THUNDER BAY -- Graham Ritchie of the Thunder Bay National Team Development Center finished 12th at the Junior World Championships sprint on Sunday, clinching one of the best World Junior cross country skiing results in Canadian history.
The Owen Sound native is in his rookie season with NTDC Thunder Bay, one of three training centers for Canadian cross-country skiing, and has been a rising star on the national skiing circuit. Also a member of the Big Thunder Nordic Ski Club, Ritchie is competing in his first World Junior Championships, after qualifying for the Canadian team earlier this month at Olympic Trials in Mont St Anne, Quebec. The result puts Ritchie in elite company, as only the 3rd Canadian man to achieve a Top 12 World Junior result in the past 10 years.
After finishing 28th in the qualifying round, Ritchie found himself in tough competition against #8 qualifier Sergey Ardashev of Russia, who gapped the field on the course’s first climb. After trailing at the halfway point, Ritchie closed hard to challenge the leaders in the finishing straight. After a gutsy finishing sprint, Ritchie narrowly out lunged the competition to advance to the semi-final, where he went on to finish 6th against eventual champion Tom Mancini of France.
Ritchie is joined at the World Junior/U23 Championships by NTDC teammates Annika Richardson and Katherine Stewart Jones, both members of the Canadian National Ski Team, as well as NTDC Head Coach Timo Puiras, who was proud of Ritchie’s performance. “This result is definitely a big deal for Graham and the NTDC Thunder Bay program” he explains. “The Thunder Bay program has had several athletes the past few years who I feel have the capacity for this kind of result so it feels great when it all comes together to happen. This result should serve as fuel for our other athletes to find the confidence to also have similar success”.
Under Puiras, the NTDC program has had consistent success in qualifying skiers for World Championship and World Cup events, and the Thunder Bay team has been a dominant force on the domestic skiing scene this season. NTDC veteran Bob Thompson recently completed three weeks of racing on the FIS World Cup circuit, where he was part of the Canada 1 team that finished 13th in Dresden, Germany. Eleven of NTDC’s 14 athletes have qualified to race on the European circuit in February, where they will look for top results before hosting Canada’s best at the National Championships in Thunder Bay from March 10 to 17.
