FasterSkier

Tag: discretionary selections

  • Nordic Nation: All Criteria Considered with Grover and Kaeding

    Nordic Nation: All Criteria Considered with Grover and Kaeding

    In late August, U.S. Ski Team (USST) Head Coach Chris Grover broke his own news, releasing three new sets of criteria on behalf of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, the national governing body for cross-country skiing. The three separate documents discussed by Grover and linked in his blog disclosed the selection criteria for World Cup and World Cup Period 1 team selection,  2019 World Ski Championships (WSC) in Seefeld, Austria, and the 2019/2020 national team.

    U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover (front) with (from left to right) Simi Hamilton, Paddy Caldwell, Erik Bjornsen, and Ian Torchia on top of the Roc Cornafion above Villard-de-Lans, France, during a training camp this summer. (Photo: Chris Grover)

    Grover and new USST development coach Gus Kaeding spoke with FasterSkier for its podcast on Sept. 11 to highlight some of the updated criteria and provide context for the modifications.

    (A lightly edited conversation with Grover and Kaeding is available on the Nordic Nation podcast. Warning: you may want to time your listening for a 1.5-hour road trip or dish duty after a crowded dinner party. It’s a lengthy discussion.)

    New U.S. Cross Country Development Coach Gus Kaeding. (Photo: Sarah Brunson/U.S. Ski & Snowboard)

    World Cup Selection Criteria

    Considering World Cup Period 1 starts, Grover stated in the following interview and in accordance with the selection criteria, the discretionary picks were made in consult with a larger working group. That group is comprised of four national-team staff coaches — Grover, Matt Whitcomb, Jason Cork, and Kaeding — as well as Dakota Blackhorse-von Jess (athlete rep), August Teague (chair of the cross-country coaches sub-committee), and eight senior club coaches: Chris Mallory (Sun Valley Gold Team), Erik Flora (Alaska Pacific University), Joe Haggenmiller (Central Cross Country), Pepa Miloucheva (Craftsbury Green Racing Project), Austin Caldwell (formerly of the Bridger Ski Foundation, now assisting the University of Colorado-Boulder Ski Team), Dragan Danevski (BSF), Pat O’Brien (Stratton Mountain School T2 Team), and Dan Weiland (Ski Club Vail).

    According to Grover, this 14-person working group was tasked with helping develop WSC and World Cup selection criteria. Further, this group, which again includes the four USST staff coaches, remains responsible for nominating the discretionary picks for each World Cup period this season.

    Once those World Cup Period 1 nominations were made, they were sent to a three-person discretionary selection review group with the authority to approve or disapprove those nominations.

    The language in the World Cup selection criteria, as it refers to this smaller group, reads as follows: “All discretionary selections will be reviewed by a discretionary selection review group comprised of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Nordic Program Manager, the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Chief of Sport, and the athlete representative from that sport who is a member of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Board. If the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Board Athlete Representative is also a currently competing athlete then another athlete, who is not actively competing, will be selected by the Athletes’ Council to be the representative in this group.”  

    In a follow-up email, Grover clarified who serves on the discretionary selection review group. “This would normally be Bryan Fish, Luke Bodensteiner, and Rosie Brennan. Because Rosie is an active athlete, Dakota has replaced her,” Grover explained.

    The other changes to World Cup selection that Grover cited in his original blog post are as follows and discussed in the podcast:

    • The standard by which men advance from one World Cup period to the next from top 30 to top 40 to reflect the greater depth in the men’s WC field.
    • Addition of SuperTour leaders as guaranteed starts to the Tour de Ski.
    • Addition of language to the past criteria for selecting a World Cup Finals team in Quebec City, including:
      • Top-30 individual performance at the Seefeld World Champs (the previous standard was top 25).
      • Created a best 11 of 14 SuperTour results selection to round out the World Cup Finals team, to encourage athletes to continue to race in Europe mid-season, rather than feeling the need to attend every SuperTour competition.

    World Ski Championships Criteria

    Come late February, the World Championships begin. In a personal blog published on FasterSkier, Grover noted the key changes to the current WSC selection criteria.

    The World Cup remains the most direct path to meeting objective criteria for WSC team nomination.

    Discretionary selection is divided into two phases: Phase 1 and Phase 2. The phases refer to the use of coaches’ discretion once objective criteria have been applied to WSC team selection.

    As FasterSkier understands the criteria, Phase 1 will be used to discretion solidly performing World Cup skiers who have not met objective criteria. Phase 1 reads much like recent 2017 Lahti and 2015 Falun WSC discretionary criteria. The current language allows for some latitude when considering potential team discretionary picks. An indication of potential future championship medal performance, as well as any outstanding competition results from last season and the 2018/2019 season, are tools for coaches making discretionary picks.  

    However, the “attitude and commitment of athletes” language included in the past as a possible factor in discretionary selection was excluded from the latest iteration of WSC selection criteria.

    The discretionary selections made by USST team coaches in Phase 1 will be reviewed by a three-person group including the U.S. Ski & Snowboard President and CEO Tiger Shaw, Bodensteiner, and the U.S. Ski & Snowboard board athlete rep as long as they are not actively competing. Another non-competing athlete will be chosen as a replacement if this conflict of interest arises. During the 2018 OWG selection, for example, former USST member Holly Brooks served as the athlete rep. Brooks was retired from competition when she served as part of the review committee. 

    For any remaining team spots, Phase 2 of discretionary selection “may” be used. This is where the selection of SuperTour skiers comes into play. Grover, in his blog, said the selection of domestic skiers from SuperTour could be perceived as the biggest change.

    Phase 2 can but is not obligated to consider the 2019 Championship Selection List and the “next best athlete” in what the criteria define as a “pool” of athletes. The “pool” is separated into four discrete disciplines: women’s distance, women’s sprint, men’s distance, and men’s sprint.

    The criteria also specify the “next best athlete” as “the highest ranked athlete on the ranking list in each of the four disciplines who was not nominated to the team.”

    The 2019 Championship Selection List will be created using an athlete’s best two results in sprint and distance respectively with points accrued from SuperTour races and weighted U.S. National Championships races. (Sprint points for the Championship Selection List consider qualification place only.)

    The athlete pools allow for the USST head coach to select an athlete from a refined list based on sex and discipline, rather than a single men’s or women’s list.

    During the interview, Grover explained his rational behind Phase 2 Discretionary Selection and the use of pools.

    “We obviously found ourselves last year in a situation going into the Olympics where we were feeling compelled, due to the language in the criteria, to look at selection as one list of athletes,” hesaid. “And to look at athletes who had more points in any discipline, whether they were a man or a woman, a distance skier or a sprinter, as the next best athlete to be nominated to the team. By moving the secondary or domestic selection from an objective domestic selection to a discretionary selection, it gives us coaches discretion to be able to select from the correct pool to fill an open start spot. So if we know that we need to fill a men’s 50 k skate spot, we can look to the men’s distance list and not to an overall combination of women’s and men’s distance and sprint lists. So this is kind of a creative way that we feel is going to solve the issue that we had last year. The USOC [U.S. Olympic Committee] has given us the thumbs up, to go ahead and pursue, and we are hoping that it selects more of the right athletes at the bottom of the selection.”  

    The process for selecting athletes in Phase 2 appears streamlined. Grover recommends an athlete from the “pools” and the three-person selection committee makes the selection. The criteria also specify that potential WSC team athletes chosen during Phase 2 should have attained a minimum World Rank (FIS points) of 120 in sprint or distance by the release of FIS points list 5 for this upcoming season.

    In the past, athletes have contacted coaches to advocate for themselves. The updated WSC criteria provide guidelines by which athletes can contact Bodensteiner directly in writing as a means of self-advocacy. Those direct petitions are potentially considered by the selection committee.  

    For athletes with a grievance with WSC team selection, the criteria also provide contact information for the USOC Athlete Ombudsman Kacie Wallace. Athletes can contact the USOC for assistance when challenging their non-selection.

    In this instance, when it comes to the WSC and team selection, the USOC has oversight since the WSC selection criteria involve “protected competitions”. Both World Cups and the WSC are protected competitions by definition. 

    From USOC Bylaws, Section 1.3(W) pg. 3: “protected competition” means: 1) any amateur athletic competition between any athlete or athletes officially designated by the appropriate NGB or PSO as representing the United States, either individually or as part of a team, and any athlete or athletes representing any foreign country where (i) the terms of such competition require that the entrants be teams or individuals representing their respective nations and (ii) the athlete or group of athletes representing the United States are organized and sponsored by the appropriate NGB or PSO in accordance with a defined selection or tryout procedure that is open to all and publicly announced in advance, except for domestic amateur athletic competition, which, by its terms, requires that entrants be expressly restricted to members of a specific class of amateur athletes such as those referred to in Section 220526(a) of the Act; and

    2) any domestic amateur athletic competition or event organized and conducted by an NGB or PSO in its selection procedure and publicly announced in advance as a competition or event directly qualifying each successful competitor as an athlete representing the United States in a protected competition as defined in 1) above.

    As FasterSkier understands, the USOC does not provide legal representation for athletes. However, the USOC does provide a lengthy list of arbitration decisions on its website as a resource for those who believe they have been wrongly denied membership on a team.

    Another notable change is the clarification of language as it pertains to the selection of WSC sprinters. In the context of selection criteria, it is referred to as the “5-sprinter-max rule”. In other words, no more than five sprinters total per sex will be selected to the current WSC team. Five male sprinters. Five female sprinters. No more.

    During the 2018 Olympic Winter Games (OWG) selection, the five-sprinter-max rule was challenged. Specifically, the language in the OWG selection criteria did not specify what happens when an athlete dually qualifies through objective criteria. For example, last year Jessie Diggins, Sadie Bjornsen, Kikkan Randall, and Sophie Caldwell all met objective OWG criteria in both distance and sprint. Would a dually qualified athlete’s inclusion on the team take up both a distance spot and one of five female sprint spots? Last winter, that question appeared unsettled.

    The answer moving forward into the current 2019 WSC team selection period for the dually qualified athlete conundrum is a categorical yes. Dually qualified athletes do count towards a sprint spot.  

    Again, in the podcast, some of the other major changes are discussed in greater detail.

    2019/2020 USST Selection Criteria:

    Kaeding was brought on board to help better define criteria when it comes to USST nominations. One thing is clear, the new criteria spells out in detail the performance benchmarks both senior and junior skiers should meet to receive USST member status.

    The new USST criteria include objective criteria for A, B, and D-team status based on an athlete’s year of birth (YOB) and the minimum World Rank an athlete should have at a specific age. This is referred to as age-weighted criteria. For example, if an athlete was born in 1995 and is 24 years old by January and their World Rank is 20th or better, they’ll be an auto-nomination to the A-team.

    Kaeding discusses in the podcast the data-crunching basis for the reliance on World Rank and an athlete’s YOB when it comes to the objective criteria. In his blog post, Grover wrote the following regarding the use of World Rank:

    “The USST staff has spent much of the past year examining data from major championship medalists over the past decade, and have found that world rank is often the best indicator of who is on the path towards a future medal.”

    For A-team nomination, any athlete regardless of age who finishes in either the top-15 of the FIS World Cup Sprint and Red Group List and/or the top-15 in the FIS World Cup Distance and Red Group List is an A-teamer. The old A-team requirement involved a top-30 rank. Grover said in the podcast this change better reflects the World Cup’s Red Group that includes only the top-15 skiers in sprint and/or distance. Red Group athletes have World Cup food and lodging paid for by the International Ski Federation (FIS).

    Additionally, any skier with a top-six result in a sprint or distance World Cup race punches the A-team ticket too.

    B-team objective requirements are less stringent. World Rank and YOB benchmarks are detailed. Further, an athlete born in 1996 and scoring an individual top 10 at the 2019 U23 World Championships is an auto-nomination to the B-team.

    D-team objective criteria have been both broadened and tightened. First and foremost, an athlete will have to be under 23 to remain a D-team athlete for 2019/2020.

    U23 World Championships results qualifying an athlete for the D-team have expanded to include an individual top 10 at U23s for an athlete born in 1997 or 1998. And any athlete at World Juniors placing in the top 10 moves onto the D-team. The old requirement for D-team nomination based on U23 and World Juniors individual performance was a podium finish.

    World Rank and YOB benchmarks are included in the D-team objective criteria.

    Coaches’ discretionary selection to the B and D-teams remain a possibility. The language under the Discretionary Selection Policy section is similar to recent editions.  

    To contact Grover and Kaeding directly, they provided their email addresses:

    chris.grover@usskiandsnowboard.org

    gus.kaeding@usskiandsnowboard.org

    (To subscribe to the Nordic Nation podcast channel, download the iTunes app. If you have iTunes, subscribe to Nordic Nation here.)

  • The Cross-Country Olympic Criteria, in the Context of U.S. Winter Sports

    The Cross-Country Olympic Criteria, in the Context of U.S. Winter Sports

    U.S. nordic skiers Scott Patterson (1), Ben Lustgarten (14), Kris Freeman (9), Brian Gregg (behind Patterson) racing head to head in the 30 k classic mass start at 2017 U.S. nationals at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah. Lustgarten went on to win for his first national title.

    Note: This is part of a series on the 2018 Winter Olympic selection criteria for the U.S. cross-country ski team. Read this parallel article for specifics on the criteria itself.

    ***

    When considering the criteria recently posted by the U.S. Ski Team regarding how cross-country athletes will be selected for the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, it’s useful to know some context about how selections are made in other sports.

    As described in a parallel piece, the criteria have three main components: a World Cup qualification process via top-eight results on one of five different days between November and mid-January, or else a top-50 World Cup ranking; discretion; and standings from the U.S. SuperTour and national championships.

    Some aspects of these criteria are consistent with common practices in other disciplines under the umbrella of U.S. Ski & Snowboard and across other winter national governing bodies.

    Others are not.

    For instance: of all of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard disciplines, the cross-country criteria were the last to be approved. The final signature of approval came on May 30, 2017, and the document was not posted online until June; on the other end of the spectrum, the freestyle skiing criteria got its last signature in June 2016.

    Secondly, though criteria for many of the ski and snowboard disciplines include discretionary clauses, few are featured as prominently as the discretionary clause is in cross-country skiing. Few individual winter sports use discretion so prominently, with the exception of figure skating (a judged sport).

    But at the same time, the lack of a guaranteed nomination route via domestic racing is not unusual, as several other sports will fill their Olympic rosters based only on international competition results.

    So considering different aspects of the criteria, which are in line with national best practices? Which likely came from cross-country team staff? Which are in line with, and perhaps generated from, U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s overall philosophy?

    Who knows what, when

    Most straightforward issue to address is the timing of Olympic criteria approval. Criteria were released later for cross-country skiing than for any other U.S. Ski & Snowboard discipline; in addition, sports independent of U.S. Ski & Snowboard: biathlon, bobsled, skeleton, luge, short- and long-track speedskating, hockey and curling had already published their criteria.

    Figure skating criteria could not be found on the U.S. federation’s website, but the official selection procedure had already been described on the NBC Olympic site.

    That means that cross-country skiing was the very last set of 2018 U.S. Winter Olympic team criteria to be published, a deviation from past Games. The 2014 Olympic criteria for cross-country skiing were signed in June 2012, more than a year and a half before those Olympics.

    “At best we would like the selection procedures to be made available to the athletes a year before the evaluative events that may be used to select [the Olympic team,” said Rachel Isaacs, a sport performance bid liaison for the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) who previously served as the organization’s team leader for sport performance.

    With the first World Cup races less than six months away at the time the criteria were posted, that didn’t happen this year.

    Isaacs said that the time frame is not a requirement, and that the organization offers flexibility. That means that there are no strict consequences for publishing criteria late.

    “We do realize that that can’t always be the case,” she said of the year-in-advance standard. “The informal guideline would be to make sure that the athletes know if a World Cup season is going to be used, certainly prior to the World Cup season starting … But we wouldn’t mandate that the first event of a World Cup season in 2017 — it wouldn’t be a year prior to that. We understand that they are still developing their selection criteria and qualification process.”

    In this case, the 2018 Olympic criteria for cross-country skiing are more or less identical to those used for 2017 World Championships, although U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover said that there had been discussions about whether to implement any changes.

    Isaacs also didn’t see a problem with the fact that the qualification period for the World Cups themselves was long past by the time the criteria were posted.

    “I think athletes know that the World Cup season is always part of, and I do want to emphasize a part of, the selection process,” Isaacs said, indicating that athletes should have known that qualifying for the early-season competitions would be important.

    Because of the Olympic criteria’s similarity to 2017 World Championships selection criteria, athletes might have been able to guess how things would shake out.

    As to the question of whether athletes might have planned their previous season differently if they knew the criteria further in advance — or built a multi-year training plan differently, or a single-season training plan that accounted for having to peak multiple times – Isaacs was dismissive.

    “Any athlete knows what she or he needs to do to best prepare themselves along with their coaching staff or whatnot,” she said, adding that responsibility for preparing did not rest with national team staff who develop selection criteria.

    Discretion in the main criteria

    The most controversial part of the criteria is likely to be the placement of discretion before a domestic qualifying mechanism.

    (Discretion also comes heavily into play at the World Cup level, discussed later in this piece.)

    After World Cup results and standings, the next way to qualify for the Olympics is via discretion: “If team positions remain open after the application of criteria 1 above, the USSA Cross Country Head Coach may use discretion (See Section 2 below) to determine team nominations.”

    (Note: USSA refers to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association, which until June 19 was the name of what is now simply U.S. Ski & Snowboard, for which there is no official abbreviation.)

    The reason for that, according to U.S. Ski & Snowboard Executive Vice President for Athletics Luke Bodensteiner, would be to prevent a situation where the team roster had already been filled via objective criteria and coaches could not nominate a key athlete who had somehow not met the criteria.

    “We’ve got some interesting factors in cross-country, like with the team sprint, where arguably a different kind of athlete is best — and there aren’t that many team sprints to evaluate from,” he said in an interview. “The coaches have the ability to pick that roster in ways that don’t pin them down to results that may not be reflective of true performance.”

    The criteria specify that athletes may be selected via discretion if they have indicated the potential for Olympic success via results in the 2016/2017 or 2017/2018 season, have a recent positive trend towards success that would suggest strong performances at the Games, or show potential for medals in future Olympics in such a way that participating in this Olympics would be beneficial for development.

    That is consistent throughout U.S. Ski & Snowboard: the language describing what discretion should be based on is identical or nearly identical to wording in criteria documents from alpine skiing, snowboarding, nordic combined, freestyle skiing, and ski jumping.

    But for cross-country skiing, discretion is listed as the second criterion just as it was for the 2014 Olympics and 2015 and 2017 World Championships.

    That is a departure from other U.S. Ski & Snowboard disciplines.

    In alpine skiing, discretion is only listed as the last possible mechanism in a cascade of criteria – it is only to be used if four previous objective criteria, all based on World Cup results, fail to fill the team.

    And in snowboarding and freestyle skiing criteria, discretion is not even listed together with the objective mechanisms and is rather only described in a separate section of the criteria. There, too, discretion is to be used only if the objective criteria fail to fill the team roster.

    In nordic combined and jumping, discretion is listed as the second criterion – like cross-country skiing (which lists its two World Cup qualifying mechanisms together under one heading) – but the criteria also state, “There is no requirement that section 1.3.2 [discretion] be used for nominating athletes to the team.” That sentence appears nowhere in the cross-country criteria.

    Bodensteiner suggested that the different disciplines could not be directly compared, because alpine skiing, for example, has no Continental Cup-based qualifying mechanism.

    “Rather than looking at alpine having discretion as their last piece, I think the primary difference between alpine and cross-country is there’s not that third tier of domestic selection in alpine,” Bodensteiner said. “There’s more of a push to say, if we don’t have athletes that gain selection through the World Cup, then we probably don’t fill our quota.”

    Outside of skiing, some sports, like figure skating and hockey, use discretion exclusively with no objective criteria. Bobsled uses discretion widely; while there are objective standards for bobsled pilots, the pushers are assembled into teams based on discretion after having met minimum requirements through a long selection process.

    There are yet other sports which use objective criteria for most of the team selection, but deal with the possibility of a key athlete failing to meet the objective criteria for some reason by guaranteeing coaches the ability to use some discretion.

    In biathlon (as discussed on this site yesterday), one discretionary selection is hard-coded into the process – for the last athlete for the five-man or five-woman roster, meaning that the first four spots are already automatically filled by athletes best meeting the objective criteria.

    For bobsled pilots and for skeleton, too, the criteria state that if the U.S. receives more than one quota spot at the Olympics, the last team selection will be made via discretion. (If the U.S. gets only one sled, it will be selected based on objective criteria.)

    Such a system of leaving the last spot to discretion would seem to fulfill Bodensteiner’s idea of picking “an athlete” via discretion in case their suitability for a team event was not captured by individual results, for instance.

    Yet there is no cap in the cross-country skiing criteria for how many athletes could be selected via discretion. In the recent past, zero, one or two athletes per Championships have been picked using discretion.

    Bodensteiner seemed wary of using discretion in general, saying that “I know from experience that using discretion — particularly in the Olympics — is painful and it’s really not worth the challenges that it can create… unless this is something that really supports a medal objective.”

    But he stood behind the prominent inclusion of discretion in the cross-country criteria, even though it seemed anomalous among the other disciplines he oversees.

    “We put it in after the World Cup selection just to have that ability to make that assessment there, pick an athlete through discretion if we need to and then use the third criteria to fill up the team if we elect to fill up the team,” Bodensteiner said.

    And when pressed on whether that meant that only a small number of athletes would gain Olympic starts via discretion, Bodensteiner demurred.

    “We always want to leave the door open because you can never really anticipate everything that happens,” he said.

    International vs. domestic results

    Another aspect of the criteria sure to raise discussion is that it would be possible to fill the Olympic roster without ever dipping into the field of athletes who compete primarily within North America.

    The first two criteria for Olympic qualification come from the World Cup. First priority will be given to athletes who notch top-eight results in the period between Nov. 23, 2017 and Jan. 15, 2018 in classic sprints (in Ruka, Finland; Lillehammer, Norway; and the Tour de Ski stage in Oberstdorf, Germany), the 10/15 k freestyle individual start in Davos, Switzerland, or the 15/30 k skiathlon in Lillehammer.

    Second priority goes to athletes ranked in the top 50 of the distance or sprint World Cup standings at the end of this selection period.

    Add a discretionary selection or two, and particularly on the women’s side, it’s easy to imagine a team that completely bypasses athletes racing on the SuperTour and at U.S. nationals.

    There were just two domestic skiers nominated to the women’s World Championships teams in each of 2015 and 2017 (Caitlin Gregg both years, and Rosie Brennan in 2015 and Chelsea Holmes in 2017; between the three of them are one World Championships medal and two top-20 finishes).

    And the whole women’s team to the 2014 Olympics was picked based on World Cup results.

    International-based qualification priorities may rankle athletes who have not been offered World Cup starts and whose only opportunity to qualify for the Olympics is through domestic results. But in the wider world of U.S. sports, it isn’t all that unusual.

    As noted above, U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s Olympic selection criteria for alpine skiing completely bypass any domestic competitions, relying instead solely on international results.

    Ski jumping and nordic combined offer Olympic spots to the winners of Olympic trials (and only the winners, not also runners-up). But that is their first criteria, and all the rest are based on international results at the World Cup or Continental Cup level. Thus, if a World Cup athlete wins trials, the team will end up filled only with athletes competing internationally (barring the use of the discretionary clause). Domestic athletes have no direct opportunity to fill spots at the bottom of the roster.

    Outside of skiing, luge also bases all of its selections on the results of international-level competitions. Bobsled makes all of its objective selections based on international results, with the last spot being filled by discretion.

    Providing a domestic qualification route is not mandated or even suggested by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

    “There is definitely a range [of selection strategies] from the national governing bodies,” said Isaacs. “The sports are the experts. They tell us how they think they will pick the best team and we work with them to ensure a fair process.”

    Who gets to the World Cup?

    The key to making good team selections based on international results, it seems, is to get all of the best athletes to those international competitions. With World Cup results being the only way for cross-country skiers to absolutely guarantee a trip to the 2018 Olympics, who gets to even go to the World Cup may become critically important.

    And while U.S. Ski and Snowboard wishes to generally avoid using discretion to pick an Olympic team, that masks a potentially essential role discretion might play: in determining who races on the World Cup and can shoot for those top-eight finishes or top-50 rankings.

    At the time that the Olympic selection criteria were published, the criteria for how to qualify for the 2017/2018 World Cup and Tour de Ski were already posted.

    For Period 1, the only athletes guaranteed starts are those with a top-50 overall World Cup ranking from the previous season (Jessie Diggins, Sadie Bjornsen, Liz Stephen, Sophie Caldwell, Kikkan Randall, Ida Sargent, and Simi Hamilton), a top-30 Sprint Cup or Distance Cup ranking (Andy Newell), and the 2016/2017 SuperTour champions (Scott Patterson and Chelsea Holmes).

    And the only athletes guaranteed Tour de Ski starts by the U.S. Ski Team are those who are sitting in the top 30 of the World Cup overall or distance rankings at the conclusion of Period 1. The top 20 athletes in the Sprint Cup are also now guaranteed spots by FIS, outside of each country’s specific quota.

    That means that in order for any other athlete to qualify via the World Cup mechanism, they would need to be offered World Cup starts via discretion. The World Cup criteria state that “Discretionary selections, if any, may be based on a variety of factors, including competitions conducted outside of the selection period.”

    Bodensteiner stated that he supported the cross-country coaching staff in their ability to make discretionary picks at the World Cup level.

    “We’re using discretion maybe more on a strategic basis,” he said. “With Tour de Ski, there is sensitivity about team size and just our ability to really service the best athletes in that kind of environment. You also have specific considerations in terms of which actual disciplines and techniques are being competed in those different blocks of World Cup… But I also know [Head Coach Chris Grover] is using some of his ability to select athletes into the World Cup to think forward in terms of preparing an athlete over successive years for international success.”

    A top-eight World Cup finish is, obviously, not easy to obtain.

    Nor is a top-50 ranking, although last season Caitlin Patterson, racing Period 1 as the SuperTour winner, came close, ranking 54th on the distance list at Christmas. That wasn’t far from unprecedented: in 2011 Holly Brooks, the previous year’s SuperTour champion, was 20th on the distance list at Christmas. That 2011/2012 season, Diggins won the SuperTour. She went home for Christmas in 2012 ranked 40th on the World Cup distance list.

    (For men, such successes by SuperTour leaders sent to the first period of World Cup racing have been rare.)

    Providing specific athletes with a chance to notch an Olympic-qualifying body of work on the World Cup may or may not go into that decision-making process regarding who gets starts.

    But the question of who heads to the World Cup will likely to come into play, especially on the men’s side.

    While the World Cup criteria state that “USSA policy mandates that team selection criteria shall be principally objective (or performance-based) and that available start rights and team spots will not necessarily be filled,” only three men have objectively qualified to start World Cups in Period 1.

    Grover has already stated that he tentatively plans to send three more men to the World Cup for Period 1 – U.S. Ski Team (USST) members Erik Bjornsen and Paddy Caldwell, along with Noah Hoffman, who was not renominated to the USST this season.

    Those selections are not based on any documented selection criteria. This was also true of the (very successful) World Cup starts by Scott and Caitlin Patterson in PyeongChang, South Korea, last season.

    If one of the planned six men does not end up on the World Cup this fall – due to illness, injury, or some other factors – the USST might invite someone else. But even that is not straightforward.

    “World Cup Period 1 is a little problematic for athletes,” Grover said in an interview earlier this month. “If making the Olympics, for example, is a primary goal, which it is for most of the top senior athletes, it’s a little problematic for an athlete to decide whether they want to attempt to do that domestically, or on the World Cup. Obviously it’s easier to do that domestically. Not that it’s easy, but that it’s easier, for sure, to qualify at home versus to qualify on the World Cup. So if, for example, one of those six men weren’t able to make it, we might look at inviting another athlete, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we get turned down on that particular offer.”

    In terms of who such an offer might go out to, there are no written, clear-cut standards for what an athlete must do to receive one. It’s discretion, or nothing.

    “It’s pretty challenging to figure out, after a dryland training season, who is the next best athlete,” Grover said. “Everybody has just been training on their own domestically, in their clubs. And according to everybody, the training is going very well – but it’s quite hard at that point to reach down and say, OK, this is going to be the next best person to bring up.”

    In Conclusion

    Both U.S. Ski & Snowboard and the USOC document that fairness and openness are important in the selection process.

    “One of the keys that we have is that there’s always basically an objective pathway to the Olympics,” Bodensteiner said.

    “If it wasn’t fair – if it was picking somebody’s best friend or cousin – we would tell them that these would not be approved and they need to go back and redo the draft,” Isaacs said of the potential situation of a national federation writing criteria which didn’t meet USOC standards.

    But fairness and an open path to the Olympics are in the eye of the beholder.

    “Sometimes that might be really limited,” Bodensteiner said of the ability to qualify outright for an event. “In cross-country, sometimes it’s pretty limited. But there’s still the objective opening for an athlete to have that pathway.”

  • Op-Ed: The Substance of Perspective

    Op-Ed: The Substance of Perspective

    Kris Freeman wearing the 2014/2015 yellow SuperTour leader’s bib en route to a win in the Craftsbury SuperTour 15 k classic mass start in February 2015. (Photo: John Lazenby/lazenbyphoto.com)

    (The following op-ed is an opinion piece submitted by an author unassociated with FasterSkier. Viewpoints do not necessarily reflect that of FasterSkier’s staff or sponsors. We fully support open dialogue and encourage the use of the comments section at the bottom of this page to express varying views. To submit an op-ed, email info@fasterskier.com.)

    About the author: Kris Freeman raced for the U.S. Ski Team for more than a decade, from 2002 to 2013. A four-time Olympian who placed fourth in the 15 k classic at both 2003 and 2009 World Championships, Freeman, 36, is currently training in New Hampshire in hopes of making the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

    ***

    “The U.S. Ski Team will select only the most qualified athletes with the greatest possibilities for winning medals in future World Championship and Olympic Winter Games competitions,” the team wrote in its 2018 national team selection criteria.

    In a recent interview, Head Coach Chris Grover explained that the potential for winning medals was key to several discretionary nominations.

    I believe that there should always be room for discretion when nominating athletes, but the vague “medal potential” standard has become an excuse for the national team coaches to have free reign.

    It’s another example of how the U.S. Ski Team markets itself to the ski community as all-inclusive, as representing all of U.S. skiing. But watching their actions, this advertisement rings false.

    Can the best skiers make the national team?

    Before I go any further, I believe that a case can be made for every athlete nominated for the 2017/2018 team and I mean no disrespect to any of them.

    I merely wonder how many skiers in our country are consistently overlooked and what part personal favoritism plays in the nomination process.

    U.S. Ski Team national-team criteria provide two ways to get onto the team via World Cup rankings: a top-50 ranking overall, or top-30 in sprint and distance. However, for male distance skiers, this is not much of a choice. No additional man in the entire World Cup field would meet that distance criteria who was not already in the top 50 overall. Thus, this criteria does not represent a way to add additional male distance skiers to the team. (Graphic: FasterSkier/Chelsea Little)

    For the first time in several years, the B-team is made up entirely of discretionary picks. Noah Hoffman failed to make the objective criteria by only one World Cup point but was left off the team. Yet Erik Bjornsen scored 66 fewer points than Noah and was still named to the team for the fifth time.

    It should be noted that Erik has never made the objective criteria in any year, and also did not objectively qualify for this year’s World Championships in Lahti, Finland, based on written criteria.

    Erik teamed up with Simi Hamilton to take fifth place in the team sprint and was 18th in the 15 k classic in Lahti. Even though success at World Championships is ostensibly one of the national-team’s main goals, those solid results were not sufficient for an objective nomination.

    The U.S. Ski Team does provide one criteria based on FIS points: that skiers with a top-20 ranking on the FIS distance or sprint points list will be named to the team. However, this is harsh top-20 cutoff represents unattainable standard that is redundant with the other criteria. All of the top-20 male distance skiers according to FIS points are also ranked in the top 50 of the World Cup. It should be noted that Chelsea Holmes of APU is the 33rd-ranked woman in the world according to FIS distance points. Only three women with lower points are not at least semi-regular starters on the World Cup, and for one (Sweden’s Ebba Andersson) that is because she is still a junior and notably a Junior World champion. (Graphic: FasterSkier/Chelsea Little)

    I believe Erik is our best all-around skier and, again, I have no issue with his nomination. However, when the best skier in the country can’t make the B-team criteria, it raises questions.

    I believe the unstated rationale for the high objective standard is that ski team leadership wants complete control over the nomination process. The easiest way to do that is to put objective criteria out of reach, keeping athletes on the B-team in a constant state of subservience as the team’s decisionmakers hold the keys to their livelihood.  The team can tell them what to say to media and what financial information can be disclosed to the public.

    Ask yourself: when was the last time a U.S. Ski Team athlete talked publicly about a poor wax job?  Are you aware that B-team athletes have to pay roughly $150 each day that they are in Europe racing on the World Cup? Have any of them ever mentioned that in an interview you have read?

    Who scores points?

    The particular results, numbers, and details of individual nominated-or-not cases (see “More Discretionary Picks” below) are interesting fodder and could be discussed for hours. But doing so might miss the forest for the trees. Such decisions are emblematic of broader problems at the U.S. Ski Team.

    There is no written standard for athletes to qualify for the funded A-team vs. the unfunded B-team, but the common discretionary standard that the U.S. Ski Team has used is a top 30 ranking in either Distance or Sprint world ranking list, formerly known as the Red Group.

    The team used this standard because Red Group skiers were partially funded by FIS up until this year. But now that the FIS funding allocation system has changed, maintaining this standard merely encourages our athletes to start every World Cup in order to not miss a chance to score points. For an organization that claims World Championships and Olympic medals are their only goal, racing their own athletes into the ground is hypocritical.

    More Discretionary Picks:
    Paddy Caldwell and Scott Patterson were also named to the B-team using discretion. Paddy followed the pipeline route to his nomination. With two top-10’s at U23 World Championships, his nomination at some level was predictable even if he did not meet objective criteria.

    Scott’s nomination is more of a mystery. He is too old for the ski team’s pipeline system, and he wasn’t nominated to the World Championship team. He did have some solid World Cup results, taking ninth place on the Olympic trails in South Korea and 27th at the Holmenkollen 50 k in Oslo. However, it should be noted that Noah beat him in Korea in his last race of the season before he came down with pneumonia.

    The World Cup start rights that were given to Patterson baffled the rest of the domestic field, as there was no qualification criteria for them or explanation for why those starts were granted; in a recent interview, Grover told FasterSkier that “We wanted to find opportunities for Scott.” Scott definitely did well with these opportunities, but who is to say that other domestic skiers could not have had the same success?

    Then there is Tad Elliott, who was the king of clutch this season. As a distance skate specialist, he took third and second in the two freestyle World Championships qualifying races. Then he went to Finland and pounded out a 27th place finish in the 50 k, the best result we have had in that race since I was 12th a decade ago. As a reward, Tad was snubbed for World Cup start rights at World Cup Finals in Quebec. The disparity between Scott and Tad’s treatment is troubling.

    Meanwhile, Rosie Brennan is the only women’s B-team nominee this year despite Caitlin Patterson having scored an identical amount of World Cup points and Chelsea Holmes putting up a 13th place in the 30 k skate at World Championships. Rosie may, as Grover says, be a medal contender in the 4 x 5 relay. But by that rationale, Caitlin and Chelsea should also certainly be named to the national team.

    Crucially, the standard also makes no sense in that it does not differentiate success against strong fields versus weaker ones. For instance, Liz Stephen scored 98 of her World Cup points en route to a second place finish in the Korean World Cup. The race had the weakest World Cup field in my lifetime. Liz scored most of the rest of her points in the hill climb in the Tour de Ski. Only 31 women started, and last time I checked, there are no hill climbs in the Olympics.

    I want to reiterate that all of the athletes nominated to the team deserve to be there. Liz is clearly one of our best skiers.

    But all the same, why is a non-championship event being used as a standard to make the U.S. Ski Team, whose primary stated goal is to win medals?

    The Tour de Ski ended up being a points feeding frenzy. Rosie Brennan and Liz would not have qualified for the World Championships without it. They did not accrue enough points to make the top-50 standard until that final Tour stage. Noah also qualified for the World Championships in a non-Championship event on the final day of the Tour against a diminished field. Is racing up a hill at the end of a nine-day tour really a fair way to determine who goes to the World Championships or Olympics?

    Even if you believe that the Tour de Ski is a fine qualification basis for the Olympics, there is that access problem. U.S. Ski Team staff can (and does) give or deny Tour de Ski start rights at their whim. There are no written standards for how these spots are doled out. I believe that there are half a dozen domestic skiers that potentially could have qualified for the World Championships had they been given the opportunity to race World Cups during the qualification period.

    What are the priorities?

    The U.S. Ski Team has gradually consolidated too much power in the naming of the national team, major Championships teams, and World Cup start rights. “Discretion” and “medal potential” are getting in the way of U.S. cross-country skiing reaching its true potential. The team’s World Cup staff need to have a presence at Nationals and SuperTour Finals, so that they have a hands-on way of evaluating domestic talent.

    This brings me to the most aggravating part of the U.S. Ski Team dynamic in relation to domestic skiing. I call it “teaminess.”

    Much has been made of the good team dynamics that the women’s team has marketed, and clearly it is working for them. However, the staff uses these dynamics as another way of controlling team composition: they have decided what emotional attributes an athlete should have, and if the athlete doesn’t have them (or doesn’t pretend to have them) he or she is not welcome.

    “Attitude and commitment of athletes” is even one of the discretionary criteria for team selection.

    This could be construed to include every male athlete in the country because it is well-documented that men and women have very different psychological needs. As a generalization, women perform better when they train in close-knit groups amid lots of social support. Men, on the other hand, generally like to have independence and thrive when given space and respect.

    Yet for the last six years, the men have been perpetually bombarded with criticism for not behaving like the women’s team. Many independent-minded skiers, who have posted some of the best results in our nation’s history, do not feel supported or welcome within the U.S. Ski Team structure.

    My question is, how real is the team dynamic if it is so fragile that it could collapse by the mere presence of these skiers?

    Also, is it fair to protect the women’s team from any type of intrusion at the expense of the men’s team and anyone on an ever-expanding blacklist?

    The staff appears to believe that it is. In the name of maintaining the status quo, the team has avoided hiring a men’s coach, perhaps due to a desire to not disrupt the women’s team dynamic.

    It is completely unacceptable that the men’s team has no dedicated advocate among the staff of the governing body.

    What are we paying for?

    The “teaminess” factor also plays into financial issues. The U.S. Ski Team wants to be all-inclusive when it comes to raising money from the cross-country ski community and projects itself as a supportive and welcoming resource. But in reality, the team’s resources are denied to many athletes with the potential to succeed internationally.

    With the current lack of funding coming from U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), the nordic program could not survive without assistance from the nation’s clubs. In return for this financial support, the clubs should know how their money is being spent. And there should be clear, attainable objective criteria for their striving athletes.

    But what is the budget of the U.S. Ski Team, anyway? It has been a decade since anyone at the USSA released a cross-country skiing budget document to the public or press. Most years, they won’t even answer what the overall budget cost is, without even getting into how it is broken down. That’s quite the culture of secrecy.

    The U.S. Ski Team coaching staff has become convinced that only they know which athletes should be supported – and how they should be supported. They have created a closed system over which they have complete control.

    This is a fearful and exploitative way of running a national governing body. U.S. skiing will not grow without outside ideas and influence.

    It is time for leadership that is open to all personalities and ideas. Fear of losing what we have will not allow us to reach our true potential as a nation.

  • U.S. Ski Team Nomination Breakdown with Head Coach Grover

    U.S. Ski Team Nomination Breakdown with Head Coach Grover

    Jessie Diggins celebrates after anchoring her team to bronze in the women’s classic team sprint on Feb. 26 at 2017 World Championships in Lahti, Finland. (Photo: Dustin Satloff/dustinsatloff.com)

    Shortly after the U.S. Ski Team (USST) formally announced its 2017/2018 cross-country team, FasterSkier reached USST Head Coach Chris Grover on the phone for his comments. Grover is in Bend, Ore., for the team’s traditional on-snow camp.

    “We have nine athletes who made the objective criteria to make the 2018 U.S. Ski Team,” Grover said. “Eight that are on the A-team, all of whom finished in the top 30 in the world in either sprint or distance. And then Katharine Ogden, who as a medalist at the World Junior Championships, made the objective criteria that way.”

    Below are the eight A-team athletes and Ogden, who was renominated to the development “D” team, that met the USST’s objective criteria for team selection.

    A Team

    Men

    • Simi Hamilton (Stratton Mountain School Elite Team)
    • Andy Newell (SMS Elite)

    Women

    • Sadie Bjornsen (Alaska Pacific University)
    • Sophie Caldwell (SMS Elite)
    • Jessie Diggins (SMS Elite)
    • Kikkan Randall (APU)
    • Ida Sargent (Craftsbury Green Racing Project)
    • Liz Stephen (Burke Mountain Academy)

    D Team

    • Katharine Ogden (SMS)

    The USST’s 2018 cross-country nomination criteria, as it relates and is applied to athletes meeting the objective criteria, remains straightforward.

    • Attain top-50 ranking in the 2017 final World Cup Overall ranking list.
    • Attain top-30 ranking in the 2017 final World Cup Sprint or Distance ranking list.
    • Attain top-20 ranking in the 2017 FIS final sprint or distance points list.
    • Attain a top-3 individual finish at the 2017 Junior World Championships or U-23 World Championships.

    Six women finished the season ranked in the top 50 in the World Cup Overall ranking list: Diggins (6th), Bjornsen (16th), Stephen (28th), Caldwell (33rd), Randall (36th), and Sargent (44th). Notably, Diggins, Caldwell, Sargent, Randall, and Bjornsen all ranked in the top 30 for the final World Cup Sprint list, too, and Diggins, Bjornsen and Stephen all finished in the top 30 on the final World Cup Distance list.

    Nineteen-year-old Ogden earned an individual bronze in the 10-kilometer skiathlon at the 2017 Junior Worlds.

    Hamilton and Newell were the two men that met the objective criteria, with Hamilton ranking 30th on the final World Cup Overall list and ninth in the World Cup Sprint standings and Newell 28th on the final World Cup Sprint list.

    The remainder of the USST were discretionary selections. The athletes nominated to the team under the discretionary guidelines are as follows:

    B TEAM

    Men

    • Erik Bjornsen (APU)
    • Paddy Caldwell (SMS Elite)
    • Scott Patterson (APU)

    Women

    • Rosie Brennan (APU)

    D TEAM

    • Ian Torchia (Northern Michigan University)
    • Hannah Halvorsen (Sugar Bowl Academy)
    • Julia Kern (SMS Elite)

    As Grover explained, the USST’s use of discretion should not perceived as murky. Built into the criteria are aspects of fulfilling “individual markers” or competition results, “attitude and commitment”, illness or injury, and the heavily weighted medal potential.

    “We are trying to incorporate athletes who we see are on a path to winning a medal at the highest level, at the Olympic level or at the World Championship level,” Grover said. “Can we make a strong case suggesting that an athlete is on the path to winning the medal? It’s really a difficult call. What are the metrics that we’ll be using: FIS points? Should we be using World Cup points? Should we be using placing at World Juniors or U23s, at NCAAs or SuperTours? There are so many different places where athletes are coming from, so many different places where they are competing. Are they all equal? No, of course not.”

    What often makes discretionary selections difficult is that USST coaches must make assessments about future potential using real-time accomplishments between skiers skiing on the World Cup and those skiers competing at the World Cup and Continental Cup (i.e. SuperTour).

    “You can’t really compare someone who has been competing on the World Cup to someone who has been competing at a Continental Cup level,” Grover explained. “So that’s a real challenge for us. Yes, you can look at FIS points – that’s one thing we have always done, for many years. We’ve taken that athlete and tracked FIS points and age in distance or sprint, whatever that athlete’s strongest discipline is, and we try to see where they are compared to the best skiers in the world, the top 10 athletes in sprint or distance of that sex in the world.”

    Grover knows the FIS point system is not necessarily the best indicator of a U.S. skier’s potential on the World Cup.

    “One of the big challenges that we had using that methodology is that our FIS points as a nation in the US are artificially low,” Grover said.

    Grover believes FIS points are “artificially low” because the U.S. collegiate system has numerous European athletes with low FIS points that compete nearly every weekend on the NCAA circuit or FIS-sanctioned races. As a result, those skiers bring some U.S. skiers’ FIS points down.

    “The same thing happens occasionally when the U.S. Ski Team comes back from Europe,” Grover said. “The U.S. women in particular but also some of the men, and they bring good points and then they are not perhaps at their sharpest at SuperTour Finals, and other athletes are able to improve their points by coming close to or beating these athletes. And so that really drives our points down. We’re just not in the European pool enough to have points that are directly compared to European counterparts. The isolation, the way that points come over and they get passed around, and then they stay isolated over here, it prevents us from our points being representative of where people are compared to their European peers.”

    Athlete by Athlete

    American Erik Bjornsen (33) racing to the 11th-fastest time of day in the men’s 15 k freestyle pursuit at World Cup Finals in Quebec City for his career-best World Cup result. He finished 25th overall. (Photo: Gretchen Powers)

    For the B-team, let’s go athlete by athlete, those nominated and those not, to get a better picture of the whys and hows of USST discretionary selection. (Note that all of the D-team members from last year were renominated and will accordingly be invited to team camps.)

    “About Erik Bjornsen for example, and why was he nominated to the team,” Grover said. “For a number of reasons, but one thing that we see is that he could contribute to a medal in the team sprint, which is an event where he and Simi were fifth at this World Championships. … [Erik is] a guy who is scoring points in sprints in the World Cup occasionally, some points in distance occasionally. He is a hybrid between aerobic and anaerobic capacities, and that lends itself rather well to team sprint. We feel like he has strong potential there.”

    Bjornsen also skied to an impressive 18th (+1:56.7 behind the winner) in the 15 k classic at the 2017 World Championships.

    Patterson is the lone new face nominated to the USST.  “[Scott] just keeps coming up in conversation and he’s a really really interesting skier,” Grover said. “He got sick before U.S. nationals and then was sick for part of U.S. nationals and did not ski particularly well, at least by his standards for national championships in Soldier Hollow.”

    The Anchorage-based skier did not make 2017 World Championships team. Yet at the start of the season, before his illness, he placed third in the 15 k classic in the West Yellowstone SuperTour and won the 15 k skate in the Sovereign Lake NorAm in mid-December.

    “So this past winter, we knew he’s definitely one of those next guys — can we find some opportunities on the World Cup to start him?” Grover said.

    Scott Patterson (APU) racing the anchor leg of the mixed relay at U.S. Distance Nationals in late March in Fairbanks, Alaska. (Photo: Lance Parrish, Fairbanks)

    Last season, Patterson was offered World Cup starts in PyeongChang, South Korea, and Oslo, Norway. In a thin PyeongChang World Cup field, he placed ninth in both the 30 k skiathlon and team sprint. At Holmenkollen in Oslo, Patterson was the top American man, skiing to a 28th in a loaded field. Patterson also qualified for World Cup Finals in Quebec.

    “And the cool thing was everywhere he went, he scored World Cup points as a 25-year-old athlete,” Grover said of Patterson’s potential. “So he’s a young guy who has got a big history of training. He’s training a lot and training really well and he’s also seizing these opportunities and showing in a very difficult men’s field that he’s a young guy who can grab some World Cup points.”

    Patterson went on to dominate U.S. SuperTour Finals and Distance Nationals at the end of the season, winning both the 20 k skiathlon and 50 k freestyle mass start in Fairbanks, Alaska.

    Addressing the question of why Patterson was given starts in PyeongChang and Oslo despite not leading the SuperTour at the time or qualifying for World Championships, Grover said Patterson had nearly fallen through the cracks. They needed to see he how he might perform on the World Cup.

    “Last year it was a challenging year for us as a national-team staff to look back at what was happening domestically and to make much sense of who was skiing well,” Grover said. “For example, in the first four distance races of the year, Yellowstone, Silver Star, and the two at Soldier Hollow, we had four different men win the four distance races. And of the four first sprint races, in those locations, I believe we had four different men win those four sprint races. And different athletes that were winning qualification in some cases versus those that were actually winning the day result for the sprint. So it was a very unclear picture in terms of who was skiing well … especially on the men’s side.”

    Of the skiers winning some of those races outright, Grover knew Patterson was promising, yet he wasn’t able to demonstrate it internationally on the World Cup or at World Championships.

    “So we wanted to find opportunities for Scott,” Grover said.

    Patrick “Paddy” Caldwell, 23, was bumped from the D-team to B-team status.

    “Paddy, he’s been on the D-team for a few years; he’s obviously been on the radar,” Grover said.

    Caldwell placed ninth in both the 15 k freestyle and 30 k skiathlon at the 2017 U23 World Championships. He also qualified for World Cup Finals in Quebec, where he skied the 25th-best time of day in the 15 k freestyle pursuit.

    “Just given where he is in terms of his ability and his age, we felt like it was the right move for him to move from the D-team to the B-team,” Grover said.

    Longtime USST member Noah Hoffman was not renominated to the team, but he has been offered World Cup Period 1 starts.

    “I think Noah would be the first to admit that last season was pretty disappointing, by his standards,” Grover said. “He and I were able to talk about expectations going into the season and Noah had struggled for a few years on the World Cup previous to this past season. …  And so we just talked that we need to make progress towards an eventual medal in the sport. So this year needs to be a step forward and unfortunately it wasn’t. It wasn’t the results Noah wanted to see and unfortunately it wasn’t the result that we were hoping to see from Noah.”

    Hoffman, 27, finished the season ranked 51st on the World Cup Overall list, a single point from the top 50 needed to meet the team’s objective criteria.

    “We hope that Noah gets back in there and starts skiing closer to his potential and starts making progress towards that medal,” Grover added. “Absolutely, the door for sure is never closed for Noah or any athlete.”

    On the women’s side, Rosie Brennan, 28, was renominated to the B-team. This past season on the World Cup, Brennan earned eight top 30s (the benchmark for scoring World Cup points). Her best finish, beyond her 23rd-best time of day in the Tour de Ski’s final climb, was a 22nd in La Clusaz, France, in the 10 k freestyle mass start.

    Rosie Brennan (43) racing to a season-best World Cup result of 22nd in the 10 k freestyle mass start on Dec. 17 in La Clusaz, France. (Photo: Toko/NordicFocus)

    “Rosie is another interesting case,” Grover said. “It’s very hard to differentiate right now between Rosie Brennan, the skiing that she is doing, versus Caitlin Patterson, for example, or Chelsea Holmes. Yes, Rosie has been a little bit stronger in some races, but she has also had some more opportunity. However, we are really looking towards Rosie as a potential leg in a 4 x 5 kilometer women’s relay at a World Championship event. She has contributed a 5 k classic leg to a podium in Lillehammer, and she also skied a terrific leg in Ulricehamn — I want to say 12 seconds from the fastest on that particular leg in that relay this year. So she’s someone we are really looking towards for a potential relay leg. So there are athletes like that where it’s hard to differentiate sometimes between some of the domestic athletes who are really starting to blossom, who we are starting to take a lot of notice of them, but Rosie is somebody who … is in shape and ready to go when we get to Korea this winter.”

    On the non-nomination side of the equation are Holmes and Patterson.

    “Chelsea, she is someone who we have discussed a ton this spring,” Grover said. “And this is a conversation I’ve had with Chelsea as well. Is she a 5 k skier right now? Maybe, maybe not. She has certainly shown her ability in longer events. Her one standout international result from this season is a longer event in skating.”

    The 30-year-old Homes placed 13th in the marquee 30 k freestyle mass start at 2017 World Championships.

    “Does that, at this particular moment, suggest that she might be able to provide a 5 k classic leg in the relay? Not at this particular moment,” he said. “We have a lot of skaters on the women’s side right now. Our skating ability is quite high. So at this moment it doesn’t pencil out, but does that prevent her from being considered in the future for anything? Absolutely not.”

    Scott Patterson’s older sister Caitlin, 27, remains on the USST radar as well.

    “Caitlin is somebody else that we’ve discussed quite a bit,” Grover said. “She’s made a big step forward in the last year she started to score World Cup points and really flirting with that edge of the top thirty on a regular basis. So we absolutely have our eye on her. … Of course Chelsea is Continental Cup leader for Period 1, so she will be skiing World Cup Period 1. And then we’ll assess where she is at that point. Anything can happen at that point. She might be someone that’s skiing really well and we want to keep on the World Cup.”