The Finnish Alpine Ski Team held its traditional early season media day in Helsinki Tuesday. The Finnish Alpine team is small, consisting of Tanja Poutiainen, Merle Soppela, Andreas Romar and Marcus Sandell along with head coaches Christian Brüesch (ladies) and Janez Slivnik (men).

“All seems to be well at this time and it is a real pleasure to work with professional athletes. We are a small but fine team. The preparations have gone really well and we have enjoyed good training conditions both in New Zealand and Central Europe,” stated Brüesch

Tanja Poutiainen too is satisfied with her training camps.

“We have been able to train according to the plans all summer, both on snow and dryland. We have tried to introduce some new things which of course means that some others will need to be left out. The team has taken a different form with the newcomers but we enter the new season full of energy,” commented Poutiainen.

The Finnish men’s team has been training in South America where both the A and B teams were training in Ushuaia. Head Coach Slivnik is especially happy about the development of the young racers and is convinced they will challenge Romar and Sandell in near future.

“We have several young racers coming up to the World Cup soon. The progress during last season was in the right direction and we intend to stick to that this year. Those racing World Cup this season will have the first group as their goal and through that there will be a chance to fight for the top spots,” said Slivnik.

In Sölden Finland has two starting places for the men, one of which belongs to Marcus Sandell. The other racer will be named after the final  training camps and a potential qualification race.

“I will be going at it at full speed in Sölden and feel confident about my current skiing. In the next two weeks we will work to find the optimal set up for the equipment for the always challenging glacier race and I am sure I can do well in Sölden although it is not my favorite event,“ noted Sandell..

Andreas Romar has trained more speed events this summer than ever before. He is full of praise for the German team with which the Finnish team cooperates starting with this season.

“The speed side is working really well right now. I had a good number of speed days on snow in South America and also feel that my GS is getting there. It has been great to train with the Germans. It has been fun and the guys are great," said Romar and admitted that his German language learning has recently mostly focused on swear words…

Source: Ski Sport Finland

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