Points and Support in the XC World

Alan Eason is possibly the most experienced British cross country skier and the following is his reflection on the costs and types of races available. I have added some additional material found in the { } brackets. If you have other info to add to this please let me know or add it in. This is what the knowledge bank is about.

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Hello, as far as I understand it, OPA/COC are the only races supported by FIS, as this is the way into World Cups. {COC = continental cup; OPA = organisation des alps, which is one of the groups that organises Continental cup races in central Europe.}

Saying that, there is still only limited funding for teams, I think it is
up to 6 athletes at OPA races, and then you have to be a Alpine Nation, i.e
Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italia, and a few more. So GB will not get funding for OPA races, but will get the accommodation at the set price of 50 - 60 euro per night for the time of the event. This is set down within the rules of COC/World Cup/World Championships.

When I raced at the World Championships, FIS paid all cost for the accommodation, but I had to race in all the events to get this, if you only do one event then you pay for most of the accommodation, and it gets less the more races that you do. {FIS rules state that the organisers must give free accommodation to any skier with less than 75 pts, or for 1 skier for each nation that doesn’t have anyone with less than 75. The skier gets 4 days free accommodation for each race entered.}

The reason that OPA and COC races are the best ones to do, is that they have good prize money, and points that will allow the top three to make a start in one of the World Cup races. This is not the case with America, Canada, Norway cups. {In Canada the continental cup equivalent is “Nor-Ams”; Norway has Norge Cup and some Scandinavian cups}

There are also no entry costs to OPA / COC races, and World Championships and World Cup, FIS have set a budget for each race and the race town will be paid by FIS to hold the event.

You some times have to pay at FIS races, but I have only had to pay a few times, they will charge large teams for entry (I think over 6 athletes), so we need to understand that if we do send a full team to a race, we may get charged at FIS level.

To get support from FIS, you need to be good, and be in the top 10 of a
OPA/COC race, which would mean that you would be on the world cup anyway and have support from FIS.

OPA / COC races are full of athletes that have easily gone under 50 FIS points, and still not at the standard to set by the ski federation to race at World Cup level. {generally the standard for World Cup is set on your average or ‘FIS points listing’} This is why you stand the best chance of getting good FIS points, as most athletes have very low FIS points. Hence, that is the reason that nearly all countries are racing in the OPA/COC races, and my self.

Also they have very low penalty points at OPA races, unlike some of the races in Norway, America, Canada. But saying that there is still a chance to get low FIS points in Canada and Norway, but it is not as good as Europe.

I hope that this helps, it is no easy to get money from FIS, unlike the
IBU, at a COC race for biathlon each athlete is paid to race, and can be as
much as 700 euro per event, and you will get paid at World Cup level 700 Euro
per event, no matter how bad you are. This is why most young athletes want to do biathlon as there is a living to be made at the sport, unlike cross country.

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I’ll be adding some info about how the points work soon.

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