November 23, 2014 (Gallivare, Sweden) – Canada’s Alex Harvey landed on the podium again claiming 3rd with teammate Devon Kershaw 5th in the men’s 10km CL at the SportEvent Gällivare competitions today in Sweden in the lead up to next weekend’s World Cup opener in Finland. Russia went 1-2 as Evgeny Belov did the honours with Sergey Ustiugov taking second.

Canuck, Ivan Babikov in 6th was happy with his performance tweeting….”Not too bad of an effort for the season opener for me and for the whole team.”

Harvey continues to show his good early season form telling Swedish reporters, “I feel good and our training for Kuusamo has been going well. It’s a really nice track here especially for classic. This is my first distance race of the season so it burns and the Russians are always tough. I feel good about my result as I usually have a hard time being fast before Xmas… so we’ll see.”

Kershaw who opted not race yesterday’s CL Sprint was not super happy with his result. “I felt like I skied well for 3/4 of the race and blew up badly after 3km of skiing with Belov (who passed me at 7.5km for 30sec and I stayed with him for 3km) which made the last lap a real struggle both mentally and physically after an output like that to try and hang on. There were positives and negatives for today,” he told Trax.

Fellow Canuck Graeme Killick finished 8th just behind Swedish star Marcus Hellner. Both Len Valjas and Jesse Cockney were not on today’s start line which featured a small field of 16 skiers.

Senior Development skier, Emily Nishikawa, showed her good early formed finishing just off the women’s podium in 4th as Petra Novakova (Cze) took the win leading a Czech sweep with Eva Vrabcova-Nyvltova in 2nd and Karolina Grohova 3rd.

“It was fun to get the first race of the season done today. I felt good for the first two laps of the race, skied with Petra (who won the race) for a lap, before I started to fade. It was a good start, but there is lots of room for improvement, and I am excited to test myself again next weekend in Kuusamo,” commented Nishikawa.

“Another good day for most today. Emily was solid the first lap but faded – hopefully she just needed a hard effort under her belt before next weekend. The boys were all solid. Alex was even all the way and he feels good about the race today,” said head coach Justin Wadsworth. “Devon started well, but said he faded a bit toward the end yet he looked good technically. Ivan looked good and kept a good pace throughout the whole race.

“Killick skied well and had a good ride from Ustagov that had him as high as 5th place after two laps. He faded a bit toward the end, but he was satisfied with this first race after travelling. The race that Belov had today was very good, so I think the speed of the top three finishers was at the level of a top result on WC,” he added.

Read more about SportEvent Gällivare Lapland here.

Results

Men

1. Evgenij Belov (Rus) 35:04.03
2. Sergey Ustiugov (Rus) 20.67
3. Alex Harvey (Can) 27.51
4. Stanislav Volzhentsev (Rus) 1:24.85
5. Devon Kershaw (Can) 1:25.28
6. Ivan Babikov (Can) 1:38.62

Women

1. Petra Novakova (Cze) 25:44.04
2. Eva Vrabcova-Nyvltova (Cze) 38.98
3. Karolina Grohova (Cze) 50.90
4. Emily Nishikawa (Can) 1:22.81
5. Tatjana Mannima (Est) 1:29.78

Women’s final results here.
Men’s final results here