Junior Olympic Nordic ski championships

Ski carrier with bumper stickers

More stickers on car top carrier

Theodore Wirth Park, in Minneapolis, has been hosting the Junior Olympic Nordic championships this week.  While this is a big event in the world of Nordic skiing, it received all of 2 1/2" of column space in today's Star Tribune.  This is about 2% of one sports page, or less than .02% of the total sports section.  No pictures were included in the report, only the top three places for each of the classic and freestyle events.

One of the local favorites, Jessie Diggins won her older junior girls 5K freestyle race by nearly a minute over the second place finisher.  Sorry Jessie, your fleeting reference on page 11 didn't rate as high as a picture of Goldy, the University of Minnesota's mascot, tackling a football player on page 2.  Go figure!?

A life time sport, like Nordic skiing, is something we should be encouraging more than we do in this country.  The discipline of an endurance sport also seems to complement academics. The team our daughter, Rachel, skis on at Armstrong High School had an average GPA of better than 3.75.

Coincidentally, while the ski meet was going on this morning, I was in the neighborhood, at the Breck Ice Arena, playing boot hockey.  Spectators were being shuttled to nearby Theodore Wirth from the ice arena parking lot.  I took pictures of one of the ski carriers in the parking lot this morning.