,” he said. “I’m really proud of the Nordic Ski Association of Anchorage for putting this all together.”

The winner of the women’s race was another skier very familiar with the terrain at Kincaid Park.

Former UAF skier Mariel Merlii Pulles edged Erica Laven by three hundredths of a second in a photo finish. Her time of 3:11.63 was good enough to earn her first win of the season after a rash of runner-up finishes.

“I’ve been second three times this season, so I had to get a first-place today,” she laughed.

Pulles, skiing for Team Birkie, won the quarterfinal and semifinal heat races. Like Oldham, she was shocked by the condition of the course.

“I don’t know how they managed to pull off this nice course,” she said. “I was a little bit scared it was going to be really slushy with puddles everywhere, but they did an amazing job.”

Pulles, who finished her master’s degree at UAF in climate security, is headed back to her native Estonia on Wednesday for the first time in 18 months. She said she will continue to finish out the season with Team Birkie and may try to find a job in the U.S.

“I’m going to ski through the season and then decide,” she said. “You never know what happens.”