Canmore Development Camp Gives Skiers Like Otis Loga A Kickstart To The Season

Otis Loga, a 20-year-old Vermont native, was ready to get back on the snow again this month after spending this past summer training on dryland.

That opportunity came when he joined a handful of other skiers for a weeklong training camp for developing athletes in Canmore, Alberta.

It has become an annual tradition for U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing to invite sit skiers, standing skiers and visually impaired skiers of all levels to train in Canmore in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. It’s a way to help them get ready for the start of the Para Nordic skiing season in the winter.

This was Loga’s third time participating in a training camp in Canmore. While there, he got to ski alongside Paralympic hopeful Ty Wiberg and learned from watching fellow sit skier and Paralympian Josh Sweeney in practice.

“Every season, this is like an official kickoff of the ski season. was excited to just get back on snow and see if my summer training has paid off and if I can see an improvement,” Loga said. “And (I was excited) also to just get off mountainboards and get off roller skis and be on snow. I was also more interested in seeing, ‘OK, where do I line up compared to everybody else?’”

While members of the U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing national team spent the entire month of November training in Canmore, the training camp for developing athletes ran from Nov. 16-23.

Eileen Carey, director of U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing, said she expected around 30 athletes — ranging from Paralympic gold medalists to relative newcomers to the sports — to participate in the camp.

“It’s a great opportunity to shift gears to winter,” Carey told USParaNordic.org prior to the start of the training camp. “For our more experienced athletes, they will be focusing on getting a lot of hours (of skiing) in. For the newer athletes, their focus will be a little more on the technical side of things.”

For Loga, the training camp gave him an opportunity to see how much progress he has made since he tried Para Nordic skiing for the first time three years ago in Canmore.

Back then, Loga was a cross-country runner for his high school in Vermont. He was preparing to compete in one of his last races of the season when he noticed that U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing had a table set up to introduce athletes to the sport.

Loga said he was curious and approached the table to learn more about sit skiing. He was then invited by U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing to participate in a training camp that it was hosting that winter in Canmore.

“I definitely see a huge improvement from three years,” Loga said. “I still have a lot of training and a long way to go. I’m definitely not the best, but I am more comfortable on snow now and I’m definitely a faster skier than if I was on two legs skiing.”

Loga said he received plenty of coaching in Canmore from both U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing staff members and other athletes. He also continued to work on improving his ski technique.

As part of the training camp in Canmore, all the athletes competed in a pair of Continental Cup races sanctioned by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. They completed a 5-kilometer race, then returned the following day for a 10K race.

Loga finished his 5K race in 25 minutes, 38 seconds — more than two minutes faster than a year ago — despite icy conditions on the course that caused him to fall several times.

“I am definitely a long-distance person, so the back-to-back races was not too bad for me,” Loga said. “Downhills are something that I’m still working on. So, when I got on snow, I was like, ‘Wait, my mountainboard had a brake, so how do I stop? Oh yeah, I’m on snow now.’ It’s different techniques on snow than a mountainboard.”

After recently returning home to Vermont from Canmore, Loga said he plans to spend this upcoming season skiing and working at the Snow Mountain Ranch in Granby, Colorado, like he did a year ago. He also intends to race as much as possible this winter.

“I’ll put my name in the hat for as many races as I can, local races and training camps as well,” Loga said.

Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USParaNordic.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.