Three Alaska Olympic veterans are brushing off their skis in Scandinavia as the last full World Cup season before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver gets under way.

Nordic skier Kikkan Randall of Anchorage, America's best female cross country skier ever, delivered a promising World Cup performance in Kuusamo, Finland, on Sunday, finishing 23rd in the women's 10-kilometer classic race for her best result ever in an international distance race.

Randall is known primarily as a sprinter, and a year ago in Rybinsk, Russia, won the first World Cup race by an American woman in a freestyle sprint. She was the only American woman to race on Sunday.

"Today was Kikkan's best distance race ever, so we're really happy about that," U.S. cross-country coach Pete Vordenberg told The Associated Press. "Her best results are obviously in sprint. Her fitness is definitely there, and she's podium potential for sure."

Randall opened her World Cup campaign on Saturday by finishing 33rd in a classic-style sprint race. In a tightly bunched field, she was just 0.6 seconds from advancing to the quarterfinals.

Randall noted "it's an odd occurrence when my distance result outdoes my sprint result in a World Cup weekend," but by late Sunday, she was thrilled.

"Today was a great race for me, my first time scoring World Cup points in a distance race," she wrote by e-mail from Finland. "It's been a goal of mine for a long time to crack into the top 30 in a World Cup distance race, and it's exciting to make it happen in the first distance race of the year."

In just a few hours, the disappointment she woke with Sunday after a sprint race had vanished.

"I didn't feel particularly good warming up before the race, either," she wrote. "I started with an even pace and got faster through the race. I felt really strong on the steep climbs and was able to take full advantage of my strength with really good skis. I knew I was having a solid race, but even when I finished, I didn't expect to be in the top 30.

"It was a nice surprise."

For her coach too. Just a day earlier, Vordenberg warned reporters "it might take a little time" before Randall began to duplicate the form she showed last season.

Racers on the circuit will aim to amass World Cup points this season while preparing for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, which open in just 15 months.

Randall is happy to be healthy and skiing well again after landing in the hospital in late March when doctors discovered a huge blood clot stretching from her knee to her stomach.

Doctors attempted to dissolve the clot, but a larger one formed. A second attempt to eliminate it apparently worked, and she was back on skis in May.

Now she's back on the World Cup circuit.

"I'm happy with my fitness level and confident," she said. "It's been seven months since my blood clot incident, and I definitely have a greater appreciation for my health and being able to race."

She'll have plenty of opportunities for that. Randall's schedule includes six World Cup sprints -- twice as many as last season -- and the U.S. National Championships in familiar Kincaid Park.

Perhaps most important are a World Cup race on the 2010 Olympic course in Whistler, British Columbia, the national championships at Kincaid and a skate sprint at the World Championships in February.

"It's important to establish ourselves as medal contenders and really get everything dialed in," Randall said. "Everyone always focuses on the Olympic year, but it's what we do this season that will really set the stage."

On Wednesday, biathletes Jeremy Teela of Anchorage and Jay Hakkinen of Kasilof are scheduled to start their World Cup schedule with a race in Ostersund, Sweden.

For them too, this is an important season. Provided both men qualify for the U.S. Olympic team that will race next winter in British Columbia, those Winter Games would be the fourth for Hakkinen, the 31-year-old Kasilof High grad, and the third for Teela, the 31-year-old Service grad and 1995 state Skimeister.

Hakkinen, in particular, has endured a roller-coaster ride over his long career -- with stirring races and dismal efforts packed into the same season, sometimes the same week.

At the Turin Olympics in 2006, for instance, Hakkinen was in position for a medal in the 20-K individual race until a split bullet veered ever-so-slightly off target, costing him a penalty lap and dropping him to 10th place. In the 10-K sprint during those same Olympics, he missed five shots and finished 80th.

Last year, Hakkinen had the best season-opening race of his long career, a ninth-place finish in the 20-K, and ended it in 89th place at the World Championships in Ostersund.

Teela is attempting to rebound from perhaps the worst season of his career in which he struggled to remain qualified for World Cup starts and his best finish was 49th.

"When you put in all of that hard work and the end result is less, it is disappointing," Teela said in a press release from U.S. Biathlon. "I spent a lot of last year in kind of a hole where I was really tired, and that affected me from the start."

Teela is particularly upbeat, though, about the potential of the U.S. men's relay team of team leader Tim Burke, Lowell Bailey, Hakkinen and himself.

"(It used to be we'd) get smoked in first couple of stages, and we'd be fighting for last place.'' Teela said. "Now it's different. We know that even on a bad day, our team is going to be in the mix."

With a group of talented young biathletes coming up, Hakkinen and Teela aren't assured a spot on the Olympic team and would love to qualify early. Two top-15 finishes in World Cup races or a top-30 finish in the final season standings would do just that.