Coming off his best international finish at the 2022 IBU Youth & Junior World Championships at Soldier Hollow in Utah last week, the Whistler Nordic Development Centre’s (WNDC) Logan Pletz looks to continue his momentum at the National Championships in Prince George from March 11 to 17.
“I’m pretty stoked. I’m definitely pretty burnt out; I’ve been racing like twice, three times a week for two and a half months so I’m feeling it. I’m trying to rest up now to get there,” said Pletz.
“Those of us that went to World Juniors will be the four favourites for nationals this year, but it will definitely be a battle … with the four of us, some people are ahead some weeks and others are ahead on other weeks, so I think that it’s going to be a good competition and a lot of fun.”
Pletz, who finished 14th in the Junior Men’s 15-kilometre individual competition on Feb. 24, was one of three WNDC biathletes—along with Lucas Smith and Zach Connelly—to attend the Junior World Championships.
And while Pletz’s top-15 finish was the high mark for the Canadians in the individual events, the three WNDC products, as well as Canmore’s Reid Lovstrom, combined for a sixth-place finish in the 4x7.5 km relay event—the best finish for a Canadian team in about 10 years, according to Pletz.
Overall, the performance by each of the WNDC’s racers was something head coach Etienne Letondeur was proud of and represents some major progress for Canadian biathletes over the last few years.
“I think the main thing is we are now filling the gap that we had on the ski speed. Europeans used to be a lot faster than us, and the gap is filling. I think what’s showing this the most is the performance from Zach, who had the third and seventh best ski time in two of the competitions,” said Letondeur.
“And that just means that we are now able to compete with the best nations in the world on the ski speed, which was our main goal, to improve that. We’ve been working hard on it for the last three years and now the hard work is starting to pay off and that’s a very positive thing, because that means now when we can put things together on the shooting range, we’ll be close to the podium.
“Before that we didn’t have the ski speed to dream about that.”
When the National Championships get underway, Letondeur is hoping his team can sweep the podium at the junior level, but on top of that, he said he just wants the whole team to end the season on a high note and prove once again that the WNDC is one of the best biathlon programs in the country.
And while all eyes will be on Pletz, Smith and Connelly to snag some podium finishes, they aren’t the only names to watch, with some high-level youth athletes like 16-year-old Jasper Fleming, who is hungry to prove what he’s got after narrowly missing out on qualifying for the Junior Worlds, also set to compete.
Despite finishing the Junior World qualifying event at Sovereign Lake, B.C. with two third-place and one fifth-place finish, Fleming wasn’t selected for the team.
While he describes missing out on the Junior Worlds as a “massive bummer” and is using that disappointment as motivation for nationals, he said it’s not coming from a place of anger, but instead from a place of learning what he can do better in the future.
“It motivates me a lot. But instead of turning it into some super crazy motivation, I kind of took a different approach where I was like, ‘OK, so I know my mistakes I did at trials, I know what to improve on for nationals, so I’m going to work on those,’” he said. “So instead of turning it into this rage and anger that I think some people would because it’s obviously very upsetting and very justified, I try to make it more of a learning opportunity for me.”
While some WNDC athletes have been back and forth to competitions all year long, others, like 21-year-old Janice Grundahl, has just one competition under her belt so far this year when she competed at the same Sovereign Lake qualifiers.
Like Fleming, Grundahl also just missed out on a berth to the Junior Worlds, and with many of the other competitions this year being cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and flooding in certain areas, she could not be more excited to get back to competing and hopes to show what she can do on the national stage.
“I’m very excited. I’ve been training hard—I’ve actually gone harder than I’ve trained the past few years, so I think I am ready for this one. My goals for it are to ski as hard as I can, finish off the season on a good note and shoot as many targets down [as I can],” said Grundahl, who considers her shooting to be her biggest strength.
“There’s going to be some pretty strong competition. A few of the girls are definitely really fast this year as we’ve seen at World Juniors, but I’m very excited to go up against them again and I’m hoping to kind of redeem myself in a way. I’m hoping for a top-five performance, for myself, and hopefully a podium, but those are just results-based goals. I’m more trying to focus on the process of it all instead of a finishing place.”
Follow the action at pgnationals2022.ca.
