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PREDAZZO, ITALY — When Astrid Øyre Slind was 26, she almost retired from cross-country skiing.
She was a good skier, just not quite good enough to break into the international circuit from her home country of Norway, where competition in cross-country is cutthroat. She was, in her own words, “stuck,” feeling like being an athlete wasn’t worth it any more.
“If you try for the same thing for 10 years, you get disappointed in yourself that you’re not getting better,” she said. “You’re working your ass off, and you’re still not there.”
But Slind didn’t retire. Instead, she mixed up her training plan, found a new coach and spent years racing on a lower-level long-distance circuit — the minor league baseball of cross-country skiing.
Nearly a decade later, in 2022, she returned to the international stage, and soon after made her first-ever World Cup podium, against Olympic-caliber competition.
This season, she finally qualified to race at her first Olympics, at age 38.
In Thursday’s 10-kilometer freestyle race, Slind finished a painful fourth place, just seconds from a medal. But on Saturday, she led the Norwegian women’s relay team to gold — punctuating a career arc that few novelists could have scripted.
“Her story, I think it’s really important to tell,” said Pål Golberg, another Norwegian skier who found success late in his career.
Slind, he said, was not an athlete with exceptional physical talent, nor especially good technique, and at times she was “struggling to find her way.”
But there’s still a message embedded in her success.
“You can get really far just by hard working,” Golberg said. “And she’s a perfect example.”
At a news conference after Saturday’s relay, Slind said she’d accomplished something she’d been working toward since childhood.
“It’s kind of crazy to say, but it’s actually been a dream for 30 years,” she said. “And it’s something I’ve given up on during the way there — and then started to believe again.”
She added: “It’s nice to finally make it.”
Not a top prospect
Cross-country skiers can be competitive into their late 30s, but few of them stay in the sport that long. In Thursday’s freestyle race, Slind was the oldest competitor, and one of just two of the 111 athletes who was born in the 1980s.
Slind grew up in the village of Oppdal in Central Norway, in a family of skiers. Her father, Peder Einar Slind, is a ski coach who once spent a year in Western Massachusetts on an exchange with a collegiate cross-country ski coach there.
Astrid also has two ski racing sisters: a younger one, Kari, and a twin, Silje.
Both still compete at a high level on European circuits. Kari, in fact, had the first breakthrough at the international level, nearly landing on the World Cup podium in her mid-20s. Experts thought she would be “the biggest of them,” said Birger Lofaldli, a reporter at Adresseavisen, the Slinds’ local newspaper.
“But Astrid came back,” Lofaldli said. “And now she’s greater than ever.”
Astrid did not grow up as a top prospect.
Unlike Kari, she never qualified to represent Norway at the World Championships for juniors, a proving ground for young athletes.
But Astrid was always skiing, she said in an interview in November. Her father would take the sisters out to play on skis; the twins were always pushing each other, with Kari “chasing us behind,” Astrid said.
At three years old, she added, the twins were “crying ourselves in” to local club races in Oppdal, where their parents initially didn’t want them to compete.
“Silje and I really wanted to go,” Astrid said. “From that day, we’ve just been skiing as long as the snow is out, and loving it.”
‘Crazy training’ with a new coach
After failing to break into Norway’s national team and the top-level World Cup circuit in her 20s, Slind spent years racing on a tour called the Ski Classics. The circuit features distance races as long as 90 kilometers, or 56 miles.
She had her ups and downs there, too. In one especially tough year, Slind said, she had trained too much — so much, that she could barely race — and was again thinking about quitting the sport.
Instead, she started talking about her problems with a teammate, Chris Jespersen, another Norwegian who was a few years older and had also struggled to stay at the highest level of the sport.
“He was like, ‘You know what? I really think I can make a good skier out of you — I’ve made all the mistakes myself. I can see what you’re doing. Let’s try to figure it out together,’” Slind said.
Jespersen, at the time, was not a coach, just an “athlete who had ideas,” Slind said.
But at that point, Slind said, she had nothing to lose, so the two started working together. They made a deal: When they disagreed — if Slind, for example, wanted to push herself to do more training but Jespersen thought it was too much — Jespersen would get the last word.
It turned out that Jespersen had a knack for explaining what Slind needed to do differently with her ski technique, in a way that she could understand. He was also a good check on what Slind describes as her impulse to do “crazy training” — things like a six-hour session of skiing with the arms-only double pole technique, with hard intervals in the middle of it, or workouts where she’d try to keep up with her team’s strongest men.
Slind had done more of those kinds of sessions as she moved into the Ski Classics circuit, where she discovered that she “needs a lot of training to be at a good enough level.”
“I think it was what put a spark in my skiing again,” she said.
But Jespersen, she added, helped rein her in when the crazy training got a little too crazy.
“He wasn’t too eager, and he wasn’t too defensive,” she said. “It was kind of the perfect balance for me.”
A breakthrough, and medals
Slind’s breakthrough came in the winter of 2022-2023, when she finally qualified to return to the World Cup circuit after a nearly nine-year absence.
Two months into the season, after nine races, Slind stood on the podium for the first time. Later that season, she won a bronze medal at the World Championships in the skiathlon, and a gold medal with Norway’s relay team.
Still, it hasn’t always been easy since then.
Last season, she raced at what was effectively a home World Championships, in the city of Trondheim just a two-hour drive from her hometown. Amid challenging snow conditions and constant rain, her results were disastrous, including a mishap with a ski during the skiathlon, and she finished with no individual medals — just a silver from the relay.
Then, at the Olympics this year, she was oh-so-close to a medal in the 10-kilometer freestyle race in fourth, just 3.3 seconds behind bronze medal-winner Jessie Diggins of the U.S.
Slind was also painfully close in her first Olympic race, the skiathlon, where she was skiing in medal position before being overtaken by a teammate and ultimately fading to eighth.
“I completely died out there,” Slind said in an interview afterward. “I’m not a good enough skier today.”
In Sunday’s relay, though, Slind was one of the strongest athletes in the race, putting pressure on the Swedish star Ebba Andersson, who ultimately crashed twice and cost her team the gold medal.
The performance caps a storybook turnaround — one so improbable that Slind probably wouldn’t have believed it herself, said Jostein Vinjerui, a Norwegian coach who works with Slind’s club team, Aker Dæhlie.
“If you’d have asked her during the Beijing Olympics, four years ago, if she’d be able to do the Olympics in four years time, I think she would have laughed, I’m pretty sure,” Vinjerui said. “It’s just an amazing story, being 38 years old now and winning a first gold medal.”
More Olympic medals are possible for Slind: The Norwegian coaches have named her to the two-person team sprint squad, and she and Julie Bjervig Drivenes will be podium contenders in the event Wednesday. Slind is also expected to vie for medals Sunday in the longest race of the Games, the 50-kilometer competition in the classical technique.
After the relay gold, Slind said at the news conference that she’s good at turning depressing results into motivation for the next event.
“Maybe the two other races just made me more on fire for today, and really wanting to show what I’m good for,” she said. “And I will take that with me into the 50 k.”
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