BY KAREN BOSSICK

Sun Valley’s Jake Adicoff and Sam Wood added another gold medal to the fistful of medals as they finished the 2023 FIS Para Nordic World Championships in Ostersund, Sweden, on Sunday.

The two anchored a U.S. squad, staging a come-from-behind victory in the mixed 4x2.5-kilometer relay.

Adicoff and Wood began their leg in fourth place but sprinted to pass Canada and Germany before sneaking by Ukraine in the final straightaway to win the race by 4.5 seconds. Ukraine ended up with silver and Germany, bronze.

Two-time Paralympian Dani Aravich, a former track and field athlete from Boise who has trained in Sun Valley, raced the second leg of the relay for Team USA, enabling her to nab her first world championship in her third year on skis.

The gold medal was the second gold for the legally blind Adicoff and his guide Sam Wood. They also won a gold medal in the men’s visually impaired 1.2-kilometer cross-country sprint.

The two also won a silver medal in the 18-kilometer individual start classic and a silver medal in  the 10K individual start middle-distance cross country race

Team USA’s next major competition will be at the World Cup in March at Soldier Hollow, near Park City, Utah.

Adicoff now has three career world titles, having won the middle-distance cross-country event at last year’s world championships before heading to the Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing where he won three medals.

He was introduced to Nordic ski racing in 2002 through the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation.