February 20, 2012 (Szklarska Poreba, Poland) – A crew of North American athletes challenged for the invitational World Uphill Trophy yesterday in Poland on an 8km course with 3,700m of climbing and a vertical gain of 480m. When the dust settled Maurice Manificat (FRA) and Anastasia Slonova (KAZ) topped the men’s and women’s fields, respectively. Magnificat charged to victory in 30:53, followed by Christophe Perillat (FRA) in second at 9s back. Martin Bajcicak (SVK) finished third.

On the women’s side, Slonova logged the winning time of 37:17. Masako Ishida (JPN) trailed by only 8s to grab silver, while USA’s Liz Stephen scored the third podium spot. We caught up with Kikkan Randall (USA), Chandra Crawford (CAN), Andy Newell (USA), and Tad Elliott (USA) about the event…

Kikkan Randall
Liz was third today. She was leading after the uphill portion but got passed on the downhill. I actually didn’t get to see the race but I heard the conditions were pretty gnarly.

Chandra Crawford
Luckily I got a race in today at the Hill Climb here in Szlarska Poreba. Went hard and always satisfied when I get to work on climbing in powder, an area with lots of room to improve for me. Liz Stephen was first up the climb, she is completely amazing and super inspiring to see in action. Training up now for the classic sprint series in Lahti, Drammen, and Stockholm.

Tad Elliott
Andy and I both had a blast in the race. It was so much fun. The course was really crazy on the downhill. Andy and i both crashed twice. Andy had really hard downhill crashes and I only had one really hard downhill crash…a blast though. Our skis were so fast thanks to our wax techs it was awesome.

Andy Newell
Yeah we raced today. I was pretty tired but wanted to just give it a go to get in one more hard effort for the week.

Tuned out to be a really nasty day with high winds and snow. So it was a little bit of a battle out there. The hill was massive. Actually more climbing than the Alp Cermis and the soft conditions made it tough. The cool part about this race though was that you got to ski down the mountain too – but without ever previewing the course we didn’t really know what we were in for.

For me,  I was already out of the top 10 at the top, which was the money, so I had nothing to lose and could push it and have fun on the downhill which was awesome for the first part, but I ended up flying off course twice. They had like super G style gates set up. So I went for it and ended up blasting into the fenced twice and getting pretty tangled up. It wasn’t too bad but it was a lot of fun, and hopefully a lot of fun for people to watch.