COOMA cross country ski talent Bentley Walker-Broose is set to return to university in Australia after completing a "much better than last" Northern Hemisphere Australian representative racing campaign and already has his sites set on the 2024-25 season.

Walker-Broose, who fell victim to overtraining syndrome last year and required time off to recover, said he was pleased with his results at the Goms and Minneapolois World Cups, World under 23 Championships in Planica Solevnia and several rounds of American supertours between November and February.

"My Northern season was much better than last," he said.

"I still have a long way to go in terms of speed but am generally moving in the right direction. I am hoping to be fighting hard again in the 2024/25 ski season."

Overtraining syndrome is common in athletes of all levels and causes chronic fatigue that can only be fixed with extensive testing and time off.

"This meant I had to have several months off at the start of 2023 to recover. Only after I was cleared was I allowed to train again and even then it was a very slow progression into proper hard training again, as once you've had it once if you don't recover well then it can come back quite quickly."

In Goms, Walker-Broose raced his first World Cup since 2021 and finished in 70th place in the sprint.

Walker-Broose, who is studying sports science in Canberra and aims to work as a ski coach when his racing days are over, still has Cooma as a home base but has spent a lot of time in Canberra for university and Sun Valley Idaho for altitude training during the past few years.

He races on the American domestic circuit for the team he trains with in the USA, the SVSEF Gold team, but anything other than that he races for Australia. He is coached in the USA by Chris Mallory and Australian head coach Alexei Sotskov.

"I will be coming back to go to university, and jumping back on the training schedule to get as fit as possible for next season leading into the world championships," he said.

"I will be back for majority of the Australian winter as I believe its really important to stay part of the community and be there as much as possible for the upcoming generations of skiers to show where skiing can take them.

"I will be racing for as long as I still love to race! I have no plans of stopping anytime soon and am super keen to push for as long as I can. Im still young and have a lot of fight in me. "

Walker-Broose started cross country skiing in Kindergarten (once per year) with Dalgety Public School under the leadership of Marg Hayes. From then he was doing it very rarely and racing in Interschools competitions for school teams ("I wasn't very strong then"). I started to get more committed to cross country skiing once I was 13 years old when I decided to do more racing outside of Inter schools."

He said his preferred event within the nordic ski classification used to be skating over 10km with individual starts, but this season the classic 10km individual starts had grown on him.

As to his favorite place to ski. He said he love skiing in the USA (when the snow is good) but Sweden or Finland are really up there for the pure atmosphere.