Rollerski: no Dupaski Festival this year
After two magnificent first editions in 2022 and 2023, the Dupaski Festival – a rollerski event organised by the Swiss Arnaud Du Pasquier – was due to hold its third edition on 12 and 13 October. As revealed last May, the programme included an urban sprint on the Saturday and an uphill mass-start race on the Sunday.
Unfortunately, the Swiss neo-biathlete has had to cancel his Dupaski Festival.“We’ve finally taken the difficult decision to postpone the event until next year, or even the year after,” he tells Nordic Magazine, after spending the entire summer in Lillehammer (Norway), training alongside the biathletes from Norway’s national B team.
“There are many reasons for this, says Arnaud Du Pasquier, “because we’ve had trouble securing the necessary resources: roller skis, accommodation, finances and staff.More importantly, our festival has always had a special objective: to bring together people from all over our beautiful community. That’s what we call the human side of skiing.”
“The Dupaski Festival is not dead, it’s just taking a break!”
This year, meeting this objective was made more difficult by the cancellation by the city of Lausanne (Switzerland), where the Dupaski Festival was due to take place, of the event to which the ski-wheel weekend was to be added.
“We looked for solutions, such as concentrating on fewer races and not providing accommodation, unlike in previous years, says the Swiss. But as we continued planning, we realised that what the Dupaski Festival was becoming this year was simply not what we wanted it to be.”
And so the difficult but courageous decision to cancel was taken at the end of the summer. “Last year’s edition was fantastic, and it would be a shame to follow it up with a mediocre event of just two races without a banquet, activities and all the other magical moments that make the Dupaski Festival so unique for the participants and for us as organisers,” he says.
However, Arnaud Du Pasquier, who is currently finishing his biathlete preparation with next month’s Swiss selections in his sights, is making a promise: “The Dupaski Festival is not dead, it’s just taking a break! We’ll be back with an even more ambitious programme than ever.”
- The Engadin photo album La Diagonela Summer Challenge, the Dupaski Festival hill-climb race
- The photo album of the Condair Showsprint, the skate sprint at the Dupaski Festival
- The photo album of the Porsel Criterium, the classic long-distance race of the Dupaski Festival
- “For a while, I thought I could have Paal Golberg at the start of the races”: behind the scenes of the Dupaski Festival 2023 with Arnaud Du Pasquier, the event’s patron
