Saint Ulrich am Pillersee

The FISTC Sprint European Championships 2016 started yesterday, Thursday 21st January with the usual Vet check and FISTC documents controls.

Here, in this beautiful mountain village, everything is perfectly organised by local staff under the supervision of Eddy Nutz, together with Mushing Holland Sport Club driven by Frans Weisscher and Ono De Jong, two dynamic hard workers, and the FISTC team.

We are lucky, in this warm and bad winter to have here such perfect conditions with excellent snow, cold temperatures (-17° last night) and beatiful and sunny days.

In the evening, after the delegates meeting, the nice opening ceremony was followed by a party with typical and excellent Dutch food offered to all participants, that are more than 120, and friends by Mushing Holland.

Today (Friday), after the cold night, all trails perfectly prepared by Uwe Schott and his team, looked very fast and they were indeed. Almost all participants and their dogs enjoyed running in such a beautiful place with such a good snow.

In Ski-Jöring 2 dogs men, Marcel Matanin (SLK) is the leader closely followed by Sebastian Astelbauer (A) and Igor Stefan (SLK). SJ 2 dogs women class is leaded by Nathalie Roland (F) in front of Susanne Noppe-Haller (A). SJ 1 dog SH is a Slovak class in which Roman Reistetter is the leader but Michal Ivanco is follwing him closely. In SJ 1 dog SH women, the daughter, Carla Reistetterova (junior) is the leader. The SJ 1dog2 class is leaded by Klaus Bäumel (A) with a Greenland dog and the SJ 1dog2 women by Helga Obrist (A) with her Alaskan Malamute.

In the O class, as the trail was too fast, Frans Weisscher started with only 10 dogs instead of 14 but he is first, having been 8" faster than Loris Bottega (I) with his 12 SH.In A class, the Austrian Karl Rachbauer is first but there is a strong competition with the second, French Jean Claude Peru and the Danish Knud Schmolz.

The first five teams in the B1 class are from the Netherlands ! The first one being Carel Van de Mortel. In B2 class Bernd Sauerhöfer is first, I would say as usual, but Zbiniew Heczko (CZR) closely follows him.

Another Van de Mortel, Gudrun, is the leader of the C1 Class, but Ugo del Nevo will do his best to catch her... In C2, another Dutch musher Ron De Ruitter is the leader. Thomas Reuter (A) is leading D1 class, and Bernd Kirstein (D) the D2 class.

Just a pity that some mushers made a mistake on the trail and had a penalty.

Tonight it is freezing again and trails will be at least as fast tomorrow and we expect another fantastic racing day.