From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.
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Hailey Swirbul (USA) racing the 20 k Classic Mass Start in Goms, Switzerland, two weeks ago. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
When Hailey Swirbul logged onto a Zoom call from Italy last Monday, she was already living inside uncertainty.
“I’m in Livigno right now,” she said. “Yeah — the higher one.”
The U.S. team held two pre-Olympic altitude camps, and Livigno was the higher-altitude option. With thinner air, it’s a place where nothing happens quickly, where adaptation takes patience, and where clarity is rarely immediate. When we spoke, it still wasn’t public which races she might ski, or even whether she would start any at all. She was there because she had qualified back onto the U.S. Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team — but nothing beyond that had been decided.
She didn’t talk about it like a comeback. She didn’t talk about it like redemption, either. Mostly, she sounded attentive — to her body, to her thinking, to the risk of letting the story get ahead of her.
“I’ve thought about this whole thing more as an experiment,” she said. “Like… can I do this? And can I do it in a way that actually feels good?”
The Olympics mattered. She didn’t pretend they didn’t. But they weren’t the point.
“What can I do?” she kept asking.
Hailey Swirbul’s entry into endurance sports began with mountain bike racing with her family around Colorado. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Before Skiing Was the Point
Swirbul’s relationship with endurance sport started long before skiing felt central, or even intentional.
“I grew up in just a really active family,” she said. “My parents valued getting outside and doing that with our family.”
Neither parent was an elite athlete. That wasn’t the model. The emphasis was simpler: movement, time outdoors, effort shared rather than measured.
“They just love being outside and moving our bodies,” she said. “And they taught that to my brother and me growing up.”
The first sport that really mattered to her wasn’t skiing.
“The main thing we loved to do as a family when we were young was mountain bike races,” she said. “We would travel around Colorado or the West and camp as a family and do these bike races.”
Mountain biking wasn’t cross-training. It was the center.
“That was kind of the first main sport that my brother and I both really loved,” she said.
Nordic skiing entered her life almost accidentally. Her older brother decided to try it as winter conditioning for mountain biking.
“So as the younger sister,” she said, “I was just going to follow whatever he did.”
Her first experience skate skiing was blunt.
“I had never skate skied before,” she said. “And I just got destroyed. I was so far behind everyone.”
What stayed with her wasn’t embarrassment. It was the challenge.
“I remember feeling this sense of, like, I need to figure this out,” she said.
Progress came quickly, and with it a new kind of motivation.
“I remember feeling like, whoa,” she said. “It’s pretty fun to do well at it — whatever well means.”
What drew her in wasn’t winning so much as the learning curve.
“Skiing is such a hard sport to master,” she said. “I don’t think anyone really can. It’s always evolving.”
By middle school, she was actively seeking out more difficulty.
“I wanted to race more,” she said. “I would go on jogs in the fall after soccer practice because I was like, I need to get more training.”
She started racing up in age groups — not because anyone pushed her, but because she wanted to be there.
“I raced up as a U16 when I was still 13,” she said. “And I qualified for Junior Nationals that year.”
Being part of something bigger mattered.
“Getting to go and be part of this bigger thing,” she said, “that was incredibly motivating to me.”
Hailey Swirbul celebrates the U16 Junior National Championship title in the Freestyle Mass Start in Stowe, Vermont, in 2014. (Photo: Voisin/FasterSkier)
Racing Up — Until There Was Nowhere Left to Go
Much of Swirbul’s early career followed that same pattern.
“My young career — and honestly much of my career — was defined by racing up,” she said.
It worked. Racing older athletes fed her curiosity and reinforced the idea that discomfort was something to move toward, not away from.
But as she progressed through the development pipeline and into the World Cup system, the feedback loop changed.
“There’s this moment where it flips,” she said. “And suddenly you’re supposed to be top 30.”
Early World Cups felt expansive. Points mattered. Starts felt earned.
“Getting points felt exciting,” she said.
Hailey Swirbul scored her first varied World Cup points in the 2019 Davos, Switzerland, Skate Sprint. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Over time, expectations hardened. Results that once signaled progress became baseline.
“It stops being exciting,” she said.
What made it difficult wasn’t failure in the dramatic sense. It was repetition.
“It’s really hard to go over there and be 45th every weekend,” she said. “And still believe in yourself.”
She kept coming back to that number — not as a complaint, but as a psychological reality.
“When that happens over and over,” she said, “it starts to mean something about you.”
The pressure didn’t explode. It narrowed.
“I felt really rigid,” she said. “And I didn’t like that.”
By the end, the issue wasn’t the results.
“There wasn’t anything wrong, exactly,” she said. “That was kind of the hard part.”
She wasn’t falling apart. She just wasn’t herself anymore.
Rosie Brennan (USA), Samantha Smith (USA), Jessie Diggins (USA), Julia Kern (USA), and Hailey Swirbul (USA) (l-r) celebrate the end of the season and Swirbul’s retirement in 2023. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Leaving Without Drama
Swirbul didn’t retire in crisis. She retired calmly.
“I don’t regret retiring,” she said. “At all.”
She enrolled in an engineering program. She stepped away from the race calendar. For the first time in years, skiing wasn’t the organizing principle of her life.
That winter, she worked as a ski patrol member in Colorado.
“At Aspen Highlands, we have this hike-to terrain up at 12,000 feet,” she said. “It’s like an 800-vertical-foot hike.”
For weeks at a time, that meant repeating the same climb again and again.
“You’re hiking up and down that bowl for six hours a day,” she said. “And honestly, I loved it.”
She was careful to separate that year from any training narrative.
“That wasn’t training,” she said. “It was just work.”
What mattered was usefulness. Responsibility. Being competent at something that didn’t care who she was or what she’d done before.
“There’s something really grounding about that,” she said.
Her body worked constantly, but without scrutiny.
“I just loved hiking,” she said. “That was my whole day.”
Hunter Wonders, Hailey Swirbul, and Chip Schoff (former APU skier and wax tech) on a multi-day hut trip. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
When Time Shows Up
The idea of returning didn’t appear during that patrol season in any obvious way. It arrived later, through moments that didn’t seem connected at first.
One came from a book about time—the idea that a human life spans roughly 4,000 weeks.
“It wasn’t panic,” she said. “It was more like honesty.”
Another came from a comment made by someone she respected — casual enough that it might have been ignored.
“I kind of just sat with it,” she said. “And I couldn’t shake it.”
What lingered wasn’t urgency. It was clarity.
“If I’m ever going to do this again,” she said, “it’s now.”
Not because she felt behind. Because waiting indefinitely no longer felt natural.
The Risk of Trying Again
Coming back wasn’t simple. It carried risk.
“I didn’t want to come back if I was just going to be the same athlete,” she said.
She worried about slipping back into rigidity. About obligation replacing curiosity again.
“I’m way more aware now of how easily I can slip back into that mindset,” she said.
She also worried about the other possibility.
“What if I come back,” she said, “and I’m just not good enough anymore?”
She didn’t rush past that thought.
“That’s part of the experiment,” she said. “Like… maybe it doesn’t work.”
Hailey Swirbul (APU) racing the US National Championships Mass Start Freestyle in Lake Placid in January. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
Starting Where She Actually Was
When Swirbul decided to race again, she didn’t shortcut the process. She entered domestic races. She lined up without protection.
“I was literally starting from the back in mass starts,” she said. “And I was like, okay. This is fine.”
Fine didn’t mean easy. It meant honest.
“I actually loved that,” she said. “It took so much pressure off.”
Domestic racing gave her feedback she could read again. Progress looked like progress. Bad days stayed contained.
Later, she reached for a phrase that stuck with her — the idea of a “safe nest.”
“A place where you can go out into the world and get beat down a little bit,” she said, “but you always have somewhere you can come back to and rebuild your confidence.”
For her, that place was domestic racing.
Samantha Smith (USA), Hailey Swirbul (USA), NS Rosie Brennan (USA), (l-r) in the 20 k Classic Mass Start in Goms, Switzerland, two weeks ago. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Europe, Revisited
She never forgot what the other side felt like.
“There’s this moment where it flips,” she said again of World Cups. “And suddenly you’re supposed to be top 30.”
She talked about Europe without bitterness, but with clarity.
“It’s really hard to go over there and be 45th every weekend,” she said. “And still believe in yourself.”
This time, she wasn’t trying to prove she could survive that environment again.
She wanted to know whether she could return without losing herself to it.
Not Being Only One Thing
Throughout her return, Swirbul kept coaching at Alaska Pacific University.
“I was doing three sessions a day sometimes,” she said. “Elite team, masters, devos.”
The workload was heavy. She didn’t romanticize it. But she didn’t want to let it go.
“Being around kids who are just excited to ski,” she said, “it reminds you why you started.”
She was conscious of what she modeled — not just in training, but in attitude.
“I didn’t want to be only an athlete again,” she said.
Hailey Swirbul enters these Olympic Games not only to prove she can still perform at an elite level, but also to celebrate that she still loves endurance sports, just as she did growing up in Colorado. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Where the Experiment Stands
Qualifying for the Olympic team didn’t resolve the experiment. It simply moved it forward.
“It doesn’t make the decision right,” she said. “It’s just what happened.”
She didn’t frame it as validation.
“I don’t regret retiring,” she said. “At all.”
While in Livigno, she waited — not gripping, not withdrawing.
The Olympics were close enough to matter. Far enough away to remain uncertain.
Now the races have started, and Swirbul is presumably days away from a race start at the Winter Olympic Games. So the hypothesis has been written and the lab experiment designed.
“What can I do?” she asked.
Not forever. Not for anyone else. But the time to run the test has arrived.
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Hunter Wonders (USA) racing the Skiathlon at the 2023 World Championships in Planica, Slovenia. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
When U.S. Ski & Snowboard released its roster for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games, Hunter Wonders’ name appeared without emphasis. No asterisk. No parenthetical explanation. Just another line in a list that had already absorbed months of speculation, anxiety, and arithmetic.
To most readers, the name represented a straightforward outcome: an athlete peaking at the right moment, a season resolved by results. But the roster line masked a career that did not move in a single direction. Wonders’ path bent, paused, and restarted. At one point, it appeared to end entirely.
Understanding how he arrived at the Olympics requires starting far from the Games themselves — in a place where progress is quiet, repetition matters more than recognition, and development happens long before it is visible.
Hunter canoe racing with his dad in Michigan. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Alaska, Not Michigan
Hunter Wonders is sometimes misidentified as a Midwestern skier. His parents are from Michigan — his father from Grayling, his mother from Traverse City — and the family returned there most summers to visit grandparents. Wonders spent long stretches canoe racing in Michigan and maintaining close ties to extended family.
But Alaska is home.
“My parents were originally from Michigan… And yeah, they moved to Alaska. It was supposed to be like a two-year thing for my dad’s work,” Wonders said. “And he just knew, like, nope, we’re not going back. I’m staying here.”
That decision happened decades before Wonders had any agency of his own. By the time he was born, Alaska was already permanent.
“I’m definitely from Alaska and have lived there my whole life,” he said.
In American cross-country skiing, place is not just a backdrop. It is infrastructure. Alaska exists at the edge of the domestic system — geographically distant from centralized camps, expensive to travel from, and easy to overlook. Athletes there develop without constant reference points, often without external validation.
For Wonders, that isolation became formative.
Hunter Wonders, Hailey Swirbul, and Chip Schoff (former APU skier and wax tech) on a multi-day hut trip. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Alaska, Off the Circuit
In Alaska, training is often solitary. Progress is built through lifestyle and repetition rather than comparison, and improvement is measured internally long before it is confirmed externally.
The winters matter. So does the darkness. Training extends into hours when daylight is no longer guaranteed, when motivation cannot depend on atmosphere or audience. You go out because it’s how you choose to live and enjoy your life.
That rhythm shaped Wonders’ relationship to skiing early. He did not grow up racing for recognition. He learned to train for alignment — the quiet sense that body, terrain, and effort were moving together. Alaska not only accelerated his trajectory. It birthed it.
Hunter Wonders (APU/Alaska) takes the lead in the U16 Boys Mass Start Freestyle race at the US Junior National Championship in Stowe, Vermont in 2014. (Photo: Voisin/FasterSkier)
A Childhood of Rotation
Wonders grew up chasing his older siblings — twin brother and sister, five years ahead — through a constantly shifting landscape of sports. Alpine skiing. Motocross. Soccer. Ski jumping. Biathlon. Mountain biking.
“Anytime I started getting into a sport, my family shifted away from that one,” he said.
The pattern was not neglect, but necessity. Supporting multiple competitive sports for multiple children eventually became unsustainable.
“My parents were like, all right, we can’t do all this stuff. We gotta limit it. And they chose to Nordic ski. And so naturally, I was kind of dragged into that scene.”
Nordic skiing, at least initially, was not a calling. It was what remained once the family consolidated its energy.
Wonders’ first encounter with skis reflects that informality.
“It was my dad playing with me on my back deck in 2001. And I’m not really skiing that much, but that was kind of my first encounter with it.”
There was no mythology attached to that moment. No sense of destiny. Skiing entered his life as play, then habit, then gradually — almost without announcement — as a central structure.
Hunter Wonders (APU/Alaska) winning the U16 Boys Mass Start Freestyle race at the 2014 US Junior National Championship in Stowe, Vermont. (Photo: Voisin/FasterSkier)
Stowe, Vermont
The first moment when that structure revealed competitive meaning came far from Alaska.
Wonders qualified for Junior Nationals in Stowe, Vermont, in 2014. He did so narrowly, selected as the fifth or sixth skier on Team Alaska.
“I barely made Team Alaska. But it was a big goal for me as a U16,” he said.
What followed surprised nearly everyone, including Wonders himself.
“And just out of nowhere, I ended up getting a second place in the individual start race and first place in the mass start. And that was just like, whoa, where did that come from?”
The results did not instantly rewrite his trajectory. But they altered his internal calculus.
“I think it kind of clicked for me that, okay, I can do this. I can be competitive.”
The significance of that realization was not the result itself, but permission. Permission to imagine a longer horizon.
The U.S. men’s silver-medal relay at the 2018 Junior World Championships in Goms, Switzerland, with (from left to right) Luke Jager, Hunter Wonders, Gus Schumacher, and Ben Ogden. (Photo: Julia Kern)
The Long Middle Begins
What followed was not a rapid ascent, but a prolonged middle years defined by steady development, incremental gains, and results that suggested promise without announcing arrival.
On the World Cup, Wonders often raced from the margins. Finishes in the 50s and 60s gave way slowly to finishes in the 30s. The progress was real, but it did not demand attention.
In American men’s skiing, where depth is both strength and complication, that middle can be unforgiving. Selection is rarely guaranteed. Criteria shift. Opportunity compresses.
Wonders responded the way he had learned to respond in Alaska: by focusing inward. Training remained central.
“For me, training has always been kind of the fun part… The training and living that lifestyle is really, really big to me.”
That orientation would become essential later — when the question was no longer how to improve, but whether improvement was still worth pursuing.
Hunter Wonders races at Government Peak Recreation Area, Palmer, Alaska, Nov. 14, 2021, in the season-opening Race to the Outhouse #1. (photo: Eric Strabel for APUNSC)
APU and Staying Put
Alaska Pacific University provided continuity during those years. It was neither a junior factory nor a national-team satellite. Its athletes often arrived through unconventional paths and stayed longer than expected.
For Wonders, APU offered stability without stagnation. Coaching relationships endured. Autonomy was preserved. Expectations were internal before they were external.
Progress was allowed to be slow.
That patience would later prove critical — because when Wonders eventually left the sport, and then considered returning, there was no system to rebuild, no trust to reestablish. The ground remained where he had left it.
Hunter Wonders (USA) on his way to 16th place in the 10 k Classic in Beitostolen, Norway in 2022. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Proof, Finally
The breakthrough season arrived quietly, without spectacle or announcement.
During the 2022–23 World Cup season, Wonders recorded the strongest international results of his career: a 16th-place finish in Beitostølen, Norway an 11th-place finish in Oberstdorf, Germany and a 23rd-place finish at Holmenkollen. The trajectory was unmistakable, even if it did not demand attention.
“For me, that was a big jump from spending my time in the 50s, 60s,” he said.
The significance of those results was not external. They did not alter his standing overnight or change how the sport viewed him. Their impact was internal.
“It felt good. To prove to myself that I could ski with some of the best out there.”
For years, that belief had existed as conviction rather than certainty. Now it had evidence. The question of whether he belonged — the one that had quietly governed training blocks, selections, and seasons — no longer needed answering.
What remained was not ambition, but choice.
Hunter Wonders (USA) on his way to 23rd place in the Holmenkollen 50 k Freestyle in Oslo, Norway in 2023. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Leaving Without Collapse
Retirement in endurance sport is often framed as inevitable. Bodies fail. Results decline. Motivation erodes. The decision arrives trailing visible causes.
Hunter Wonders’ retirement did not follow that pattern.
When he stepped away from World Cup racing in the spring of 2023, his career was not unraveling. It was consolidating. The season behind him had not forced his hand; it had freed it.
“My planned last World Cup… it was right after a really good season for me,” he said.
The timing mattered. He was not leaving with questions unanswered. He was leaving with a sense of completion.
For a long time, Wonders had believed he could compete at that level. Now he knew it. And that knowledge altered the logic of staying.
With the central doubt resolved, the future opened in unexpected ways. Instead of sharpening ambition, success created space to consider what life beyond skiing might look like, and whether the cost of continuing still made sense.
“I thought I was content. I thought I was, you know… ready to move on.”
The decision was not driven by exhaustion or dissatisfaction. It was driven by certainty — and by the rare freedom that certainty can bring.
Crust ski in the spring time (Wonders’ all time favorite form of skiing). (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
What It Means to Leave While Improving
Leaving while things are going well carries a specific psychological weight. There is no obvious decline to explain the decision. No external force to blame. The athlete leaves not because the door is closing, but because it remains open.
Improvement, once experienced, does not fade quietly. The body remembers what alignment feels like — when training, racing, and confidence converge. Walking away at that moment does not resolve ambition; it suspends it.
Wonders framed his retirement as closure. But closure in elite sport is rarely permanent. The unanswered questions tend to return first, often in subtler forms.
In his case, the unresolved question was not whether he could ski at the highest level. That had been answered. The question was whether he wanted to continue building a life that revolved so completely around it.
From Seasons to Paychecks
After stepping away, Wonders entered a different rhythm entirely.
“That whole following summer, I worked construction, learned a lot of new skills. That’s when I got my pilot’s license.”
The change was not symbolic. It was practical. Construction offered tangible progress — work that produced visible results and predictable compensation.
“Even when skiing was going well, I just wanted to get out of it and work a normal job, get the normal paycheck, things like that.”
The appeal of normalcy was not rooted in dissatisfaction with skiing. It was rooted in adulthood. After years of living season to season, the idea of stability carried weight.
At the same time, Wonders had recently completed his degree at Alaska Pacific University.
“I graduated with a bachelor’s in business administration,” he said.
What followed was a transition many elite athletes experience but rarely articulate.
“I found a really hard transition when I graduated from being a student athlete to just an athlete. I felt like I wasn’t progressing elsewhere in life. And that was pretty hard for me.”
Without coursework, semesters, or academic milestones, skiing existed in isolation. Progress on snow no longer corresponded to progress in life. The imbalance unsettled him.
The Second Discipline
Aviation entered that gap not as a hobby, but as a parallel discipline.
“I have my pilot’s license now, and I’ve been working on my instrument rating,” Wonders said.
He described the training with precision.
“Being able to fly only using what’s on the dashboard of the plane. Basically, no looking outside the plane.”
Instrument flight is unforgiving. It demands trust in systems over instinct, procedure over perception. For Wonders, it offered a structure that mirrored elite sport without duplicating it.
“It’s been giving me something to work on outside of skiing, which has been really nice.”
More importantly, it offered psychological margin.
“It’s a very important thing for me, I think, to not feel trapped.”
The word matters. Trapped implies more than fatigue or burnout. It implies a loss of agency — the sense that leaving would erase identity rather than expand it.
Aviation gave Wonders a way to be committed to skiing without being consumed by it.
A Life That Almost Fit
For a time, the other life worked.
Construction days were long and direct. Progress was visible. Paychecks arrived on schedule. Flight training offered complexity, mastery, and forward motion.
The pace was different. The stakes were different. The feedback was immediate.
Skiing receded into the background — not as a regret, but as a completed chapter.
Yet even in that distance, the sport did not disappear entirely. It remained embedded in routine, in memory, in the body’s sense of what effort felt like.
Wonders did not describe missing racing. He described missing the calendar.
In November of 2022 Hunter Wonders (USA) was on his way to 30th place at the opening World Cup weekend in Ruka, Finland, but a year later he was home in Alaska. (Photo: NordicFocus)
November
“When everyone started peacing out to go race, I was like, man, what am I doing?”
November arrived the way it always does in elite skiing — as a turning point. Training blocks gave way to travel. Preparation became exposure.
For athletes still inside the system, November is movement. For those who have stepped away, it is absence.
The routines disappear first. Then the shared language. Eventually, the calendar itself feels unfamiliar.
Wonders’ realization was not emotional. It was logistical.
“I can always be installing insulation in some random house someday, but I can’t be skiing forever.”
November clarified something Wonders had not fully confronted while working construction or studying flight manuals: skiing was not just a job he had left. It was a window with an expiration date.
The question was no longer whether another life was possible. That had been answered. The question was whether he was prepared to let the skiing life close while it remained viable.
APU Head Coach Erik Flora, Chip Schoff, and Oscar Flora after getting the PistenBully running on Eagle Glacier last spring. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
The Conversation That Changed the Direction
Wonders began talking again with his APU coach, Erik Flora. The conversations were not urgent.
“He was very enthusiastic about my getting back into skiing. And so that just made that step a little easier.”
There was no pressure to return immediately. No demand for proof. The space remained open.
What followed was not an impulsive comeback, but a deliberate reconstruction.
Fishing trip on the Gulkana river this last September with close friends. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
A Three-Year Calendar
Rather than simply resuming his previous life, Wonders built a framework designed to prevent the same tension from reemerging.
“I just planned out this three-year calendar kind of to right now,” he said.
The calendar was not about training volume or race targets.
“I blocked off weeks that I was like, okay, these chunks of time, I’m not going to be thinking about ski racing.”
Those blocks were non-negotiable.
Moose hunting with his father and brother. Fishing weekends on the Kenai Peninsula. Commitments that anchored him to a life beyond snow.
“There are certain things I was willing to give up and certain things I wasn’t.”
The decision to return was conditional. Skiing would be central again, but not all-consuming.
Moose hunting camp with his dad and brother in interior Alaska. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
The Return, Without Announcement
When Hunter Wonders returned to full-time racing, there was no formal reintroduction. No narrative reset. No expectation that the sport should receive him differently than it had before.
He did not return as a project. He returned as a person who had already tested the alternative.
The first season back was uneven by his own account — fitness arriving in pieces, rhythm coming and going — but the framework held. The calendar he had built remained intact. The boundaries were not abandoned under pressure.
“Coming back from retirement wasn’t the easiest. Not… not the most productive thing,” he said.
The difference this time was not performance. It was posture. He no longer treated each result as a referendum on identity. He had already stepped outside the system once and learned what waited there.
That knowledge altered how he handled uncertainty.
Hunter Wonders (USA) during the 10 k Freestyle in Les Rousses, France of January of 2025. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Progress Without Urgency
As the return season unfolded, improvement came incrementally — the way it always had for Wonders. There was no single race that announced transformation. Instead, there was accumulation: training blocks completed, races absorbed, effort normalized.
The quiet confidence that had once been provisional now appeared settled. Racing no longer felt like a test of belonging. It felt like execution.
That distinction matters in Olympic years, when urgency can distort judgment. Athletes often feel pressure to force form, to manufacture moments that prove readiness. Wonders did not describe that impulse. He described a narrowing focus.
“I really tried to narrow the focus. And limit some distractions in the last year. I just wanted to go all in.”
The phrase carried none of its earlier desperation. “All in” now meant presence rather than sacrifice — committing fully to skiing while refusing to let it consume everything else.
Hunter Wonders (#369 – APU) on his way to winning the opening race, a 10 k Individual Start Classic, at the US National Championships in Lake Placid, New York, at the beginning of January. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
The Olympic Winter, Reframed
Olympic selection seasons tend to magnify everything. Results are scrutinized more closely. Criteria are parsed more aggressively. Small margins carry exaggerated meaning.
For athletes who have never stepped outside the system, that pressure can feel total. For Wonders, it did not.
He had already lived the other version of his life — the one with construction hours, flight manuals, and normal paychecks. He knew that version was viable. He also knew it was incomplete.
That knowledge changed how the Olympic Winter Games landed.
The selection process did not define him. It tested him.
Hunter Wonders (USA) racing the 10 k Classic in Oberhof, Germany on the final weekend of racing that was considered for making the US Olympic Team. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Selection as Consequence
When the Olympic team was named, Wonders’ response did not resemble arrival. It resembled recognition.
“My parents are coming over. I’m very excited about that,” he said.
Their presence mattered more than the announcement itself.
“Regardless of whether I made the Olympics or not, they were going to be supportive and proud.”
That certainty allowed the moment to settle without drama.
Still, the meaning was clear.
“To me, making the Olympics is kind of like paying them back… like, I finally made it.”
The phrasing was not triumphant. It was relational. The Olympics were not framed as destiny fulfilled, but as acknowledgment earned — proof that the years of logistics, travel, and patience had resolved into something concrete.
Hunter Wonders (USA) during the 20 k Classic Mass Start in Goms, Switzerland, the weekend after he had been named to the US Olympic Team. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
After the Goal
The days after selection often reveal more than the selection itself. For many athletes, the achievement creates a vacuum. The central question disappears, replaced by a quieter one: Now what?
Wonders articulated that shift immediately.
“Now it’s hard. I’ve been kind of thinking about now, what are my goals going forward?”
Qualification had resolved the season’s largest uncertainty. It also removed the shelter of pursuit.
“I don’t want to look like a bum at the Olympics… that’s not why I came here.”
The bluntness mattered. Making the team had never been the end of the story. It was a threshold — one that demanded a different kind of clarity.
Wonders taking his friend, who’s also a pilot, on a flight while he visits Alaska. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Flying by Instruments
The metaphor that runs quietly through Wonders’ story — though he never names it as such — is aviation.
“Being able to fly only using what’s on the dashboard of the plane,” he said, describing his instrument rating.
Instrument flight requires a specific discipline. When visibility disappears, instinct becomes unreliable. The pilot must trust systems rather than sensation, training rather than impulse.
That discipline mirrors the way Wonders has navigated his return. He has learned not to chase feelings — not to react to noise — but to trust the structures he has built.
In an Olympic year defined by margins, criteria, and scrutiny, that trust is rare.
When these two embrace each other next, they will have gone from this first ski on the back deck all the way to the Olympics. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
A Different Kind of Olympic Story
Hunter Wonders will arrive at the Olympic Games as a first-time Olympian. He will not arrive as someone who chased the Olympics at all costs.
He has already lived the alternative. He knows what it means to step away, to build another life, to find meaning beyond the sport. That knowledge changes how the Olympics function in his story.
The arc matters because it resists simplification. It does not fit neatly into the narratives elite sport prefers — prodigy, burnout, comeback. It occupies a quieter space: adulthood.
Wonders did not return because he had nothing else. He returned because he chose skiing again — deliberately, with boundaries intact, with the instruments checked and trusted.
In endurance sport, where careers are often defined by urgency and fear of loss, that choice may be the rarest qualification of all.
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If Hunter Wonders (#302) earns an Olympic start this February, hopefully, it will be a little less chaotic than the start of the US Junior National Championship in Stowe, Vermont, in 2014. (Photo: Voisin/FasterSkier)
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Lars Heggen (NOR) overpowered the field in Oberhof, but many of the world’s best sprinters—his Norwegian teammates—were absent from the day’s racing. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Some day, Norway won’t be the only force in Men’s World Cup cross-country skiing. Some day, the participation of other nations will truly matter. Other nations will hear their anthems played, other skiers will excel, other results will be cited and praised. Some day, France may figure it out, or Finland may remember its heritage, or Sweden may return to prominence. The USA may identify another Bill Koch, or Italy another Pellegrino, or Switzerland another Cologna, or Russia another Bolshunov. Some day, the podium of the Men’s Cross-Country Skiing World Cup will not be decorated exclusively in Norwegian flags. While that’s not yet the cross-country skiing world that we live in, it is this upcoming World cup weekend in Oberhof where we expect to witness a kind of “It’s A Wonderful Life” view of Nordic skiing . . . the chance to see what the world would be like without them.
France stayed home from Oberhof, presumably for national championships and team selections of their own. But everyone else is here, hoping to add to their World cup résumés with some of the scraps left on the tablecloth by absent Norwegians. Finland has sent its best (their Sprinters, anyway), and Sweden (in Norway’s absence they could make a splash), and the Italians (Federico Pellegrino and Elia Barp will see their chances to capture glory). The Czechs and the Swiss are here as well, hoping to grab World Cup distinction while the Norwegians are at home. And Team USA has sent it’s own hungry skate-sprinters, as well. Ben Ogden and Jack Young will be vying to return to the finals . . . even to imagine standing atop the podium (dare we say). JC Schoonmaker will be desperate to prove he belongs on the team that marches into Milano-Cortina. Gus Schumacher will be itching to prove that he and Ogden make a compelling Team Sprint team. There’s a lot going on . . . the same sort of drama that goes on every single week of the World Cup season, but no one really notices it because we’re so distracted by the Norwegian that tsunamis through every World cup venue.
And where’s Norway? Well, Norway has more important business to attend to. World Cup wins, World Cup podiums, World Cup points: those are every-week occurrences for ski-crazy Norway. But 2026 is an Olympic year . . . the big prizes will be awarded at the Games of Milano-Cortina. So, this weekend in Oberhof, Norway sends stand-ins while the true contenders refine their technique or taper their training, or just put their feet up for a few hours before the headlong streak toward Norwegian immortality in Milano-Cortina continues.
The elder Northug bother—Petter—was one of Norway’s greatest champions, but even he faced disappointment when it came to Olympic qualification. If Lars Heggen fails to make the team for Milano-Cortina, he will understand the parallels between his pain, and Northug’s. (Photo: Nordnes/NordicFocus)
Norway Still Expects to Win
Lars Heggen (NOR) is 20 years old . . . and he just dominated the Sprint competitions at the recent Norwegian Nationals. Granted, a number of Norway’s very best Sprinters weren’t there (no Klaebo, no Valnes, no Amundsen), but Heggen made enough of an impression that many Norwegian ski-pundits called for his immediate elevation to the Olympic Team. We can assume that Petter Northug was not among that enthusiastic group of pundits . . . especially since a 20-year-old Northug dominated 2006 Norwegian Nationals in an even more commanding manner than Heggen did in 2026. And Northug was unceremoniously denied an Olympic berth because of the selection committee’s assertion that, at only 20, he was too young for the pressures of Olympic competition, that Northug would benefit from more development time before being tossed into the Olympic maelstrom. Northug’s career turned out all right in the end, but it may have been even better if he’d collected another Olympic medal or two at the 2006 Games in Torino.
Northug’s little brother, Even, competes for Norway in the World Cup Sprint this weekend in Oberhof. Like his brother 20 years ago, Even Northug has already been told that no spot is reserved for him on the Norwegian Team at the upcoming Olympic Games. Well, he’s still a world class Sprinter . . . it will be interesting to see how the younger Northug uses this weekend’s Sprint opportunity to comment on his being the second Northug to have been ignored in his efforts to make a Norwegian Olympic Team.
But first, you need to qualify . . .
The top American qualifier in Oberhof, JC Schoonmaker (USA) leading Even Northug (NOR), and Zanden Mcmullen (USA) in their quarterfinal heat. (Photo: . Authamayou/NordicFocus)
Qualifying
We don’t know exactly why, but it’s been reported that top 30 in today’s Sprint qualifying will be rewarded with increased FIS World Cup points (nearly double when compared to normal World Cups, or to races in tour de Ski that received only 50% points). It’s a good reason to be at your best in this particular qualifying event . . . and a pretty good way to continue shuffling the deck for numerous nations that are still choosing their Olympic Teams. And while a number of Norway’s best sprinters decided to sit this one out, Norway still manages to dominate most men’s Wold Cup racing. Case in point: six of Norways seven entries qualified for the heats, with Lars Heggen doing the job he was sent to do—winning the qualifier by 1.5 seconds.
Americans took advantage of this diluted World Cup field with JC Schoonmaker finishing 13th, Jack Young 22nd, Zanden McMullen 28th, Michael Earnhart 35th, Kevin Bolger 44th, Owen Young 54th.
“The heat selection strategy was definitely a bit different today with a lot of normal World Cup guys not being here,” said Schoonmaker. “I went for heat 1 because that felt like a good one to move on from and it was a better option than usual with Klaebo not here. Other than heat selection the strategy didn’t differ at all for me, just trying to race my best!”
McMullen is better known as a Distance skier, but his strong qualifying effort proved his versatility. “I do actually like using sprint races as a bit of a warm up,” said McMullen. “It puts my mind and body into a race mentality that I can’t really achieve on a race prep day. Sprints also typically feel lower stakes to me, so it’s just a nice way to go out and have some fun!”
Sprint Heats—New Cast, New Strategies
Skiing can be such a strange sport. Oberhof is a famed biathlon venue; if this were a weekend of biathlon races the grandstands would be packed. As it is, this was a cross-country weekend, and the stadium stood all but empty. The German fans who could’ve been here definitely missed a good show, and a fair indication of what the future of what World Cup Sprint events may look like in the near future. Even with a number of bright stars missing from the days entry list, the racing proved fast and furious.
There was a lot going on in Quarterfinal 1: Lars Heggen wearing the green U23 World Cup leaders bib, alongside JC Schoonmaker, Zanden McMullen, and Even Northug. Everybody with something to prove, everybody with something to gain, and only two minutes of Heat 1 in which to do it. Schoonmaker led through the early parts of the course, but faded by mid-race. Heggen accelerated up the hill before the finish, sufficiently gapping his rivals and easing up before the finish line which he was followed across by a scrambling Even Northug. McMullen would finish fourth in the heat, followed by Schoonmaker in fifth. On the day, McMullen and Schoonmaker would finish 20th and 23rd, respectively.
Pellegrino advanced out of Quarterfinal 2 in which Jack Young’s day would end with a fifth place heat finish. Young had led early in the quarterfinal, evidently hoping to press the pace in the hopes of advancing as a lucky loser. His strategy was bold, but it left him one place short. Young would finish 24th on the day.
“I wanted to get to the front and control the race,” said Young. “Sadly, I wasn’t able to hold my position into the big climb—this wasn’t part of the plan. I then made up sole ground, but I didn’t have the energy to hold my position through the working finish.”
Semifinal 1 included Heggen, Pellegrino, and Northug who all came in together at the bottom of the final climb. Heggen would V2 the entire climb, while Pellegrino switched to a high-tempo V1 to scoot past into the hole-shot. Northug faded as Lauri Vuorinen (FIN) edged into the top three. Pellegrino would coast across for the heat win, followed by Heggen’s lunge for second ahead of Vuorinen in third and Northug fourth. Those lucky losers would sit and wait for the results of the second semifinal.
That second semifinal included one well known Sprinter—Switzerland’s Valerio Grond—who was joined by a cast of names we’re less accustomed to hearing: Filip Skari (NOR), Jaume Pueyo (ESP), Emil Liekari (FIN), Jiri Tuz (CZE), and Martino Carollo (ITA). Grond would finish second in the heat behind Liekari to advance to the final. Vuroinen and Northug—lucky losers from Semifinal 1—would advance as well.
Federico Pellegrino (ITA) used a high-tempo V1 to position himself on the steep uphill of Oberhof’s Sprint course. But Heggen’s V2 would prove stronger. (Photo: Reichert/NordicFocus)
Plenty at Stake in the Final
In the absence of truly dominant skiers, no one really knows what to do. The Sprint Final would become a bit of a curiosity as Heggen hoped to solidify his Olympic credentials . . . but Northug would be harboring similar plans of his own, and they’d both need to figure out how to deal with the cagey veteran, Pellegrino. In the final, Heggen and Pellegrino went to the front to control things, but neither looked eager to really drive the pace. Both the leaders chose the far-right line up the first climb as Liekari spun his wheels in the loose snow on the inside line. That was the point at which Grond took control, charging over the top of the climb. But Heggen’s fast skis could not be contained onthe subsequent downhill. He coasted easily into the lead, followed to the base of the final climb by Pellegrino and Northug. The final hill had offered a contrast in styles all day: Heggen’s V2 power vs. Pellegrino’s V1 tempo. This time up the hill, it was Heggen’s strategy that proved strongest, fending off Pellegrino’s V1 charge and holding on across the finish line for his first World Cup win. Northug would cross the line in third, a fine World Cup finish that was likely to be overlooked in Norway’s construction of its Olympic roster.
The 20 year old upstart bested the 35 year old veteran. The question that remained was this: was the Norwegian Olympic Team Selection Committee watching?
Oberhof World Cup Men’s Freestyle Sprint QUALIFYING
The Men’s Freestyle Sprint Podium in Oberhof—Federico Pellegrino (ITA always contends, Lars Heggen (NOR) hopes he proved his point, Even Northug (NOR) left wondering if anyone had noticed. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
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The US National Championships got started yesterday with the 10 k Classic Individual Start in Lake Placid, NY. Hunter Wonders (#369 – APU) took top honors in the men’s race. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
On a January afternoon in Lake Placid, Mt. Van Hoevenberg did what it has always done best: it asked skiers to be honest.
The 10-kilometer classic individual start is not a format that rewards theater. It doesn’t care how good you looked in warm-up, how confident you sounded the night before, or how convincing your season-long narrative might be. It rewards pacing that’s brave but not reckless, technique that doesn’t unravel under strain, and the ability to keep making good decisions when your legs are trying to renegotiate the terms of the day.
This year, the U.S. National Cross-Country Ski Championships opened with that race—two laps on the 5-kilometer loop—and the timing was no accident. In an Olympic winter, Nationals is never just Nationals. It’s an argument. It’s a week where results don’t merely “count,” they accumulate, and the accumulation becomes the story that follows athletes into selection meetings, petitions, and—if all goes right—onto a plane headed for Italy.
Will Koch (SVSEF) on his way to 8th place on the day. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
The Course: Where You Can’t Afford to “Blow Up”
The Van Hoevenberg course is famous for being “fair,” but fairness in skiing is rarely gentle. The climbs arrive in layered sequences—sections where you can press, sections where you can survive, sections where you can lose seconds simply by being a fraction late to a gear change. There are places to win time, and places where you simply try not to hemorrhage it.
Hunter Wonders described the central problem precisely after the finish:
“It has some big hills. And I really think that in this course you can’t afford to blow up. If you blow up, you’re just going to bleed so much time.”
That idea—bleeding time—was the hidden refrain of the day. Not because athletes were exploding spectacularly, but because this loop punishes any lapse in restraint. It is a course that rewards a mind that stays intact.
Corbin Carpenter (UAA) on his way to 10th place in the 10 k Classic at US Nationals. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
Men’s Race: Seconds as a Selection Language
At the front of the men’s race, the margins compressed into something almost absurd: a national title decided in a space so small it could be measured in one imperfect corner, one extra step of herringbone, one pole that slips just slightly at the wrong moment.
Hunter Wonders won the men’s 10 k Classic National Championship. Behind him, the podium fight came down to an almost unnerving closeness. The story wasn’t simply that the race was fast; it was that it was tight—tight enough to turn pacing into the defining skill.
Wonders’ post-race reflection didn’t sound like someone who had “controlled” the race so much as someone who had managed it correctly, which is often the same thing in interval start racing:
“Yeah. So going through it never really felt like it was my day. I knew it was going to be a competitive one, and I knew that it would just come to good skis, good feelings in the body, good pacing, and I’m just really happy that I was able to pull it off.”
He returned to pacing again, emphasizing that his strategy wasn’t about heroics, but about avoiding the one mistake that the Van Hoevenberg loop will magnify:
“I think pacing was the biggest challenge for me today… So I was trying to take it out hot to where I could be competitive but not blow myself up.”
What made Wonders’ win especially convincing was how he described staying committed to his plan and then finishing with intent when the splits told him the race was available:
“I never really changed my race plan mid-race. But I did get some good splits, especially near the end, so I just tried to finish as hard as I could.”
And then, because it’s 2026 and everyone knows what this week represents, he said the part that matters most:
“And then, of course, U.S. Nationals does carry some heavy weight in an Olympic year. And I’ve been thinking about this race since the races in Anchorage ended, so I’m just really happy to have it behind me.”
He wasn’t pretending the pressure isn’t real:
“I definitely felt the pressure, and I’m going to continue to feel the pressure throughout the rest of this Nationals. But I think I have good momentum going, and I have good confidence. I know that I’m in shape, and everything else just kind of hopefully falls into place over the next week.”
The finish-line truth of the men’s race is that it created a kind of selection tension that will hang over the rest of the week: the top contenders weren’t separated by a narrative gap. They were separated by seconds.
Luke Jager, who finished second, captured what that tightness means on this course and in this moment:
“Yeah, crazy how close the times were! The course is cool because there are so many different gears in the climb that people can all have different focus spots and still end up so close together at the finish line. It is really cool, fair racing like that.”
That line—different focus spots, same finish—explains why the top of the results can look like a near-tie without being random. You can ski this course well in different ways. But you still have to ski it well.
Jager also spoke directly to the Olympic subtext without overplaying it:
“I’m not naive enough to say that the Olympics aren’t on all of our minds, but I’m also really having fun just trying to do my best and working to solve the puzzle of how to perform on any given day. Italy would be sweet, but I’m super thankful for this opportunity to even be feeling that pressure at all. It’s been fun to have such a big challenge.”
And then the warning embedded in the closeness:
“The close times just show me that you can’t take anything for granted, and each race could be someone else’s day. Fun to have to try and be as dialed and prepared as you can every day when the stakes are high.”
In other words, this wasn’t a day that “settled” anything. It made the next races more consequential.
Hailey Swirbul (APU) on her way to a national title in the 10 k Classic at US Nationals in Lake Placid. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
Women’s Race: Swirbul’s Return, and a Course That Doesn’t Flatter Anyone
If the men’s race was defined by a razor-thin margin, the women’s race had a different feel: not less intense, but shaped by a performance at the front that felt like a statement. And the words that followed from the winner did not sound like someone who had stumbled into a good day; they sounded like someone who had been building toward a day like this for a long time.
Hailey Swirbul framed her win as the visible outcome of a longer experiment:
“Winning this race felt like finally getting to watch the outcome of a long experiment unfold! I’ve wanted to approach this season from a place of curiosity to see if I can get fitness and strength back after a 2.5-year hiatus. It has felt so rewarding to get stronger and remember how it feels to race and go hard again.”
She described the way racing itself can re-teach an athlete what “hard” feels like:
“Each race or hard interval session reminds me what it feels like a little bit more.”
And then she said what almost everyone in the finish area seemed to be thinking, whether they admitted it or not:
“This course is legit. I didn’t hear the words ‘I felt good out there!’ come out of a single person’s mouth! It was a battle of self against hill.”
That sentence carries the whole day inside it: not a battle against other people, exactly, but against the course’s capacity to strip away pretense.
Hailey Swirbul (APU) charges up one of the many climbs on that Lake Placid course behind Virginia Cobb (#120 – DAR) and Marit Flora (#76 – UAA). (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
Swirbul’s race plan—at least as she described it—was deeply personal in its logic. Not a copy of someone else’s pacing, not a response to what she imagined others were doing, but an attempt to ski in a way that matched her strengths:
“I tried to ski true to myself. I wanted to use momentum and my own body weight the most effectively I could to get around that course as fast as I could- regardless of how the pacing looked for others.”
And because it’s an Olympic year, she made the subtext explicit:
“I have my eyes on an Olympic Team spot, and I’m going to continue to fight for it until the team is officially named. I’m not thinking beyond this week of racing here at Nationals. One step at a time, staying present…”
Then the line that reminds you why athletes keep doing this:
“…and enjoying getting to live this life and see so many people from old racing days— it’s a good life.”
Novie McCabe’s post-race comments carried a tone that felt especially relevant to this week: gratitude, yes—but also a clear-eyed description of how fragile a season can feel, and how an athlete can build stability by focusing on what can be controlled.
“It meant a lot to be starting today for sure! I think that being a bit unsure of whether I’d be starting these races made me feel pretty grateful for the opportunity to go out there and give it my best today.”
She described the emotional mix honestly:
“There were, of course, lots of doubts and some nerves going in as well, but I really tried to just enjoy the skiing and made that my main goal going into it.”
And she emphasized that conditions and course feel matter—not as excuses, but as context:
“The conditions were insanely nice today, which helped, and this course is one of my favorites!”
On pacing, McCabe described a strategy rooted in self-knowledge:
“Honestly, I kinda just went out as hard as I could within reason, and tried to relax and hold onto it. I know the splits don’t really make it look that way, haha, but I am not the fastest starter, so it is usually best for me to go out at what feels like a pretty hard pace.”
Then she explained the architecture of her day: not results goals, but process goals. She made a point that’s easy to dismiss until you remember what an Olympic week does to people:
“Being focused on process goals going into a race really helps me develop a framework for success.”
She listed those goals with specificity—how she wanted to feel, what she wanted to focus on, what she wanted her mind to do when discomfort arrived:
“…going out hard but comfortable and trying to hold it, skiing well (not skiing hard), be the focus of the day, keeping up the positive self-talk, and finding the good and noticing what is going well throughout the race.”
And on Olympic pressure, she offered a perspective that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever had a season disrupted by health or inconsistency:
“I think it has honestly helped me out in terms of handling self-imposed Olympic qualification pressure to not have had the best lead up and be pretty unsure of what I would be doing as far as racing goes this year…”
She described her focus as narrower—day by day—because it has to be:
“…it has taken some of my focus off of results… It has just kind of led to an approach where I take it day by day, and don’t really think much further into the future than that.”
That isn’t resignation. It’s an operating system. And it’s one that often works, especially on a course where you can lose time in the exact moment you start racing the future instead of the hill in front of you.
Rosie Fordham (UAF) leaving it all on the course on her way to 7th place overall. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
Samantha Smith: A Double Life and a Very Real Result
Samantha Smith’s presence near the top of the women’s results came with a storyline that’s unusual even in American ski racing: balancing elite cross-country skiing with Division I soccer at Stanford, and arriving at the heart of ski season off a long NCAA tournament run.
She spoke about the short transition plainly:
“Yes, that’s correct, that our soccer team’s long run into the NCAA tournament has made for a much shorter transition to the season. I’ve only been on snow for a few weeks, so I know my ski fitness is improving every day.”
She described the emotional carryover of playing for a national title—how it can become fuel rather than a distraction:
“Playing in the National Championship was an amazing experience—we were so close to winning it all. It was a tough way to end such a great season. I’m taking that fire from our final game and pouring it into my skiing.”
And she framed her path as something she’s embracing, not defending:
“I know my path is different from others, but I’m doing what I love, and I think there’s a lot to be said for staying true to that. I’m trying to take everything step by step, live in the moment, and focus on what I can control!”
On the scrutiny that comes with missing ski events earlier in the season, she emphasized the lessons she’s drawn from doing two sports seriously:
“…for me, I feel like there’s actually a lot I can pull from the two sports and use it to my advantage.”
She described last year as a “trial year” and explained how she’s adjusted:
“I needed that test phase to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. I made some adjustments this year in training, switching things up a bit, and I feel like that’s helped me a lot going into this season.”
She credited Braden Becker for helping with training and coaching through the fall:
“I owe a huge thank you to Braden Becker, a retired skier, who’s now a grad student at Stanford. He helped me a lot with training this fall, and it honestly made a world of difference…”
And then she returned to the mental challenge of this week—high stakes, lots of uncontrollables—and the philosophy that keeps an athlete from spiraling:
“…I’m just trying to focus on what I can control—my attitude and effort.”
Finally, she addressed the question of what a distance result might “say” about her:
“I was happy with today’s result… I think today’s race was a good indication of my trajectory for the rest of the week and the rest of the season.”
And she framed versatility—distance and sprint—as part of the argument she wants to make this winter:
“…hopefully showcase some of my versatility in different distances and disciplines, which I think can be important for big competitions like the Olympics.”
Alayna Sonnesyn (Team Birkie) on her way to 10th place overall. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
Why This Week Matters So Much
For the men, the arithmetic of Olympic selection is already partly written—and partly unresolved. At present, the United States is allotted seven men’s quota spots for the Olympic team, with the possibility that an eighth could roll down following this weekend’s World Cup races in Oberhof, Germany. That uncertainty is where much of the tension at U.S. Nationals resides.
It is also where most of the speculation comes from—so take it for what it is, informed but unofficial. The six American men who recently raced the Tour de Ski appear, by any reasonable reading of the criteria, to be on solid ground. Each currently ranks in the top 45 on the FIS World Cup sprint and distance overall lists, the threshold set by the US Ski Team that meets the objective requirements for Olympic selection.
Within that group of six, there is also ample sprint depth to cover the four available starts in the individual classic sprint and to form a competitive two-man sprint relay. As a result, Tuesday’s Freestyle Sprint at Nationals is likely to carry less weight for those athletes racing in Lake Placid with dreams of making the Olympic roster. Instead, the races most likely to function as closing arguments—particularly if an additional quota spot materializes—were Sunday’s 10 k Classic and Thursday’s 20 k Freestyle Mass Start. For at least one man, and potentially two, those performances may determine whether this week in Lake Placid becomes a footnote or a turning point.
On the women’s side, the picture is far less settled—and far more fluid. The United States has eight Olympic quota spots available, but only a portion of them is considered secure. Jessie Diggins—if it were ever in doubt—has already satisfied the objective criteria by finishing in the top eight in World Cup races that are part of the Olympic schedule. Julia Kern and Rosie Brennan also appear well-positioned, based on their respective rankings on the sprint and distance overall lists.
That still leaves as many as five remaining spots to be determined, drawing from a complicated blend of results across Period One on the World Cup, the SuperTour events in Alaska, and, critically, U.S. Nationals this week in Lake Placid. For those athletes, Nationals is not simply a domestic championship. It is an audition, a data point, and—in some cases—the clearest remaining path onto the Olympic team.
John Steel Hagenbuch (DAR) on his way to 5th place overall on the day. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
Grover: “There’s Going to be Space”… and then the Paperwork
US Cross-Country Ski Team Director Chris Grover offered perhaps the clearest explanation for why the opening races at Nationals feel unusually charged—not because they deliver final answers, but because they create space. Space in which athletes can move themselves from the margins of the conversation toward its center.
The story, as Grover framed it, is not simply who wins. It is what a result permits: what doors it opens, what arguments it strengthens, and how it positions an athlete within the broader, inevitably imperfect machinery of Olympic selection.
As Grover put it in an interview with FasterSkier, U.S. Nationals does exactly that—it creates room:
“…it’s going to be a great story because there’s space. There’s going to be space on both the men’s squad and the women’s squad, by the looks of it, for athletes to qualify from Nationals, to have great U.S. Nationals and come over, especially on the women’s side…”
That space, however, is not filled automatically. In an Olympic year, it is accompanied by paperwork, petitions, and deliberation—an acknowledgment that performance, while central, is rarely the entire story.
Grover outlined the petition process that follows Nationals, a step that often receives less public attention but carries significant weight:
“…all athletes who want to be considered for discretionary selection… We’ll put in an application. Or a petition rather, where they will kind of write out what their case is, why they should be considered…”
Those petitions, Grover explained, are then evaluated by a selection committee—six people tasked with translating results, trends, and context into final decisions:
“…we have the six-person selection committee that will pick the team. So as a committee, we’ll read everybody’s application, and then we, as a committee, will decide whether we want to elevate somebody using Coach’s discretion to be selected.”
Even the arithmetic of quota spots, Grover noted, is subject to forces beyond any one athlete’s control. On the men’s side, the possibility of an additional spot remains unresolved:
“…it’s after Oberhof… qualification for nations also closes on January 18… and at that point a spot [might be] available…”
Which is to say: timing matters. So does patience.
Taken together, Grover’s explanation underscores a truth that every athlete racing this week understands intuitively. Lake Placid does not merely crown national champions. It produces evidence—sometimes decisive, sometimes ambiguous—for a selection process that will soon harden from theory into reality. And once it does, the margins that feel abstract today will become permanent.
Ava Thurston (#45 – DAR) on her way to 6th place overall on the day. (Photo: Phillip Belena/EISA)
What Sunday Actually Did
The first day of Nationals did not select the Olympic team. It did something subtler and, in some ways, more powerful: it established the tone of the week.
On the men’s side, it proved that the domestic field is not going to give anyone breathing room. Wonders’ win was decisive in the only way that matters in interval start racing: he was fastest when everyone had to ski alone. But the closeness behind him reinforced Jager’s point—each race could be someone else’s day. In a week like this, that’s not a platitude. It’s a forecast.
On the women’s side, Swirbul’s victory felt like a day where preparation and belief finally aligned. But even she framed the week properly: one step at a time, staying present, not thinking beyond Lake Placid. McCabe and Smith offered two different versions of the same survival skill: build a framework, focus on process, control what you can, and let results become the output rather than the obsession.
If there was a single emotional throughline, it was this: the athletes weren’t pretending the Olympics weren’t there. They were trying, in different ways, to keep that fact from hijacking the work.
A Conclusion in the Shape of an Interval Start
There’s a particular quiet that follows an interval start classic race—not silence, exactly, but the hush of athletes doing their internal accounting. A national championship can feel like a celebration. In an Olympic year, it can also feel like a deposit: something placed into the larger selection ledger, something that will matter later, in rooms the athletes won’t be in, in conversations they can’t control.
What makes Lake Placid different—what makes Mt. Van Hoevenberg feel so permanent—is that it refuses to dramatize any of this. It simply asks the same thing of everyone: ski two laps honestly, manage the climbs, keep your head when your legs get loud, and finish without bargaining.
Wonders said he felt the pressure—and expects to keep feeling it. Jager said the closeness means nothing can be taken for granted. Swirbul described a long experiment that finally yielded its outcome. McCabe described building success from process, not prediction. Smith described a life lived between two sports, and a focus narrowed to attitude and effort.
Taken together, those aren’t just post-race quotes. They’re the first chapter of the week.
And in an Olympic winter, first chapters matter—because the next race arrives quickly, and the story keeps writing itself, one start at a time.
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This coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR) paced the Tour de Ski 20 K Classic in Toblach (ITA) to perfection. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
By mid-morning in Toblach, the cold had settled into the valley in that particular Dolomite way—dry, bright, and unforgiving. The stadium clock read 10:30 a.m., the tracks were hard-packed, and the Tour de Ski—never gentle, always exacting—had reached a moment where patience mattered as much as power. Stage 4’s men’s 20-kilometer classic pursuit would not be decided by theatrics. It would be decided by discipline.
From the first push out of the starting line, Johannes Høsflot Klæbo made that clear.
The Norwegian leader skied as if tethered to an internal metronome, clicking off splits that barely wavered across five laps of the 4-kilometer loop. Behind him, the race congealed into a dense, minute-long chase—ambitious but realistic, orderly but never comfortable. Inside that group, Gus Schumacher did what pursuit racing rewards: work when it mattered, wait when it didn’t, and finish inside the race rather than on its margins.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR) on his way to first place on the 20 K Classic Pursuit. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Klæbo’s Quiet Authority
Klæbo entered the day with the yellow bib and skied as though intent on keeping it uncontested. At 4 kilometers, he led in 9:11.8; at 8 kilometers, 18:23.4; at 12, 27:34.6; and at 16, 36:53.3—the first three splits almost exact to the tenth. He crossed the line in 46:01.7, never once letting the chase compress to a threatening distance.
Second place belonged to Mattis Stenshagen (+51.1), who skied the most assertive race of those behind Klæbo and briefly tested the cohesion of the chase on the fourth lap’s long climb. Third went to Edvin Anger (+59.8), tied on time with Italy’s Federico Pellegrino, whose classic form looked as efficient as it did economical. Emil Iversen finished fifth (+1:00.2), matching Schumacher stride for stride to the line.
That minute—barely more than a breath in Tour de Ski terms—defined the race.
Gus Schumacher (USA) did much of the work early to bring the chase into one pack behind Klaebo. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Schumacher in the Middle of It
Schumacher finished sixth, also +1:00.2, part of the decisive chase that refused to fracture even as the course repeatedly asked for answers. The result came less than 24 hours after his 5 k freestyle win in Toblach, and the transition—emotionally and physically—was not trivial.
“It was a little bit tough, honestly,” Schumacher said. “This pursuit started at 10:30 a.m., and I haven’t woken up before eight in probably a month because all our races have been so late. … I definitely enjoyed the win, but the focus was to refocus right away. It’s another new day, and this race was really important for the Tour.”
Inside the race, Schumacher was not hiding. He described closing the gap to Iversen after the early climbs and doing much of the work that consolidated the group—an effort he acknowledged with pride. “I did most of that work, which I’m actually pretty proud of,” he said. What he didn’t do was overreach. “I wasn’t trying to catch Klæbo or anything,” Schumacher added. “Even though some of the guys might have been thinking that.”
The fourth lap told the story. Stenshagen pressed hard on the long climb out of the stadium, stretching the elastic just enough to test resolve. Schumacher bent but didn’t break. Over the top, the group exhaled. The fifth lap came fast—but not frantic—and Schumacher found himself boxed in late, a tactical note he filed away rather than lamented.
“With the overall standings so tight, I don’t think it’s worth thinking about it too much,” he said. “I’m sitting in third right now, and top ten is definitely still the goal. … Everyone from second through ninth is so close that it really comes down to focusing day by day.”
That may be the most Tour de Ski answer of all.
Gus Schumacher (USA), Emil Iversen (NOR), Edvin Anger (SWE), and Lars Heggen (NOR) worked together to prevent Klaebo from extending his lead. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
A Chase by Committee
Behind Schumacher, the chase’s cohesion owed as much to restraint as to strength. Lars Heggen (seventh, +1:00.3) and Benjamin Moser (eighth, +1:00.8) rounded out a group that included Harald Østberg Amundsen (ninth, +1:03.1). No one bridged to Klæbo; no one detonated the pack behind. The race’s geometry stayed intact.
That stability mattered in a Norwegian context. With Olympic selection pressure already humming and only a few men’s spots still unsettled, Toblach functioned as both race and audition. Stenshagen’s second place was emphatic. The Tour does not reward one-off brilliance. It rewards survivability.
Ben Ogden (USA) finding his classic distance form. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
The Americans: Process Over Panic
Further back, the pursuit revealed its less visible truths. Ben Ogden finished 29th (+3:03.3), a result that reads well on paper and even better when you hear how he raced it.
“The biggest challenge is always the start,” Ogden said. “For me, it was about trying to pace the race properly, even when people were moving ahead of me early. … I started with a pack, then a bunch of them dropped me, and I just kind of let that happen, knowing I’d be able to catch some of them later—which I did.”
That in-and-out rhythm—sometimes lonely, sometimes crowded—is pursuit racing in the middle of the field. Ogden framed it honestly. “Racing in a tight group is obviously more fun,” he said, “but you really have to pace yourself and try not to lose unnecessary time in a Tour, especially when you’re already a little tired.”
For Zak Ketterson, who started deep in the order, the early kilometers were chaos by design. He finished 42nd (+3:55.1), but the route there mattered.
“The wave is really challenging, especially starting in bib 70,” Ketterson said. “Five or six seconds have already passed before I even reach the start line. The first two laps were chaos, and I was just trying to stay relaxed and avoid trouble.”
He did move forward—damage control after a Stage 2 crash that had already cost him minutes. “It was nice to move up a lot today,” Ketterson said, “but the classic sprint on Stage 5 is definitely the main focus now.”
Ketterson also addressed the jury’s written reprimand for use of a banned technique in a marked stride zone—a penalty that did not disqualify him but appears in the official record. “The technique violation came from double poling in a stride zone,” he explained. “I changed tracks to pass someone, and the motion of doing that ended up being a double pole.”
For Zak Ketterson (USA), the Tour de Ski hasn’t exactly gone as he had hoped, but today in the pursuit, he showed his form from earlier in the season. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
When the Day Turns on a Ski
Kevin Bolger finished 51st (+4:18.6), a result shaped by circumstance rather than strategy. Bolger had been patient by design, content to let early red-lining pass him by before advancing after lap two. Then a ski broke.
“I like to settle in, and then after lap two start working my way up the field,” Bolger said. “I was just about to do that today when someone merged into my track and broke my ski, which cost me close to a minute. That was pretty disappointing.”
Before that moment, his choices had been sound. Toblach’s two main climbs invite early commitment to kick wax, and Bolger leaned into it. “It was an easy choice to really feel the kick wax early,” he said. “The skis were feeling great, and I was really excited about how I was going to start moving up the field.”
Bolger’s broader view was measured, almost cheerful in its realism. “This Tour isn’t quite as massive as some of the past ones,” he said. “It’s about gaining confidence and fitness, as long as you’re able to absorb it after the Tour.” Olympic energy is present, he acknowledged, but not consuming. “At the end of the day, I’m just trying to race fast.”
J.C. Schoonmaker placed 56th (+4:42.7), while Jack Young finished 80th (+8:07.2), both navigating a day where patience was mandatory, and opportunities were earned in inches rather than meters.
Andrew Musgrave (GBR) and Antoine Cyr (CAN), (l-r) moving up through the field together. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Canada: Trials Done, Work Ongoing
Canada’s men arrived in Toblach with their Olympic trials already behind them and the Tour serving a different purpose. Antoine Cyr led the way in 13th (+1:54.5), with Thomas Stephen 28th (+3:02.6) and Xavier McKeever 30th (+3:08.1). The emphasis now is accumulation—fitness, familiarity, resilience—rather than immediate results.
Context at the Margins
The Tour de Ski has a way of narrowing options without warning. On Thursday morning, one Norwegian men’s Olympic hopeful, Oskar Opstad Vike, withdrew close to start time, a reminder that the margins between readiness and retreat are thin, especially in an Olympic year. Toblach did not create that pressure; it merely revealed it.
Mattis Stenshagen (NOR) was excited when he crossed the finish line as if he knew he had shown the Norwegian Olympic selectors enough to make the team. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
What the Splits Say
A look at the time checks explains why the race felt so controlled. Klæbo’s advantage barely fluctuated. The chase group’s gaps among themselves were measured in seconds—Schumacher, Iversen, Anger, and Pellegrino trading fractional advantages without a decisive rupture. Further back, time losses accrued not in dramatic collapses but in quiet inefficiencies: a missed pack, a broken ski, a moment of over-enthusiasm.
The course profile—five laps, 137 meters of total climb—rewards restraint. Toblach does not forgive impatience.
A broken ski for Kevin Bolger (USA) didn’t prevent him from showing his form in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Looking Ahead
Stage 4 did not reshuffle the Tour so much as clarify it. Klæbo remains the reference. The men chasing him know exactly how much ground they have—and how little room there is to gamble it away. Schumacher’s position near the top of the standings is real, earned through effort and discretion. Behind him, athletes like Ogden, Ketterson, and Bolger are racing a Tour that asks for perspective as much as speed.
Val di Fiemme awaits with its own demands and, this year, Olympic resonance. But Toblach offered a simpler lesson. In a pursuit, the clock is visible; the choices are not. The best skiers make the hard ones look easy—and the easy ones count.
Fastest Skiers on the Day – Men (Top 15, Net Time Only)
This ranking removes pursuit start gaps and shows who skied the fastest 20 km classic on Stage 4.
Day Rank
Athlete
Nation
Net Time
1
Edvin Anger
SWE
45:39.5
2
Simen Hegstad Krüger
NOR
45:44.0
3
Federico Pellegrino
ITA
45:45.5
4
Mattis Stenshagen
NOR
45:51.8
5
Emil Iversen
NOR
45:51.9
6
Gus Schumacher
USA
45:52.9
7
Truls Gisselman
SWE
45:58.5
8
Antoine Cyr
CAN
45:59.2
9
Hugo Lapalus
FRA
46:00.5
10
Johannes Høsflot Klæbo
NOR
46:01.7
11
Benjamin Moser
AUT
46:03.5
12
Savelii Korostelev
AIN
46:04.5
13
Harald Østberg Amundsen
NOR
46:07.8
14
Andrew Musgrave
GBR
46:13.6
15
Lars Heggen
NOR
46:17.0
Net time calculated as finish time minus individual pursuit start offset.
Places 3-7 where this close for Federico Pellegrino (ITA), Edvin Anger (SWE), Gus Schumacher (USA), Emil Iversen (NOR), (l-r) after 20 K in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
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On Friday afternoon, as World Cup sprinters snap into their skis in Trondheim and the SuperTour fields gather in Fairbanks, one of the United States’ most electrifying young Nordic athletes will step onto an entirely different stage. Stanford University, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Women’s Soccer Tournament, is marching toward the College Cup—and at the center of it all is a player who, in just a matter of days, will also begin her bid for the U.S. Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team.
The athlete is Sammy Smith: 20 years old, a national-team skier, an Environmental Systems Engineering major, and a starter for one of the most dominant college soccer programs in the country. The U.S. Ski Team views her as one of the most promising sprinters of her generation. And yet this weekend, instead of warming up on hard-packed snow in Norway or chasing early-season points in Alaska, she’ll be preparing to face Duke with advancing to the NCAA Championship Game on the line.
“Get ready to cheer for one of the U.S. Ski Team’s top skiers this weekend,” you might tell Nordic fans. “Just… not on skis.”
From the outside, the collision of seasons looks impossible to manage. For Smith, it is simply the life she has known since childhood.
Idaho in Two Parts
Smith grew up in a pattern that almost feels mythic now: winters in Sun Valley, summers and the rest of the year in Boise. Her family built the rhythm—her mom moving the kids north each winter so they could ski full-time and homeschool them in those snowy months.
“I kind of grew up splitting time between Boise and Sun Valley,” Smith says. “My mom would move up to Sun Valley during the winter with my siblings and me so we could ski, and she would homeschool us up there… I did that all through high school.”
In Boise, she was a typical public school student. In Sun Valley, she became a multi-sport anomaly. Her childhood was not just active—it was encyclopedic.
“Growing up, I played about every sport one can imagine,” she says. “I ran track and cross country all through high school… I played hockey for a long time. Played football. Yeah, like, you name it, I pretty much did it.”
Soccer was the constant. She started as soon as a child could sign up—though the Smiths occasionally bent age rules to make sure she could play with older kids. When her older sister started soccer, she was right behind her.
“It’s probably like three years old when I started,” Smith says.
And then there was freestyle skiing—a considerable part of her identity, something she expected to pursue more seriously than Nordic. Until one day, she couldn’t.
“I ended up fracturing my tibia in my sophomore year,” she says. “And so I focused on Nordic that winter… I ended up having a great season, and then haven’t really looked back since.”
The transition was abrupt, but the groundwork had already been laid: years of downhill confidence, years of skiing, years of learning to read terrain and push limits.
“I’ve been on skis my entire life,” she says. “Very comfortable on downhills… I love to ski aggressively.”
The athlete emerging in those years was already something unusual. The athlete she would become—balancing multiple sports at world-class levels—was still unimaginable.
Against the Specialization Tide
From the outside, Smith’s career appears to defy the common wisdom of modern youth sports. Increasingly, top athletes specialize early; by high school, many are all-in on one discipline.
Smith resisted that. Not because she lacked ambition, but because multiple sports gave her joy—and made her better.
“I think that’s something I’ve really thought a lot about,” she says. “There’s been more and more pressure to specialize… but growing up and doing so many different sports just kind of added to different components of skiing that I think are really important.”
Soccer, for example, translates directly into sprint racing.
“It’s a very high-paced game,” she says. “There’s a lot of change of direction, a lot of accelerating and decelerating. Particularly when you’re looking at heats, a lot of it is reacting to other people’s moves, trying to find little gaps and squeeze through.”
The skill set becomes a competitive edge: quickness, agility, and decision-making under pressure.
“That ability to shift gears really quickly and take openings when you can really emulates in soccer,” she says.
Freestyle skiing contributed something else entirely: creativity and courage on skis, especially in chaotic or technical downhill sections.
“At World Juniors last year,” she recalls, “everyone was in the track. I hopped out of the track, went far on the inside, and just double poled… It was a risky move, but it was something I saw.”
She paused for only a moment before going all-in. It worked.
The blend—soccer fuel, freestyle instinct, Nordic engine—gives her a uniqueness rarely seen in American skiing.
U.S. Ski Team head coach Matt Whitcomb sees it clearly.
“She’s a world-class athlete,” Whitcomb says. “She’s already exhibited the early signs of being a World Cup star.”
That she is doing this while starting for Stanford’s soccer team? To him, it’s not a contradiction. It’s part of the magic.
Why Stanford — and Why Now
Choosing Stanford was not simple. Smith had options—many of them. But a few factors stood out.
“I really value my education,” she says. “Stanford’s a great school. It’s where my mom went. And my sister is also on the soccer team, so the opportunity to get to play college soccer with her is pretty hard to pass up.”
Her academic path—Environmental Systems Engineering with an energy concentration—fits a pattern among elite U.S. skiers. Many of the top men (Gus Schumacher, Ben Ogden, et al.) have gravitated toward engineering. Smith sees the overlap, too.
“You look at a skier and the training that they do,” she says. “They’re very self-motivated, very committed. So I’m sure certain aspects translate pretty well.”
The challenge, of course, is that Stanford is far from snow. It is not close to ski culture. It is not close to the European World Cup circuit. It is very near, however, to one vital piece of equipment:
“Fortunately, I have a classic roller-ski treadmill… in a little office space,” she says. “That’s been an irreplaceable part of my training.”
She uses it for high-quality sessions, often squeezed between classes, labs, or soccer obligations. Running remains a central component, helped by the demands of soccer conditioning.
But she knows her preparation is different—less volume, more precision. Not ideal. Not textbook. Not expected. And yet:
“I think I’ve tried to accept that,” she says. “I know that I am not at my best, but skiing is a sport you can do for a very long time. I don’t necessarily need to be the best skier I can be at 20 years old.”
Again, Whitcomb backs the long view.
“We’re willing to postpone that timeline,” he says. “We’re just happy for Sammy being happy in her current environment. We’ll take what we can get at this moment, but we want more down the road, and we’re excited for it.”
This, in many ways, is the crux of the story: the U.S. Ski Team is betting on Sammy Smith not despite her dual identity, but because of it.
Samantha Smith (USA) racing the World Cup individual sprint in Goms (SUI). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The Final Four — and Then the Sprint Start Line
The most astonishing part of Smith’s season is its timing.
If Stanford beats Duke on Friday in Kansas City, they move directly to the College Cup championship game. The semifinal is December 5th; the final is December 8th, Monday. Smith has already mapped out the days that follow.
“We’ll get back Tuesday night from Missouri… I have a final at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning,” she says. “I’m going to fly out right after my final, and then I’ll have one day of snow on Thursday in Alaska, and then I’ll be hitting that sprint on Friday.”
She says this calmly, matter-of-factly, like someone describing a standard weekend trip.
The Anchorage SuperTour sprint is not just any race—it is her re-entry into skiing, her first day on snow of the season, and a crucial tune-up before U.S. Nationals in Lake Placid, where she hopes to qualify for the Olympic team.
The Anchorage races, she says, are not performance indicators—they are simply a way to “bust the rust off.”
“Obviously, a lot of other skiers will have been on snow for well over a month, and I won’t,“ she says. “It’ll just be an opportunity to get on skis, do something fast.”
Her real focus is the 10-day window between Anchorage and Lake Placid.
“For me, as more of a sprinter, and the way the criteria is set up, I’ve got to target the qualifiers,“ she says. “So being really deliberate… knowing exactly what I’m going for.”
The stakes are simple: she must race well at U.S. Nationals to have a shot at Milano-Cortina.
The stakes are also massive.
Julia Kern and Sammy Smith paired up for the Team Sprint in Lahti (FIN). (Photo: Nordic Focus)
The Domestic Gamble
If Smith had a regular ski season—if she weren’t in the NCAA Tournament—she might have chased World Cup points, fought to crack the top 45, and used international racing to establish selection priority.
But that route is closed.
“If you’re only racing a few of the international races, it’s incredibly challenging to get into that top 45,“ she says. “Whereas if you were able to do all of them, it’s a lot more feasible.”
She knows she has “had some really good World Cup sprints,“ and she wonders—without bitterness—what might be possible in a different academic or athletic setup.
But this year, it is the domestic route or nothing.
“That’s what I’m planning on,“ she says. “I need to have some killer races at U.S. Nationals.”
What sounds like a gamble is, for her, simply the version of the sport she can access this season. And she is okay with that.
“Just being consistent… being intentional,“ she says. “Doing what I can.”
Who She Wants to Be
Ask Smith what success looks like decades from now, and she doesn’t list medals or championships.
“You look at Jessie’s legacy,“ she says, referencing Jessie Diggins. “The amount of skiers she’s inspired and how much she’s done for the sport… I want people to look back on my career and feel like I’ve done a lot for the sport, inspired the younger generation of skiers, and brought a lot back to my community.“
It is the kind of answer that feels too mature for her age, but entirely in character.
She is not racing to avoid mistakes—she is racing toward something: possibility, growth, a long future. Maybe a future on the World Cup. Maybe a future in engineering. Maybe a future doing both.
But first, she has Duke.
Samantha Smith (USA) racing the World Cup individual sprint in Minneapolis (USA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The Athlete You’ll Watch Twice This Month
When you tune in this Friday—whether you are a Nordic diehard refreshing live timing from Trondheim, or an American fan checking SuperTour results—remember that one of the most important U.S. prospects in cross-country skiing will be competing too. She just happens to be wearing soccer cleats instead of ski boots.
And next week, she’ll be back on snow, sprinting against the country’s best, staking her claim for a place on the Olympic team.
The duality is not a distraction for Sammy Smith.
It is her identity.
It is what built her.
And it might be what carries her into the future of American skiing.
“She’s been playing a ton this year,“ Whitcomb says. “Of course, we want her all to ourselves… but we want more down the road, and we’re excited for it.”
This weekend, she wants one thing: a berth in the College Cup Final.
Next weekend, another: a ticket to the Olympics.
Two worlds.
Two uniforms.
One athlete.
A lot of people will be cheering for Sammy Smith this month. Nordic fans just get to do it twice.
*You can watch #1-ranked Stanford vs. #2-ranked Duke in the women’s College Cup semifinal tomorrow, Friday, December 5, at 8:45 p.m. EST on ESPNU. The game can also be streamed on the ESPN app, Fubo, or Hulu.
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When Novie McCabe spoke with FasterSkier early last month, she was looking out the window of her place in Anchorage, waiting for winter to finally take hold. “We’re patiently waiting on snow,” she said. “But today might be the day.“
Outside, the ground was still in its in-between phase—too brown for grooming, just white enough that fish-scale skis could work if you were stubborn and optimistic about it. Alaska in November often asks skiers to hover in that liminal space: ready but not yet racing; fit but not yet tested; hopeful but not naïve.
This week, the waiting ends—at least for the top domestic circuit. The U.S. SuperTour season opens in Fairbanks and continues in Anchorage next weekend, but McCabe hopes her body will allow her to join the field. After a long, uncertain stretch, simply lining up for even one race would mark a meaningful step forward. The timing makes this the right moment to trace how she has arrived at this threshold, and how the places she has lived—Methow Valley, Salt Lake City, Anchorage, Europe—continue to shape the skier she is becoming.
Laura, Sean, and young Novie McCabe. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
The Valley That Built Her
The story begins in the Methow, where winter is less a season than an identity. “I grew up in the Methow Valley, which is like a small valley in north central Washington with a pretty big ski community,” McCabe recalled. “I think we have the most Ks in North America or something when the skiing is good.“
Her mother, former U.S. Ski Team athlete Laura McCabe, and her mother’s longtime friend Leslie Hall helped build the Methow Valley Nordic Club from scratch. McCabe grew up inside the culture they created: open, community-driven, relentlessly outdoorsy, and—maybe most importantly—fun.
“I was lucky enough to have a really big group of kids my age who all just kind of happened to be really close friends,” she said. “We would all just be active together and spend a lot of time outside… backpacking trips all the time together.“
Skiing was less a pursuit than a language. Practice might include ultimate frisbee on skis or just exploring terrain with no agenda beyond movement. “That was the main thing that got me so excited about skiing—the community,” she said. “It was just what all my friends did.“
These early years formed more than her fitness. They gave her a worldview: skiing should be joyful, shared, and balanced.
“Stay Behind Us—It’s Supposed to Be Easy”
That mindset came directly from her mother’s coaching style. “My mom… would do all the sessions with us,” McCabe said. The education was intuitive, rooted in feel rather than metrics.
“It was very feeling-based,” she said. “Like, in L3 you should be able to talk to me and give me a sentence back at least when I ask you how you’re feeling.“
Heart-rate monitors were used only sparingly—tools to complement the athlete, not dictate behavior. “We maybe did lactates once or twice the whole time I was in high school,” she said.
One lesson, in particular, stuck with her. During easy sessions, her mom and Leslie Hall would say:
“You guys have to stay behind us because it’s supposed to be easy.”
The rule was simple, but the philosophy was profound: fundamentals come from awareness, not pressure.
McCabe laughs that even today, in anything resembling an ultra-distance test, the result might still tilt toward her mom: “She might have the upper hand in anything longer than 50 k.“
Novie McCabe during the 20 k Classic at the NCAA Championship hosted by Saint Laurence University in Lake Placid in 2023. McCabe controlled a pack that also contained her teammates, Sophia Laukli and Sydney Palmer-Leger. McCabe led the UU women, who finished 1st, 3rd, and 5th, on the day that propelled the Utes to their 4th consecutive NCAA Championship. (Photo: (c) Nancie Battaglia).
Utah and the COVID Bubble
By the time she left the Methow, McCabe was ready for a bigger arena. She chose the University of Utah for its coaching, competitive team environment, and growth opportunities.
“At that stage in my life, I was pretty ready for it,” she said.
Her first year unfolded in the disruptive isolation of COVID—a strange, surreal time that somehow fostered uncommon cohesion.
“It was the heart of COVID isolating, but honestly, kind of in a fun way,” she said. “We were just hanging out as a team all of the time.“
Despite Utah’s reputation as an NCAA powerhouse, she never felt crushed by expectations. “It didn’t feel like a high-pressure situation,” she said. “They were there to help us get the best out of ourselves.“
She balanced training with academics, majoring in political science and minoring in economics. Even then, she was thinking beyond skiing.
Novie McCabe skiing for APU. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Leaving Eligibility on the Table
After her third year, she made a difficult decision: she left Utah with two years of NCAA eligibility remaining.
“I just felt kind of ready to move on from the NCAA,” she said. The experience had been positive—”I think everyone should go NCAA… It’s so fun and great for development,”—but the structure had become limiting.
She wanted freedom: to race World Cups without constant travel back to the U.S., to pursue her development without logistical whiplash.
“I wanted the freedom to race as many World Cups as I wanted during the season and not fly back and forth so much.“
Once she accepted that her path needed to diverge, the next step was obvious.
Novie McCabe and Luke Jager. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Anchorage and the APU Reboot
Anchorage had already become a meaningful place—she had been coming there every summer since her first year at the University of Utah. Her partner, Luke Jaeger, is from there. And she had trained with APU coach Erik Flora for years.
“It honestly wasn’t even much of a decision,” she said.
Flora’s coaching became a stabilizing force. “Erik Flora is really awesome when things are going wrong,” she said. “He knows how to help athletes sort through challenges… It’s never a linear path to success in skiing or any sport.“
APU offered a training environment grounded in trust and peer excellence. “This year there is a pretty big girls’ group,” she said. “Kendall Kramer, Quincy Donley, Annabel Needham, Haley Swirbul, we have a big crew.“
Training with athletes like Rosie Brennan and Swirbul created a layered mentorship:
“They have been and are some of the best in the world.“
Anchorage became the center of her athletic and personal rebuild.
Novie McCabe joined by family and friends for a climbing adventure. (Photo: Novie McCabe)
The Year Without Racing
McCabe didn’t race at all last winter, more or less. At the time, she explained this as part of a balance project—but in reality, the situation was more complicated.
“I have historically been kind of bad at the balance thing,” she said. “My happiness is sometimes quite dependent on skiing.“
That year became a forced reset, with significant emotional and physical consequences.
“I think I’ve gotten better at it,” she said. “I’ve found some things that I really do like to do outside of skiing.” She mentioned baking, cooking, reading, and spending time outside in ways that weren’t tied to training logs.
Yet she was still searching for answers.
One of Novie Mccabe’s (USA) career highlights was her top 15 finish in Falun, Sweden in a Classic race. (Photo: NordicFocus)
A Quiet Battle Behind the Scenes
After our original conversation, McCabe followed up with more context—an important layer we had not fully jumped into earlier. For the past two years, she has been navigating what she called “some mystery health challenges,” a swirl of symptoms that worsened last fall to the point where racing no longer felt possible.
“The best guess of most of the doctors I have seen is some sort of post-viral or chronic fatigue thing,” she wrote, “possibly combined with some issues keeping my celiac and Hashimoto’s in check, but I am still not really sure what is going on to be honest.“
She spent the winter searching for stability rather than start lines.
“I have taken a pretty cautious approach to training this year and just been trying to build back into it super slowly and give a lot of extra attention to rest and recovery,” she said. “And I do feel like I made some solid progress.“
Even now, she remains cautious. “The past two weeks have been a bit of a step backward,” she said. She’s not entirely sure she will race in Fairbanks. Her hope is modest: “One race there and one race in Anchorage, just to give myself a bit more recovery between hard efforts.“
Still, the optimism in her message is unmistakable.
“It means a lot to be back in a place where racing seems like more of a possibility.“
“I will definitely consider it a win if I get to do some racing this year and make some more progress toward feeling like myself again.“
McCabe credits her teammates with helping her develop the traits that won her recognition. Here she is training in Beijing with Hailey Swirbul, Hannah Halvorsen, and Sophia Laukli. (Photo: Novie McCabe)
Team USA on the Road
The U.S. Ski Team’s culture is widely celebrated—glitter, dance videos, and road-trip camaraderie. McCabe grew up watching those clips.
“I would see their dancing videos from the World Cup and be like, ‘That just looks like the best time ever.’”
But she knows now that joy is a decision, especially when you’re far from home. “Sometimes you have to decide that it’s going to be a good time,” she said. “Everyone does an excellent job of being good teammates.“
That environment matters, especially in challenging seasons.
Novie McCabe skates a strong third leg for Team USA in the 4 x 5 k relay at the Beijing Olympics in 2022. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Europe: Brown Cheese, Ferris Wheels, and Perspective
Her memories of Europe arrive in flashes of color rather than race results.
“I love brown cheese,” she said. “You can get it here, of course, but it’s not as good.“
She recalls Trondheim at Christmas—”Ferris wheel and everything“—and moments where she stepped outside the hotel room and let herself experience the place.
These glimpses matter because they remind her of what she still wants from her career: a stable return to the World Cup, a chance to live in that rhythm again.
And through all her travels, she keeps a single talisman:
“Katherine Ogden made me a crochet octopus one year… I’ve brought it along as a good luck charm ever since.“
Novie McCabe after the World Cup 10k in Falun, Sweden, in 2024. (Photo: NordicFocus)
The SuperTour Returns — and She Hopes to Join It
Which brings the story back to this week, and the opening races of the season. “I haven’t started a season domestically in like four or five years,” McCabe said. But she’s doing this season differently.
She is hopeful she will race—one race in Fairbanks, one in Anchorage, if her body allows. More than anything, she wants to be thoughtful and patient.
“My main goal is to make the Olympics,” she said. But this winter, her priority is health. “Being able to race and stay healthy and recover… that would look like a win for me.“
The Olympic qualification system is, as she put it, “really complicated“—top-45 overall rankings, top-8 results, SuperTour contingencies. But she isn’t thinking that far ahead yet.
She’s thinking about one start line. One bib. One race that feels like progress.
Becoming Who She Meant to Be
If you fast-forward five years, she still knows exactly where she wants to be.
“I, for sure, dream about being one of the best skiers in the world,” she said. “I hope to be able to compete with the best one day.“
She also knows this path no longer looks how she imagined it “four years ago.” But she has something she didn’t have then: perspective, patience, and a grounded sense of herself.
Back in Anchorage early last month, the snow hadn’t fully arrived. It mirrored her season ahead—close, possible, not yet certain. The SuperTour begins this weekend, and McCabe is on the edge of stepping back into the environment she loves.
Maybe in Fairbanks. Maybe in Anchorage. Maybe later.
But the hope is real. The joy is returning. And somewhere in her bag, the crocheted octopus is still waiting.
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Aerial view of Ruka (FIN) this morning, with the start of the World Cup season less than a day away. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
For six hours on Tuesday, the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team watched Finland scroll past the windows of a northbound bus, the day’s thin slice of sunlight slanting low across the snow. The sun in late November never rises entirely above the horizon there—”maybe ten degrees,” Matt Whitcomb noted—and so the world outside was washed in a pastel light that never quite felt like midday. In that part of the Arctic, sunrise and sunset are effectively the same event.
That is the moment Whitcomb pays attention to every year.
“As it sets, as you’re driving in those first two hours of the bus ride,” he said, “it sort of feels like it’s the official close of the preparation season.” The athletes may have left Muonio only hours earlier, but that sunset marks a boundary: everything before is training; everything after is racing. “That’s it,” he said. “The prep season’s over. It’s time to race now.”
The bus carried all seventeen athletes—nine men and eight women—each holding a different version of readiness. Some were energized, some were still finding their legs, some were quietly anxious. An Olympic season magnifies everything. For veterans, this opener in Ruka is familiar and charged; for athletes on the bubble, the weekend marks the start of a two-month test whose outcomes will determine whether they get to ski in Italy in February.
But for one last window of time, before the waxing trucks and the bib pickup and the official training, the whole team was suspended in this Arctic twilight. It is a soft entry into what quickly becomes a hard world.
When the bus crested the final kilometers into Ruka, the athletes looked out the left side toward the hill that dominates the course—a climb they will race up and over repeatedly in the coming days. “Every year,” Whitcomb said, “that road goes right up the largest hill on the course… your first trip up that is in the bus.” The hill glowed under floodlights. Below it, the village looked like it had been placed inside a glass ornament. “It’s lit up like a snow globe around here.”
By the time the athletes stepped off the bus and into the cold, the World Cup season had begun.
Jessie Diggins (USA) was able to find another gear at the finish which no one could match to take victory in Ruka a year ago in the Mass Start. (Photo: NordicFocus)
What They Carry From Muonio
A week earlier, the team was skiing through air so cold it could freeze eyelashes. Muonio is remote even by Finnish standards, a strip of trails and cabins surrounded by deep quiet. The temperatures dropped to –5°F for the high and –10°F for the low, and the athletes masked up, moving carefully to avoid frozen lungs. No one did intensity that day; even the coaches agreed the cost wasn’t worth the risk.
And yet the camp was a success.
“It was right on the edge of being too cold,” Whitcomb said, “but we made it work. And nobody has residual coughing, so I think that’s the tangible indicator that we didn’t push too hard.”
More importantly, Muonio was calm this year. There were no lingering illnesses, no cascade of early-season injury setbacks. “This year has been a better year with regard to preparation,” he said. “We’ve had fewer long-term illnesses, fewer acute injuries.” In an Olympic season, where every missed week feels like a month, that is no small thing.
Muonio is the last place where the athletes can simply train, ski, nap, andrepeat. Once they arrive in Ruka, the season accelerates in a way no one can fully control.
Zanden Mcmullen (USA) coming to the line in Ruka in 2024. (Photo: Thibaut/NordicFocus.)
Ruka’s Glow and Ruka’s Pressure
Ruka is where the World Cup hardens into its proper form. The quiet trails of Muonio are replaced by a carnival of nations: wax trucks pulled side by side, technicians moving in practiced circuits, athletes from every powerhouse country striding around the stadium. For all teams, the opener reveals the truth of the summer: whose fitness is real, whose technique held up, whose body needs another two weeks before coming online.
“The moment we arrived here in Ruka,” Whitcomb said, “you start to see the waxing vehicles from other nations… the reality of it hits, and you could feel butterflies sort of emerge as a team.” Even the veterans feel it. “Munio last week was all about recovering from jet lag… and you arrive here, and it’s like: official training, then race, race, race. It’s go time now.”
He emphasized that the stress is not negative. Stress, in his framing, is a sign that something meaningful is at hand. “It’s indicative of the privileged environment that we live in,” he said. “We’re doing something important, something these athletes work really hard for, and something that they’re ready for—and that’s why they feel stressed.”
In an Olympic year, there is no such thing as a low-pressure opener.
The U.S. team looks on in Ruka in 2023. (Photo: NordicFocus)
The Team Within the Team
The most striking thing about this group, Whitcomb said, is not its athletic potential—though several athletes are carrying top-10 ambitions into the weekend. It’s the internal energy.
“It feels as supportive a team as I think we’ve ever had,” he said. “Not better, but certainly as good as any team we’ve ever had.” A year ago, he described a similar feeling, but something about the last month apart has deepened it. “They just vibe together,” he said. “They’ve really missed each other.”
From outside, the U.S. team can look like a logistical patchwork—athletes based in Vermont, Alaska, Idaho, Colorado, Norway; college skiers who drop in and out; development athletes rotating through Europe. But when they’re together, Whitcomb believes the culture gives them a competitive advantage.
“One of the privileges our nation has,” he said, “is that we are not as competitive as Norway is.” He doesn’t mean competitive in results—he means internally. In Norway, a single race in Beitostølen can determine whether an athlete gets a World Cup start or disappears back into domestic anonymity. “Literally that one race… has a lot of say in whether your winter is going to be successful,” he said.
In the U.S., the pressure comes from the Olympics, not from your teammates. “A positive team vibe really does some work for you,” he said. It prevents the “little stresses”—the ones that accumulate in toxic environments—from becoming overwhelming in an Olympic year.
“When the only stress you have to worry about is the silly one that is racing,” he said, “you can overcome that.”
Jessie Diggins (USA) keeping it light with her coach, Jason Cork. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Olympic Stakes, Explained Clearly for Once
For athletes and coaches, the rules of Olympic selection are a map that everyone has memorized; for the public, they are a maze. Whitcomb walked through the system with the clarity of someone who helped write it.
There are three primary pathways:
1. Top-8 in an Olympic event on the World Cup
If an athlete finishes top-8—but only in a race that exactly matches an Olympic event—they automatically qualify.
Classic sprint in Trondheim? Yes.
20k Skiathlon in Trondheim? Yes.
10k skate in Davos? Yes.
Team sprint? No.
Any race similar but not identical (ie, the 15k Skiathlons)? No.
2. Top-45 on the World Cup ranking list (by Oberhof)
Any athlete inside the top-45 overall (distance or sprint, depending on discipline) meets the selection criteria. They still need a spot available, but their case becomes strong.
3. Discretionary selection
This exists—but is avoided whenever possible.
“To be candid,” Whitcomb said, “that’s a goat auction in itself.”
In an Olympic year, the staff prefers not to touch discretion at all.
Ben Ogden (USA) working on ski selection on Thursday in Ruka (FIN) a year ago. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Roster limits
Right now, the U.S. holds seven men’s spots and eight women’s spots, with a realistic chance of earning an eighth men’s spot. It will not exceed 8 + 8.
Domestic results?
For someone skiing exceptionally well at Senior Nationals to force their way in, there must be vacancies left by athletes who didn’t meet criteria on the World Cup. In most years, Olympic qualification is won or lost by Christmas.
This is why every World Cup start in Period 1 matters. Every 12th place, every quarterfinal, every decent distance day contributes to the math.
But to Whitcomb, that math isn’t the point. It’s how athletes handle pressure that determines whether the season becomes joyful or claustrophobic.
“Meet Your Body Where It Is”
On Thursday night, in the team meeting before the weekend races, Whitcomb planned to give a simple message.
“You start that 10k, and you’re going up the first hill,” he said, “you just meet your body where it is. You do your very best that day.”
He wants the athletes to tune out the noise:
the coaches on the sides of the trail
the athletes they pass
the athletes who pass them
the crowd, the music, the reporting, the points
“You deal with the one vehicle that you’re driving,” he said. “And you try to enjoy it.”
Because fitness today doesn’t predict February.
Because the Olympic Games begin on February 7th, the only date that truly matters.
Because early-season expectations are a trap: some athletes are ready this weekend; others won’t feel themselves fully until the Tour de Ski.
“The human body,” he said, “is a wildly unpredictable thing.”
If there is one truth that governs the first weekend of racing, it is that.
Julia Kern testing her skis with her longtime tech, Eli Brown a year ago. (Photo: NordicFocus)
Why Ruka Still Matters
Still, the weekend is not symbolic. It is competitive, decisive, and formative. Whitcomb believes the team is “positioned well to have a great opener,” but he also knows that Ruka rarely tells the whole story of a winter. The temperatures are often frigid, and the travel is too recent. But it gives athletes one thing they cannot simulate anywhere else: the clarity of racing.
“Early,” he said, “but it can’t come soon enough. We’re really excited.”
Ruka is where the starting gun echoes for the first time, but it’s also where the season’s unseen forces begin working: confidence, doubt, momentum, cohesion, luck, health, andperspective. Many Olympic stories begin here without anyone realizing it until months later.
The First Night in the Snow Globe
By Tuesday evening, the team had unpacked their bags in the small condos near the stadium. By Wednesday, when we spoke, through Whitcomb’s thin door, we could hear athletes talking after dinner—laughing, telling stories, building team chemistry. “You can hear people probably through my door,” he said, because “they’ve really missed each other.”
Outside, the northern lights edged across the sky.
Inside, there were skis to prep, race plans to finalize, nerves to manage.
And in the morning, the first climb of the season would begin at the bottom of that hill they had ridden over on the bus.
There are a few actual rituals in a sport defined by travel and unpredictability. But in the U.S. team’s calendar, the bus ride to Ruka is one of them. It marks the line between the world that was and the one that’s about to begin. Between training and racing. Between imagining and knowing.
The sun had long since set, but the trail lights of Ruka glowed through the fog, warm against the cold.
The World Cup season officially starts tomorrow.
And for the U.S. team—healthy, united, a little nervous, and very ready—there is nothing left to do but ski.
Rosie Brennan (USA) dialing in her skis a year ago. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
10k Interval Start Classic – Women at 4:30 am EST and Men at 7:15 am EST
November 29th:
Classic Sprint – Heats begin at 5:25 am EST
November 30th:
20k Mass Start Freestyle – Men at 4:00 am EST and Women at 5:45 am
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On the Wednesday before the World Cup season opens in Ruka, Jack Young sits in a small condo, looking out at over a foot of new snow that’s been drifting down all morning. The air is much warmer today than it was before he and the U.S. Ski Team loaded onto a six-plus hour bus ride yesterday — “Muonio was friggin’ cold,” he says — and the mood is calmer, quieter, the way he wants it. This is his final runway before an Olympic year truly begins, and he is spending it doing almost nothing.
Not nothing-nothing, of course. But nothing extra. No bonus minutes, no filler skis, no threshold for confidence, no volume for psychological reassurance. “The biggest thing right now is taking these two weeks absolutely as seriously as possible with rest and just not doing anything extra training-wise that I do not need to be doing,” he says. “I’m training so little right now because of how important Ruka and Trondheim are for me.”
Growing up in Northern Vermont, Jack Young had an All-American childhood. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Outside, the classic sprint course cuts through the forest — the first of two classic sprints in Period 1. They matter—more than they ever have. To make the Olympics, he must qualify. To qualify, he must have transformed himself into something he has never consistently been: a classic sprinter capable of making heats on the hardest stage in the world.
That he is even here, on the cusp of an Olympic selection fight, is strange enough. Stranger still is the way he got here — not built from the standardized American skiing pipeline but stitched together from its edges. A football quarterback. A baseball outfielder. A skier whose parents “didn’t know what Nordic skiing was.” A D3 athlete who reverse-engineered sprint training out of 800-meter track plans and the writings of a Swedish speed skater. A young man who kept such detailed training logs that, by the time he made the World Cup, he could begin writing his own plan.
In a sport that often rewards conformity, Young’s ascent is something close to a jailbreak.
Jack Young as he started his racing for Craftsbury. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
A Vermont Childhood Without the Usual Skiing Script
“Neither of my parents knew what Nordic skiing was,” he says with a laugh. They loved the outdoors, yes — mountain biking, alpine skiing, the typical northern Vermont mélange of mud, woods, and winter — but their son’s athletic identity formed somewhere else entirely. “I played every sport. I loved baseball. I played basketball through elementary school. I started football as soon as I was allowed to, which I think was in fourth grade.”
He became the kind of athlete rural towns understand intuitively: the quarterback on fall afternoons, the center fielder chasing down balls in the summer dusk, the kid who could pick up anything and find competition in it. Skiing entered sideways, almost accidentally, through his sister Callie. She joined the small Nordic program in Newport, and he was brought along because that’s what families do — pack the car, hand over snacks, make it work.
“I immediately fell in love with racing,” he says. “I just love the competition.” Running around on skis made sense to him. Movement, speed, chaos — he could do that. But even with training days at Craftsbury beginning around sixth grade, he didn’t think of skiing as his primary outlet. “I wasn’t as focused as my sister was, but I would still get dragged along,” he says. “I loved skiing, but I loved football and baseball just as much.”
The irony — one he now sees clearly — is that he was training for skiing without realizing it. “All summer was spent doing fun things in the woods. We’d go to Craftsbury a couple of times per week. But I never thought of skiing as my main sport. I weighted those sports equally, even though I was putting a lot more time into skiing.”
If northern Vermont had offered a travel football club or competitive baseball without days of driving south, the story may have gone a different way. But mountain running and biking were nearby, and elite baseball diamonds were not. “I’d so much rather go for a long run in the mountains or go mountain biking than I would hit on the tee for two hours,” he says.
Sometimes this is what talent looks like in real time: a kid choosing the fun version of hard work without realizing he’s choosing a future.
When we spoke, Jack Young sat in a small condo in Ruka wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball hat, just added evidence for how important the game has been for him since he was a boy. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
The Late Bloom: A Breakthrough and a Decision
He kept skiing in the winter, of course. Not obsessively. Not in the way some junior skiers live their lives by FIS points before they have a driver’s license. But enough to stay close. Enough to remain good. Then came the summer after his sophomore year of high school — the first time he trained like someone who had decided to see what was possible.
“I put a good summer of training in,” he says. “Had a bad football season… but that was the first time I was really starting to push the limit on what I could do training-wise while in season for football.”
He mountain-biked in races on weekends, squeezed workouts around football practices, and tried to make the whole geometry hold together. Then came Junior Nationals, and with it, proof. “I had a pretty good result in the sprint. I think I was like 18th or something… and that was the moment where I was like, okay. I am decent at least at this sport. I’m doing a lot better than I’ll ever be at baseball.”
That spring, Young emailed coaches — the NESCAC schools, Dartmouth, and UNH. Bowdoin and Dartmouth joined Colby on his shortlist. Colby won on something less quantifiable: belief.
“Tracy [Cote] was very excited about me,” he says. “And I think that resonated with me. Maybe it’s my ego, but it was nice to hear.”
He would later call it “a perfect decision.”
Jack Young enjoying some backcountry skiing in Jay. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Colby: Building an Athlete in a Place That Shouldn’t Have Worked
Winters in college can blur into one another — classes, training, snow, the strange mix of exhaustion and euphoria that defines 19-year-old life. But Young remembers his freshman fall with clarity: meeting people, finding balance, doing “good, not great” training, and then, once the season started, traveling west for Senior Nationals.
There, in Soldier Hollow, everything sharpened. “I think I qualified in the top 20 in the skate sprint,” he says. “That was an absolutely massive result for me. I never had anywhere near that level of success on the national level.”
He didn’t transform overnight — not yet. His sophomore season brought a “fine college season,” a top-30 at NCAAs in the 10k skate, and the sense that distance skiing was finally, mercifully making progress. But the turning point came not in results but in imagination. He learned that the U.S. would receive twelve start spots for the Canmore World Cup the following year. Twelve starts. “I was like, 12 starts… that’s not that far off,” he says. “I kind of feel like I’m in contention for that.”
To chase it, he would need to master something specific: the sprint qualifier.
And this is where the story breaks from the template completely.
Jack Young hits some big lactate numbers during a hard training session. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Reinventing Sprinting from Scratch
“I’ve always thought that sprint qualifiers were really similar to an 800-meter race on the track,” he says. Physiologically, mechanically, conceptually — they looked more alike than different. So he dug into 800m training. He looked for the extreme version, the distilled essence of what sprinters do when they train specifically for the thing that matters. Qualifiers are discrete. Defined. Precise. Why train them like a generalist?
Then he read Nils van der Poel.
The legendary Swedish speed skater’s manifesto, How to Skate a 10k, isn’t a skiing manual, but to Young, it may as well have been scripture: the idea of building huge aerobic capacity, then sharpening with brutally specific intervals at exact race pace. “He wants to skate as many possible laps at world record pace as possible,” Young says. “And that really struck me. I’m like — I can apply this to skiing.”
He wasn’t going to become a single-event specialist, not in college. But he could take the principle and adapt it. So he built a sprint-qualifier program composed of things like:
6 × 1 minute
4 × 90 seconds
10 × 30 seconds
8 × 45 seconds
All at precisely what he believed to be his sprint qualifier pace.
“That was the bread and butter,” he says. “I’d do those workouts once or twice a week. I didn’t actually find them that strenuous, but I was accumulating a good amount of time at exactly what I thought sprint qualifier pace was.”
He went completely dry that fall — no beer, no casual nights out, nothing that compromised sleep. “I was just recovering a lot better all the time,” he says. “I didn’t get sick at all.”
Meanwhile, Colby head coach Tracy Cote allowed him to blend his ideas into the fall plan. “We were working together. I think we ended up writing the training plan together that fall,” he says. “She was pretty stoked about the focus on recovery… and she’d let me get away with doing things a bit more geared towards sprinting.”
He trained more overall, too — a heavy summer that gave him the resilience to handle so much intensity once fall arrived. “My freshman year, I trained a little under 600. Sophomore year was around 650. My junior year I trained like 750 or something.”
This was not an American development pipeline approach.
It was an experiment.
A smart one.
A successful one.
Jack Young, who a week earlier had a 3rd and 5th place in the EISA college races for Colby College delivered the 11th fastest qualifying time in the freestyle sprint at the Canmore World Cup in 2024. (Photo: Cockney/FasterSkier)
Anchorage, SoHo, Canmore — and the Race That Changed Everything
He targeted Anchorage for his first chance at the Canmore World Cup spot. He knew what he had to do: fly across the country in the early winter, race well, then perform at Senior Nationals in Soldier Hollow. Anchorage was the linchpin.
“I went into Anchorage with a lot of confidence,” he says. “I won that qualifier; it was such a surprise.”
He didn’t replicate the magic at Soldier Hollow — “I think I got like 11th” — but the Anchorage win held. He made the Canmore start list.
And then came the race of his life.
“That’s still my lowest FIS points ever,” he says. “I didn’t match that last year.”
When he crossed the line, something shifted internally. “Once I did that in Canmore… that was the first time I really thought I wanted to keep skiing after college,” he says. “That was the moment I realized how good I thought I could get.”
Call it the ignition point, the place where belief calcified into ambition.
Where a multi-sport kid from a non-skiing family, attending a D3 school, doing self-designed intervals, suddenly saw himself in a World Cup heat map and thought: Yes. Here.
Jack Young training on Eagle Glacier this past summer. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
Writing His Own Plan on the World Cup
Two years later, he is living in Europe, often for months at a time. He is in his second year of racing full-time on the circuit. He is older, stronger, andmore certain. And he is, in many ways, coaching himself.
“For this time of year, it’s entirely guided by what I’ve done the last two years,” he says. “Which workouts worked in which places, which workouts didn’t… the comments are much more important than the hours.”
He still works closely with Pepa Miloucheva at Craftsbury — “She’s the number one on that” — but when he’s on the World Cup, he is the primary author of his training. He reads his patterns. He analyzes sensations. He looks for the combinations of stress and stimulation that make him feel dangerous on race day.
He isn’t reinventing his body now — he’s listening to it.
The independence he cultivated at Colby has become his competitive advantage.
With the Olympic sprint being in the classical technique, Jack Young (USA) hopes to find the form he has historically shown in freestyle sprinting during the early season World Cup stops. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The Classic Sprint Problem — and the Olympic Dream
To make the Olympics, the math is simple, even if the execution is brutal.
“The simplest answer is: make a big jump in classic sprinting,” he says. “If I can start qualifying for classic sprints consistently, I have a very clear path to making the Olympics.”
Last year’s results would meet the published criteria — “hypothetically, if I had the exact same season… I would technically make the team,” — but this year is different. The Olympic sprint is classic. Period 1 has two classic sprints and only one skate sprint. Some of the contenders for Olympic spots are stronger in classic than he is.
So the path is narrow: qualify in Ruka. Qualify in Trondheim. Hold form in Davos. Don’t step back. Don’t stagnate.
At the philosophical level, the criteria are simpler still.
“It’s all about execution at this point,” he says. “A good season is continuing with progress I’ve made… scoring more World Cup points than I did last year. Anything else is a step back.”
He knows progress isn’t linear. He knows failure is part of sport. But he also knows what a step backward would feel like. “I’d be lying if I said I could look at this season as successful if I don’t maintain what I’ve been doing in skating and at least make a little bit of progress in classic skiing.”
It is clear-eyed. Unsentimental. The kind of assessment you get from someone who has built his career on self-honesty.
Jack and his sister Callie after winning a slow pitch softball tournament. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
What It Means to Make It This Way
There’s a certain poetry in the fact that Young’s rise mirrors the very way he races: a precise, deliberate accumulation of moments. Nothing in his career came from the prescribed steps, the standard routes, the familiar trophies of a groomed junior-star life. Instead, his path looks more like a map drawn after the fact — connecting points that didn’t seem aligned until the picture emerged.
A sister’s Craftsbury workouts.
A baseball-heavy early adolescence.
Mountain biking and football collisions.
A D3 program that let him try things.
A manifesto by a Swedish speed skater.
A dry collegiate fall at age 20.
A logbook of sensations.
A day in Canmore.
A belief.
There is no template for this. There never was.
But here he is anyway — on the World Cup, in an Olympic year, taking the biggest swing of his life.
And as he sits in a Ruka apartment, resting more than he ever has before a race that matters more than most, he reflects not on what’s missing from his résumé but on what got him here in the first place: a way of building a skier that is his alone.
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Bob Thompson (NTDC Thunder Bay) competing at last season’s World Cup in Lillehammer, Norway. He’s shooting for another round of Period I World Cup starts this season and, he hopes, an Olympic berth. (Photo: Fischer/Nordic Focus)
Bob Thompson won his first NorAm in 2014, at Olympic trials in Canmore, Alberta. The then-22-year-old Canadian cross-country skier skied safe and smart and took the victory after two pre-race favorites, Jesse Cockney and Phil Widmer, collided near the finish.
That win didn’t earn Thompson an Olympic berth for Sochi. But this year, the Thunder Bay National Team Development Center (NTDC) athlete is hoping to get to PyeongChang, South Korea – and hopefully, to avoid needing an Olympic trials win to do so.
“I’ll do the Frozen Thunder race [in Canmore in November] – I think it’s just one race this year – to get Period I [World Cup] starts,” Thompson, 26, said of his goals for the beginning of the season. “So then get on the Period I World Cup, and then from there that’s the only chance to get another two top 30s to get the Olympic qualification locked in.”
After finishing 30th in the World Cup Finals sprint in Quebec City in March – his first World Cup points – Thompson is one-third of the way to qualifying for the Olympic team, most likely.
Nominations go preferentially to athletes who have finished twice in the top-16, or have one top-12 distance result or one top-six sprint result, or are part of a podium relay or team sprint. Five men have hit those marks.
Bob Thompson sprinting to second in the 2016 skate-sprint qualifier last fall at Frozen Thunder in Canmore, Alberta. The performance earned him the final spot on Canada’s 2016 Period I World Cup team. (Photo: Drew Goldsack)
But if the team is not filled yet with men meeting those criteria – and it probably won’t be, as the Canadian team intends to take around seven men – the next spots will go to athletes with three top-30 World Cup results. That’s the mark Thompson is after.
He already has one result in the bag.
And he is familiar with Period I World Cups, considered by many to be the most difficult and competitive World Cups of the season. Most countries send a full team of athletes to every event, not true some other weekends of the year. And when World Cups are hosted in Norway and Finland, the 15 “extra” athletes the home country is allowed to enter as a “Nations Group” are pretty high-caliber skiers.
“From an actual racing standpoint, I had [Russia’s Sergey] Ustiugov go by me when I was on my first lap and he was on his second lap,” Thompson said of a distinct memory from those races last season. “He just dropped me immediately. It was this realization, that, OK, I should be going a lot faster. I’m trying to do that … getting more World Cup experience under the belt.”
But despite the wake-up call of racing the very best and deepest fields in the world, Thompson felt that he had executed well last season and now has experience to build on.
“Those races were really good,” Thompson said of the 2016 races. “I guess I didn’t do as well as I had hoped – I had hoped I would get a top 30 in that period – but in Lillehammer I tied my previous best World Cup result, which was my very first one from Gatineau from the Ski Tour Canada. I was 52nd.”
Thompson had another opportunity to get World Cup points last season when he was selected to race in PyeongChang for the World Cup test events. Like many countries, Canada didn’t send most of its A-team because the races were before World Championships and team leaders worried about fatigue. Thompson, Cockney, Simon Lapointe, and Julien Locke joined World Cup regular Len Valjas in PyeongChang.
Bob Thompson (NTDC Thunder Bay) racing to second in the men’s classic sprint qualifier at 2016 Western Canadian Championships in Prince George, B.C. He went on to win the men’s final. (Photo: Sally Connon)
It was a bitter moment for Thompson, in a way, because he finished 31st in the sprint qualifier, just 0.01 seconds out of the quarterfinals. That would have guaranteed him a top 30 and, perhaps, something much better than that.
It was a race effort imperfectly executed, something that Thompson remembers.
“I definitely knew multiple places where I didn’t ski it well enough,” he said. “There was one place where my wax caught on me, and then I tried to prevent that from happening again and took a corner too wide, easily losing at least a second. … I definitely felt like I could have had a decent result there. I mean, anyone can say that, but, yeah.”
The pressure of having a good result is something that Thompson has grown used to, as he is constantly trying to qualify for something – a competition, a team, funding.
“Every World Cup start I’ve had so far has had pressure to get that top 30,” he explained. “I always felt like I had to have near my best day to do it.”
So in a way, this year’s Period I (if he gets there via Frozen Thunder) won’t be any different. The big change is that now he does have one top-30 under his belt, and in a field more competitive than in PyeongChang, too.
If he doesn’t hit the top 30 twice in the initial period of World Cup racing, Thompson will need to manage the transition back to Canada better and excel at January’s Olympic trials, to be held in Mont Sainte Anne, Quebec.
That will require refocusing, and Thompson had an important cautionary lesson about it last season. It had been his first time spending a whole period on the World Cup, and between the racing and the travel it took more out of him than he had expected.
“Coming out of that is where I guess I learned the most,” he admitted. “We came back from Europe and were set on doing a bit of a recovery period before the U.S. Nationals races, which were trials races. But we decided we couldn’t pass up the opportunity for the Rossland NorAm weekend because it was the Period II qualification, for whoever won the weekend. We thought that I had raced well so I was going to be fast. And it turned out that in hindsight, that was a mistake as it was a bit too much travel for me or a bit too much load.”
This year, with so much on the line, Thompson is trying to be aggressive but also careful.
His plans hit a snag in August when Thompson fell ill and missed several weeks of training. With his coaches he has made the tough decision to skip an on-snow camp on the Dachstein glacier in Austria and try to gradually build back into full training without overdoing it. By November’s race in Canmore, he hopes to be back fully to himself.
Before getting sick, things had been going well.
“Maybe I was a little more tired than I should have been, but it was starting to get better, especially around the Alignment Camp we hosted in Thunder Bay,” Thompson said. “That was a lot of fun and a well-organized event. It was really good to have everyone who came to that, to train with us, and we could showcase the training venues in Thunder Bay. … I think I was not getting enough recovery after a few key workouts, but in July I made note that I was feeling a little bit run down and I started to address that.”
He is also taking advantage of some non-coaching support systems available in the Thunder Bay area.
“We have been focusing this year on nutrition,” Thompson explained. “We have been working with the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario a little bit more. I’ve been getting plans from their nutritionist as well as doing more work with their sports psychologist and physiologist. Those are a few of the small things that I hoped would be that extra percentage to help ramp me up for this Olympic year.”
And another thing has changed for Thompson as well. Thanks to that 30th-place finish in the Quebec World Cup, he is now a “carded” athlete, receiving a monthly stipend from Sport Canada.
It’s not enough money to change the material aspects of his life, but it has done two things. The first is to release Thompson from some of the pressure to do odd jobs whenever the opportunity arises.
“Previous years, I have worked for older former skiers who have properties or rentals that need fixing up,” he said. “A number of us on the team have been doing that. But now it’s sometimes like, well, actually, I don’t have time. I have too much training. I don’t necessarily feel like I need to take all those opportunities which could take away from training opportunities due to fatigue levels and spending time not resting.”
And secondly, having his own money to live on has been mentally freeing.
“I have been very fortunate from my parents being very supportive of my racing,” Thompson said. “But just the fact that I wasn’t paying for it myself, or was paying for limited aspects of it – to have skied fast enough to have that income now, takes the strain off my parents and the pressure off myself for feeling like I was draining them too much.”
It might seem trivial, but along with the sports psychology work it has made a big difference in Thompson’s outlook.
“That in itself, the mental relief – I think I have been looking for that for the last five years, ever since I’ve been a senior athlete,” he said. “Ever since I entered the realm of, OK, now I should really be able to make it if I’m competing at the top level in Canada. So I think most of all it has been a good mental boost just to have that.”
Matt Liebsch (XC United/Team StrongHeart) enjoying the view from the chartered flight he shared with friend Brian Gregg (Team Gregg/Madshus) from Oroville, Wash., to Bozeman, Mont., on Dec. 7. (Courtesy photo)
We know, you’ve been on the edge of your seat since the release of “The Adventures of Gregg and Liebsch: Part I,” and you can’t wait to find out what happened to the two Midwest pals in their quest to qualify for the Olympics. While the rest of the story has yet to be written, we’re happy to pick up where we left off: the plane ride from Washington state to Bozeman, Mont.
***
Three hours later, they made it. Aside from an unpaved runway in Oroville, Wash., Matt Liebsch and Brian Gregg described their six-seat chartered flight as the smoothest plane ride they had ever been on. But Gregg’s wife, Caitlin, wasn’t so sure as she waited up for them the night before their SuperTour races.
“Our ground speed was only about 150 knots, but it’s amazing what you can do when you take out the ups and downs and curves in the roads,” Liebsch said on the phone earlier this month.
Had the weather been unfavorable – too windy or altogether too risky to fly – the two would’ve had to drive 575 miles east to Bozeman, a trek they made less than a week earlier in the opposite direction. In an effort to better their FIS profiles, Liebsch and Gregg competed in the first NorAm distance race of the season at Sovereign Lake, British Columbia, 2 ½ hours north of Oroville. They had raced the SuperTour season-openers the week before in West Yellowstone just south of Bozeman.
Brian Gregg in the co-pilot’s seat of a six-seat chartered plane. (Courtesy photo)
Now they were on their way back to Montana to race the next day.
With the plane’s passenger seats pushed down in to fit their skis and oversized duffel bags, Liebsch sprawled out in the back and Gregg sat up front with pilot and friend Monte Catlin as they took off shortly after 8 p.m.
Flying about 9,000 feet above the ground, Liebsch said they could see the mile-high Mount Spokane in the distance. All the while, he had cell service. Knowing that they were going to touch down in Bozeman around 12:30 p.m. – too late for anyone to pick them up – Liebsch called a taxi.
“I had 4G the whole time,” he said. “I didn’t know how we were gonna race the next day. When we landed in Bozeman it was like -17 [degrees].”
Dropped off at the hotel at 1 a.m., Gregg greeted his wife with a knock on her door. She handed them their dinner – Walmart rotisserie chicken, Jasmine rice and homemade applesauce – and nodded off while they ate in the lobby.
“We told her she should try to sleep, but the challenge is, there’s sort of a lot of excitement and I think Caitlin was nervous about the small plane,” Gregg said on the phone.
The next morning on Sunday, Dec. 8, Gregg woke up at 8:30 a.m., “bouncing around,” Liebsch said.
“I was kind of mad,” Liebsch recalled.
With temperatures well below zero, the men’s 15-kilometer classic mass start was delayed until 1 p.m. The women were scheduled to race at noon.
“There was so much adrenaline from the excitement of the flight and having a good race in Silver Star,” Gregg recalled after he placed first and Liebsch was second in the Sovereign Lake 15 k freestyle individual start.
The chartered plane Brian Gregg and Matt Liebsch took to Bozeman, Mont., on Dec. 7. (Courtesy photo)
The two had made the last-minute trip to Bozeman because of their results. They agreed if they went 1-2 in the NorAm, they’d splurge for the $2,100-dollar chartered flight that same day.
The morning after, Gregg said he suffered a bit of an energy crash. The fatigue starting to set in, Liebsch skipped warming up and tested his skis at noon. With two skate races in West Yellowstone followed by another in Canada, he didn’t pack any classic race skis.
“I was going to race in my rock skis,” Liebsch said.
Fortunately, Liebsch is the race services director at Gear West in Long Lake, Minn., and he had his coworkers wax and overnight two of his best classic skis to Bozeman. Once there, Montana State University (MSU) helped Liebsch and the Greggs with race wax.
“It was just crazy that it all worked out,” Liebsch said. “Thinking back, that was nuts.”
To satisfy the legal-racing limit of -4 degrees Fahrenheit, organizers delayed the women’s start delayed to 1:30 p.m., and the men didn’t go off until 2:30. Liebsh couldn’t believe they were actually going to race until he saw the women head out. Frostbitten from similarly cold temperatures the day before, he stayed inside until eight minutes before his race.
Three months ago, Liebsch rolled his ankle in a half-marathon trail run and had relied on Level-1 classic training since. With low expectations for his first classic distance race of the season, he said the first couple kilometers were rough.
“I felt pretty in control the whole classic race and I was pretty content to sit a row or two back from whoever was in the front,” he said. “I didn’t know if the travel or the race before would catch up with me … it was good to sit behind some really good classic skiers, too.”
Frigid temperatures canceled the Bozeman classic sprint the day before, putting Gregg ahead in the overall SuperTour standings. Doing well enough in the classic distance race would solidify his lead for Period 1, which Caitlin led as well on the women’s side.
“Brian was really like, ‘Hey, this opens the door for me to get that overall SuperTour World Cup leader and I’ll get to travel with Caitlin overseas,’ ” Liebsch recalled.
Patrick Johnson (Far West) leads Brian Gregg in the 15 k classic mass start on Dec. 8 in Bozeman, Mont. (Photo: Anya Caldwell Bean)
“We went in with pretty low pressure,” Gregg said. “Our main goal was to be in the main pack, the lead pack.”
“It was nice that we had the fundraiser going, like, ‘Oh man we cant go down there and suck!’ ” Liebsch said. “Even during the race Brian and I would look at each other like, ‘We gotta stay in here.’ It was kind of funny. You just think of all those people that were donating to help you get there.”
With two hills left in the race, Dmitriy Ozerskiy of Central Cross Country (CXC) attacked ahead of Miles Havlik (Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation) and Patrick Johnson (Far West) up front. Liebsch searched for an opportunity to pass Johnson on the narrow-and-twisty trail, but without much luck.
“There wasn’t a lot of space to move up and Dmitriy was gone by that point,” he said. “A lot of herringboning the last two big hills and I actually kind of liked that.”
Liebsch finished fourth and Gregg took fifth, 12.8 and 13.5 seconds back from Ozerskiy, who won in 44:47.7. Gregg ended up beating Ozerskiy by 1 point for the overall SuperTour lead and accompanying Period 2 World Cup starts in January.
“We’re both very happy with fourth and fifth, and we’re really lucky MSU stepped up helped us wax both of our skis and Caitlin’s skis,” Gregg said. “It’s kind of a cool story, but it depends on a lot of different clubs that made it possible.”
The Ongoing Journey
A week later, the Greggs were back in British Columbia – this time for the Rossland NorAm – and Liebsch was home in Minnesota with his two kids and wife, who’s expecting their third child in late March/early April.
Liebsch had considered racing the Davos World Cup in Switzerland that weekend, but decided to take a breather and rest up for U.S. nationals Jan. 4-10. He had spoken to the US Ski Team (USST) coaches in October about it, and there was a possibility that as many as three World Cup starts would be open for the men’s distance race in Davos.
“It just got tight on turnaround time and do that international travel right before Christmas and leading up to nationals it didn’t make sense; it was going to cost a lot of money,” Liebsch said.
He reasoned that an international flight with 11 to 13 hours of air-travel time plus another 4 ½ hours on a train would’ve left him “basically worthless” when he arrived three days before the race.
“I’d also be trying to get the body used to that time change,” he said. “It just wasn’t going to set me up or Brian up for a successful result there. If we had really crushed it was West Yellowstone we might have skipped Silver Star and gone over.”
In West Yellowstone, Gregg was second in the 15 k skate race (the first American), and 16th in the skate sprint. Liebsch placed fourth in the 15 k after sitting out the sprint.
“My opportunity for a better FIS point result was going to be in Bozeman,” he explained. “We kind of knew after doing that crazy weekend travel we were going to be blown out. Racing right at that legal [temperature] cutoff, it takes a lot out of the body.”
Team Gregg, with Caitlin (second from l) and Brian (r), and Matt Liebsch (l) in Bozeman, Mont. (Courtesy photo)
And so the two continue the Olympic-qualification dance and weigh their options in the next month leading up to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. In early January, the Greggs will take advantage of World Cup starts immediately after the U.S. nationals 20/30 k distance races on Jan. 8.
“Right now, the plan is that Caitlin will take a 5 o’clock flight after the 20 k … to Prague,” Gregg said. “I’ll stay in Utah and help wrap up things here. I would probably fly the next day or two while we’re trying to work out logistics. I probably won’t do that first weekend in Nove Mesto [Czech Republic].”
The goal is experience and racing overseas as much as possible this season, he said.
“I think you learn so much just being over there,” he said. “Caitlin’s only had five World Cup starts; I got a bunch of starts in 2010 as the Period 4 World Cup leader. I think the more starts, you can get the better. If nationals go well, we’re staying over in Europe as the Period 3 and 4 World Cup leaders. There’s still a lot of work [ahead] … but it’s cool to know that that possible.”
While the Greggs try to turn some heads on the World Cup circuit with top-50 results or better, Liebsch said he’d need to notch a top 15 at a race like Davos in order to crack the top-50 overall World Cup criteria.
“The number one criteria is you’ve got to be ranked in the top 50 overall in the World Cup rankings,” he said of the U.S. Olympic standards. “A lot of women are going to make that criteria.”
The men’s side is a bit more open, he said.
“If I had gotten top 15 at Davos, I would’ve liked to think that would’ve been enough to get discretion done … that’s the number two criteria,” Liebsch explained. “And then the third criteria is looking at the FIS distance and sprint list. They’re gonna name up to a maximum of four sprinters and look at the distance list and fill in the rest of the team with distance guys.”
That’s where he’s hoping his low FIS points, boosted by recent races in Montana and British Columbia, will help. At nationals, Liebsch will focus on the 30 k – just like Gregg – in order to be one of the top picks on the non-USST men’s distance list. That’s why he hasn’t focused on sprinting.
“I didn’t do any sprint racing this year because historically I don’t have that genetic gift of tiger spring,” Liebsch said with a laugh. “If I could win the 30 k skate at nationals, that would be huge. I’ve never really had a bad 50 k skate result … Hopefully [I’m] skating well enough to get the nod for the 4 by 10 [relay at the Olympics].”
With a World Cup top 30 under his belt (in Canmore 2010), he said the USST might consider that. They’ve also waved the discretion limitation; last season only 25 percent of the World Championships picks could be based on discretion. “This year, there’s no such clause,” Liebsch said.
“Last year for world champs, they took five men; I was number six on the list,” he added.
“They’re gonna name the people that make the hard criteria, then they’re going to look at the FIS distance list,” Liebsch explained. “They have that discretionary card in there to see if somebody’s trending upward very rapidly that gives them leeway to put them on the team, or if somebody’s tanking, they can take them off as well, that’s what I think.”
“Brian and I have pretty good FIS profiles,” he continued. “The point opportunities at nationals will be pretty good, so the guys that have a good nationals have a good potential to move up.”
Because of the rolling 12-month FIS profile, Liebsch said he can rely on his best races from last season, which came in the spring.
“If I have a bad [nationals], I’m not going to move backward,” he said. “I want to stay healthy and make sure I have some good solid results. Ideally I’d like to be able to train and peak for February, but if you’re not on the Olympic team, you don’t get that luxury.”
But for now, he was happy to be home.
“It was super special to surprise my kids and get them off the bus,” he said after returning from Bozeman. “It’ll be nice to be at home for the holidays.”
An Olympic berth is going to be harder to come by. Justin Freeman racing at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino.
For anyone who thinks that the U.S. got a raw deal with the introduction of a new Olympic quota system, you’re right.
According to FIS Cross-Country Race Director JürgCapol, just two nations had their quotas significantly affected by the switch-the U.S. and Kazakhstan. For the rest, he wrote in an e-mail, their quotas are more or less the same as they would have been under the Torino guidelines from 2006.
Those numbers should rise before the Games begin in February. But in the meantime, American athletes are still training with the same intensity that they have been all summer because, as SVSEF’s Colin Rodgers says, “it just comes down to skiing fast.”
What is a quota?
A quota is the number of skiers that a country is allowed to bring to compete in the Olympics.
How is a quota decided upon?
Most countries will get a basic quota of at least one male and one female skier, as long as they have athletes whose race results meet a minimum points threshold. Then, FIS ranks skiers on a list, and nations are awarded additional places based on the position of their skiers on that list. Finally, nations can earn additional quota places if their skiers perform well on the World Cup circuit.
What is the U.S. quota for the 2010 Olympic Games?
Right now, the U.S. quota stands at seven, although it is very likely that that number will grow based on the performance of American athletes during the early winter. Also, if other countries do not take their full quotas of skiers, the U.S. may get a few more spots.
Why is the U.S. quota so small?
The new FIS quota guidelines give more weight to skiers who have strong distance and sprint results, as opposed to those that excel in just one discipline. Since the U.S. has many specialists, its quota was smaller under the new system than it would have been under the old one.
USSA Nordic Director John Farra has been in touch with the coaches of athletes with strong FIS points in one discipline to encourage them to improve their points in their weaker discipline.
USSA has also undertaken some long-term strategies to ensure that domestic skiers have more opportunities to improve their FIS points.
Based on current projections, the U.S. has a quota of seven skiers-a number derived using a complex formula that takes into account World Cup standings and FIS points. As long as powerhouse nations like Norway and Sweden don’t bring their own full quotas of 20-which they haven’t in the past-a few of the unused spots should trickle down to the Americans.
It’s a different system than the one used in Torino in 2006-the old one was replaced at the behest of the IOC in an effort to limit the total number of skiers at the Olympics. The new selection criteria favor those who excel in both sprint and distance races, and since so many American skiers are specialists in one discipline or the other, the country’s quota has suffered as a result.
Andrew Johnson at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.
Murmurs about the low quota had been circulating since the summer, and Farra said that he had been reluctant to go public with the information out of concern for hurting skiers’ motivation. But on October 15, the ski blog JohnnyKlister.com linked to a FIS document showing the new numbers, and since then most athletes have been clued in.
Despite the news, those on the bubble have tried to remain focused on their training, given that there is little they can do individually to impact the quota.
In an e-mail to FasterSkier, XC Oregon’s Brayton Osgood said that when he planned his training in April, he was under the impression that there would be eight American men going to the Olympics. Given that the number will probably be less than that, he said it would definitely be harder to make the team, but that his approach is still the same.
“I really try not to get stressed about the things beyond my control. Our Olympic quotas are definitely beyond my control right now,” Osgood said.
Rodgers also acknowledged that making the team would be harder, but he pointed out that this would make American athletes dig deeper to qualify.
“The more competitive it is to make the team, the better the athletes will be that go,” he wrote in an e-mail. Like Osgood, Rodgers also said that he didn’t have any power to change the quota system, and was instead focused on skiing as fast as he could.
While athletes have stayed focused on their training, USSA has been working behind the scenes to try to increase the American quota.
In an open letter published on the USSA web site, Farra wrote that he had identified nine skiers with good FIS points in either sprint or distance competitions, but not both. With a few decent results in their weaker disciplines, Farra said, these nine could net the U.S. an extra quota spot.
Two of the athletes will be racing the early season World Cups with the U.S. Ski Team, and Farra said that they will be working with their coaches do what they can to shore up their FIS points in their weaker discipline.
Farra also contacted the coaches of the other seven skiers on the domestic circuit, and he wrote that they had been “receptive and anxious to help.”
However, since skiers create quota places for their countries rather than for themselves, they have less of an incentive to put a lot of effort into doing well at races that don’t suit their strengths.
In an interview with FasterSkier, USST Head Coach Pete Vordenberg said that he “won’t make major changes to who starts what to increase points.” Kris Freeman might start a few more sprints, he added, but “that will be to get quick, too.” Plus, Vordenberg said, bringing a huge number of skiers to the Olympics isn’t good, because the work they would create for USST staff could might distract from the focus of winning medals.
More promising are the structural changes being instituted by USSA to improve the FIS points of the American skiers that aren’t competing in Europe. First, Farra said, USSA and Cross Country Canada have cooperated this year to minimize the overlap of their big domestic races, which will allow the Canadians to race in the U.S. and vice versa. With deeper, more competitive fields, these races should give participants better FIS points.
Second, Farra said, USSA has blocked out a part of the winter during which it will encourage top domestic athletes to travel to Europe for OPA Cup races-that continent’s version of the Super Tour. Since OPA Cups usually have better fields than the Super Tour, these will also be good opportunities for Americans to improve their FIS points.
Both of these programs are new, and Farra said that in the future the U.S. will have to take a much more active approach if it wants to ensure a large quota.
While taking a large team to Vancouver might not help the USST win medals on the short term, Farra did say that bringing a larger number of second-tier athletes is still important, because the promise of skiing in the Olympics helps to fuel “the whole domestic structure.”
Osgood is an example of this, as he wrote in his e-mail to FasterSkier that he has continued competing for longer than he otherwise might have “because of a chance to race in the Olympics.”
“And I’m not the only skier who has done so,” he said.
The payoff for Farra’s efforts won’t be known until the end of January, when FIS releases the final quota numbers. Until then, athletes like Osgood and Rodgers will working as hard as they can to make the team. They’ll get their answer from USSA when the last few spots on the Olympic team are announced on January 29th-barely two weeks before the Games begin.
![Matt Liebsch enjoying the view from their chartered flight from Oroville, Wash., to Bozeman, Mont., on Dec. 7.](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/12/photo-4.jpg")
![Brian Gregg up front with the pilot.](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/12/photo-22.jpg")
![The chartered plane Brian Gregg and Matt Liebsch took to Bozeman, Mont., on Dec. 7. (Courtesy photo)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/12/photo-12.jpg")
![Patrick Johnson (Far West) leads Brian Gregg in the 15 k classic mass start on Dec. 8 in Bozeman, Mont. (Photo: Anya Caldwell Bean)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/12/Mens-3.jpeg")
![Team Gregg, with Caitlin (second from l) and Brian (r), and Matt Liebsch (l) in Bozeman, Mont. (Courtesy photo)](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/12/photo-31.jpg")
![An Olympic berth is going to be harder to come by. Justin Freeman racing at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino.](http://images.fasterskier.com/2009/11/freeman-torino.jpg" "An Olympic berth is going to be harder to come by. Justin Freeman racing at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino.")
![Andrew Johnson at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.](http://images.fasterskier.com/2009/11/joohnson-sl.jpg" "Andrew Johnson at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.")