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.
Annika Martell racing during the NENSA club relays, Saturday, March 28, 2026 at Craftsbury. (Photo: Phil Belena)
The Craftsbury Green Racing Project has named Annika Martell as its new Head Ski Coach.
Martell brings a resume that spans nearly every corner of the Nordic skiing world. A Minnesota native, she headed east to ski at Colby College, where she captained the team and earned recognition for her leadership before graduating with a degree in economics and environmental science.
Her coaching career has taken a similarly wide path. Early on, she interned with the US Biathlon Association and coached juniors at Ford Sayre and the Berkshire Nordic Ski Club, before moving into elite-level work as an assistant coach with the Stratton Mountain School T2 Team. She spent four years as an assistant coach at Williams College, during which time she completed two stints as a Trail to Gold Fellow with the US Ski Team and served twice on the wax staff for Team New England at Junior Nationals.
Most recently, Martell was the Head Nordic Coach at St. Michael’s College, where she guided the program to highly competitive results.
Her background extends well beyond the ski tracks. She is a certified weightlifting coach and handled strength and conditioning duties at Williams. She also has experience in finance and operations management, and holds a Master’s degree in Sports Business from Drexel University.
The Craftbury Green Racing Project is still accepting athlete applications for the incoming 2026 snow class — Apply Here
Martell follows Jessie Diggins on course in Beitostolen in 2022. (Photo: Nordic Focus)
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)
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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Jessie Diggins (USA) claimed her third Tour de Ski overall victory in Val di Fiemme (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
The Tour de Ski does not end so much as it compresses. By the time the women turned onto the ribbon of snow climbing Alpe Cermis, the race had already been going on for a week—measured not only in kilometers and seconds, but in fatigue accumulated quietly overnight, in sore muscles, achy backs, and in confidence gained or lost one race at a time.
The final climb has a way of making those invisible things visible. It is steep enough to strip racing of pretense, long enough to punish impatience, and familiar enough that every skier arrives with memories—good ones, bad ones, and some they would rather forget. On Sunday afternoon in Val di Fiemme, the climb again became what it always is: less a finish line than a reckoning.
For Jessie Diggins, that reckoning ended in confirmation. Diggins finished second on the stage, protecting her margin with experience and restraint, and secured her third career Tour de Ski overall title. It was not the loudest way to win. It was, however, the truest.
Jessie Diggins (USA) paced the final climb perfectly to finish second on the day. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
A Climb That Decides Everything
Stage 6 of the women’s Tour de Ski—10.0 kilometers, mass start, freestyle—began with the tension that always precedes Alpe Cermis. Some skiers arrived still dreaming of a stage victory. Others were guarding seconds earned days earlier. Still others were simply hoping to make it to the top without the climb turning overly cruel.
The early kilometers unfolded with relative calm. The pace was honest but controlled, the group compact as it flowed through the lower valley before turning uphill. On Alpe Cermis, there is no hiding, but there is strategy: when to let others go, when to follow, and—most importantly—when not to.
The decisive moves came as the gradient steepened and the field stretched into a long, thin line. Norway’s Karoline Simpson-Larsen skied with precision and patience, gradually asserting herself as the strongest on the day. She crested the final meters alone to win the stage in 37:05.3, earning the biggest single-day victory of her World Cup career.
Behind her, the race unfolded with quieter drama. Diggins, who entered the day with a commanding overall lead, skied with calculation. She resisted the temptation to respond immediately when others surged, choosing instead to manage the climb in segments. When the grade lessened and the gap narrowed late, she allowed herself to push hard enough to secure second place, but not so hard as to invite disaster.
Diggins crossed the line 8.8 seconds behind Simpson-Larsen, followed by Norway’s Heidi Weng in third at +14.4. The stage podium reflected the day’s effort, but it was Diggins’ second place that carried the most weight.
Jessie Diggins (USA), as always, left everything out on the course. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
“Dying at the Right Moment”
Diggins’ approach to Alpe Cermis was shaped by experience—and memory.
“I was trying to be smart and safe in terms of the overall Tour,” she said afterward. “And then when I realized we were close enough, I thought, okay, now I can empty the tank. But I’ve paced it badly before where I blow up, and that last 600 meters is the slowest of your life.”
It is a detail only veterans tend to mention: not the steepest pitch, but the final few hundred meters, when legs that have already been pushed too far simply refuse to respond. Diggins has lived that mistake. On Sunday, she avoided it.
“I was trying to ski it smart and make sure I was dying at the right moment,” she said.
That restraint—so often invisible to spectators—was the difference between managing the Tour and risking it. The margin Diggins had built over five stages gave her room to think clearly. The climb rewarded that clarity.
Julia Kern (USA) and Jessie Diggins (USA) celebrate with US Cross-Country Ski Team coaches and staff, as well as US Alpine Ski Team athletes who came to support them at the end of the 2025/26 Tour de Ski. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
The Meaning of a Tour
In the mixed zone at the top, Diggins spoke not with relief so much as appreciation—for the work, the people, and the endurance the Tour demands.
“The Tour de Ski is one of the hardest things to win,” she said. “When you win the Olympics, it’s amazing—it’s really special. But that’s one race. The Tour is day after day after day. You have to put it together back-to-back, under cumulative pressure. That’s really hard. It’s hard on you, and it’s hard on the team.”
Her emphasis, repeatedly, returned to the collective effort. She spoke of team energy, of support staff, of consistency rather than dominance. It was a reminder that Tour victories are not seized in moments, but constructed patiently across an entire week.
Diggins finished the Tour with a total time of 2:11:26.1, winning the overall by more than two minutes over Austria’s Teresa Stadlober. It was not a victory defined by a single attack or a single stage, but by accumulation—time gained when others faltered, mistakes avoided when margins were thin.
Julia Kern (USA) makes her way up Alpe Cermis to finish 14th on the day. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Kern’s Quiet Confirmation
For Julia Kern, Alpe Cermis offered something different: clarity.
Kern finished 14th on the stage, 2:01.0 back, after a Tour that reflected both progress and unfinished business. She described the climb as meeting—or exceeding—her expectations.
“Every year it’s a little different with who’s still left in the Tour,” Kern said. “But I’m taking away from today that my fitness is there. I just need to fine-tune some of the sprinting gears. That’s very trainable at this point in the season.”
Her assessment mirrored her results. Kern was consistently strong in the distance races throughout the Tour, finding rhythm and confidence as the days passed. The sprint stages, by contrast, left her frustrated.
“I was a bit bummed with my sprint days for sure, and hungry for more,” she said. “But at the same time, I had consistently good, strong distance races. Halfway through the Tour, I started to find my race legs again.”
It is a pattern Kern recognizes—slow starts, gradual momentum, strength revealed in longer efforts. In an Olympic season, that trajectory matters more than any single result.
Maja Dahlqvist (SWE) attacked at the end of the valley trail leading to the Alpe Cermis in Val di Fiemme (ITA) to secure her silver sprinters’ bib. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
The Bib Battles
Beyond the overall, the final climb also settled two secondary competitions that added layers of tension to the Tour’s closing act.
The climber’s bib—awarded for cumulative performance on the Tour’s toughest ascents—went to Teresa Stadlober, who accumulated 45 points across the week. Diggins finished second in the standings with 39, underscoring how consistently she handled the steepest terrain without ever needing to gamble on a single climb.
The sprint standings, marked by the silver bib, remained unsettled until the final stage, where one final set of bonus points was awarded at the beginning of Alpe Cermis. Sweden’s Maja Dahlqvist emerged with the title at 53 points, ahead of Switzerland’s Nadine Fähndrich and Sweden’s Johanna Hagström. Diggins finished fourth in the sprint competition—another reflection of her Tour: competitive everywhere, decisive where it mattered most.
Teresa Stadlober (AUT) fought hard to defend her climbers’ bib. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Pain, Reconsidered
Late in the mixed zone, Diggins reflected on something more personal—how different this climb felt compared to recent years.
“The last two years I’ve been so injured that I was in so much pain outside of racing,” she said. “So for it to be only painful during the race was like, wow—that’s kind of nice.”
It was not a dramatic declaration, but it carried weight. The Tour de Ski magnifies everything: fatigue, doubt, confidence, pain. To arrive at Alpe Cermis feeling capable—rather than simply enduring—marked a shift.
She laughed when she added that she told herself, mid-Tour, that she would “never do this again.” Then she smiled at the familiar uncertainty that defines the race.
“You never know how you’re going to feel every day on a Tour,” she said. “And today I felt really good. One of the best I’ve ever felt on the final climb.”
Julia Kern (USA), Jessie Diggins (USA), (l-r) at the top of Alpe Cermis in Val di Fiemme (ITA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The American Picture
For the U.S. women, the Tour ended with a sense of coherence. Diggins’ overall victory provided the headline, but Kern’s steady distance form pointed toward depth and durability within the team.
Kern’s immediate plans reflect that long view. She will return home to Richmond, Vermont, for two weeks—prioritizing recovery before resuming training on familiar snow.
“I did this last year, and it worked really well,” she said. “Just getting off World Cup, getting a lot of recovery the first week, being in my own bed.”
From there, she will rejoin training camps and racing with an eye toward sharpening for the Olympics. It is a plan built on patience rather than urgency—much like Diggins’ approach on Alpe Cermis.
Teresa Stadlober (AUT), Jessie Diggins (USA), Heidi Weng (NOR), (l-r) take the Tour de Ski overall podium. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
What the Climb Leaves Behind
When the last skier crested the climb and the finish corral emptied, Alpe Cermis returned to stillness. The Tour de Ski had done what it always does: clarified things.
It clarified that Jessie Diggins remains one of the sport’s great stage racers—capable not just of winning races, but of managing weeks. It clarified that Julia Kern’s fitness base is real and growing, even if some pieces still need refinement. And it clarified, once again, that the Tour is not about brilliance alone, but about survival, intelligence, and trust in process.
Diggins did not win the final stage. She did something harder. She won the Tour by knowing exactly when not to.
At the end of the longest climb of the week, that knowledge mattered most.
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Jessie Diggins (USA), Karoline Simpson Larsen (NOR), and Heidi Weng (NOR), (l-r) share the final climb podium at the top of Alpe Cermis in Val di Fiemme (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
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.
Mattis Stenshagen (NOR) took stage two of the Tour de Ski in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
By the time the final seeded skier pushed through the finishing straight in Toblach, the race had already revealed what interval starts always do best: not who looks fastest, but who stays fastest when no one is there to help.
On a clear, cold Monday morning in northern Italy, the men’s Tour de Ski distance competition began in earnest with a 10-kilometer classic interval start — a race that rewards patience, punishes impatience, and exposes any weakness in pacing, technique, or timing. For some, it was a statement. For others, a warning. For nearly everyone, it was a reminder that the Tour de Ski is less a series of races than a slow accumulation of consequences.
At the front of the field, Mattis Stenshagen (NOR) delivered the cleanest distance race of his World Cup career, leading from the opening checkpoint to the finish and winning Stage 2 in 22:11.0. Behind him, familiar names followed — Johannes Høsflot Klæbo and Emil Iversen — but the day belonged to the skier who never wavered, never overreached, and never gave back time once he took it.
Mattis Stenshagen (NOR) led wire to wire in the 10 K Interval Start Classic. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
A Classic Race, Skied Classically
From the opening 2.1-kilometer split, Stenshagen established a rhythm that no one else matched. His early advantage was not explosive, but it was decisive: a smooth, efficient tempo that translated into the fastest time at every checkpoint — 2.1 km, 3.0 km, 5.0 km, 6.7 km, 8.0 km — and ultimately at the finish.
Behind him, the race for the podium unfolded with more complexity.
Klæbo, starting later with the gold Tour de Ski leader’s bib, skied conservatively through the opening kilometers, conceding small amounts of time before gradually tightening the gap. His second-half splits were among the fastest in the field, but by then Stenshagen’s advantage was already established. Klæbo finished 8.9 seconds back, a strong result that preserved his overall lead without demanding unnecessary risk.
Iversen followed a similar arc — controlled early, assertive late — but never quite bridged the gap to Klæbo, finishing third at +10.1. Behind the podium, the field compressed quickly, with Iivo Niskanen, Edvin Anger, Erik Valnes, and Harald Østberg Amundsen all skiing within seconds of one another through the middle splits before settling into their final placings.
It was the kind of race that rewards experience — and punishes even small mistakes.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR) kept close to the lead on the day and preserved his Tour de Ski lead. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Norwegian Depth, Olympic Stakes
If the Tour de Ski is often described as a test of endurance, for the Norwegian men it is also something else entirely: an extended job interview.
With the Olympic Games returning to Italy in February, every race carries an added layer of pressure. The margins between selection and omission are thin, and performances like Stenshagen’s matter not just for podiums, but for perception. Beating Klæbo, Iversen, Valnes, and Amundsen head-to-head in a classic interval start sends a message — especially when it is done decisively.
Emil Iversen (NOR) continued making his case for one of the valuable Norwegian Olympic team spots. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
The depth of the Norwegian field was evident throughout the top ten, but Stage 2 clarified one thing early in the Tour: no spot is guaranteed beyond Klæbo, and even he is racing with calculation rather than abandon.
Gus Schumacher (USA) led the American men in the 10 K Classic Interval Start in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Schumacher Leads the Americans on a Complicated Day
For the U.S. men, the day unfolded with a mix of promise and frustration — a pattern that became clear as the split times accumulated.
Gus Schumacher emerged as the top American finisher, placing 17th, just under 50 seconds back. His race was defined by steadiness rather than volatility, with consistent splits that kept him in contact with the top 20 throughout the day. In a Tour de Ski that rewards durability as much as peak form, Schumacher’s result positioned him solidly in both the stage results and the overall standings.
Still, Schumacher felt there was more on the table.
“The pacing wasn’t amazing,” he said. “It was close to the race I expected, but it could have been a bit better with a little more energy over the last two or three kilometers.”
Part of that equation came down to ski feel — specifically, kick wax that required more effort than anticipated.
“I think my kick was slightly slipperier than I expected based on how it felt in testing,” Schumacher said. “Having to work for the kick more than I planned on the second lap tilted the scales of my pacing a bit. Overall, it was a solid day, but some small changes could have made a big difference.”
Rather than holding back, Schumacher said he plans to continue racing the Tour aggressively, while being deliberate about recovery away from the course.
“This year’s Tour doesn’t feel too hard, so managing load isn’t really on my mind during the races,” he said. “Outside of racing, I’m trying to give myself a lot of quiet time, but I don’t feel any reason to hold back in my efforts.”
His goals for the Tour strike a careful balance between ambition and pragmatism.
“I want to end up top 10, but most of all I want to finish,” Schumacher said. “A lot of my focus is on doing everything i can to avoid getting sick.”
Zak Ketterson (USA) was sharp early during the 10 K Classic in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
Zak Ketterson’s Race Changes in an Instant
Through more than seven kilometers, Zak Ketterson was skiing the way he had during the first part of the season.
His early splits placed him firmly in contention for a top-15 finish, and as he crested the final significant climb with just one uphill remaining, the trajectory of his race appeared set. Then, in an instant, it wasn’t.
“This race was going really well for me up until I crashed on a really high-speed downhill at about 7.3 kilometers,” Ketterson said. “I was fighting for a top-15 finish and had just one uphill left to go.”
The fall itself was only the beginning.
Zak Ketterson (USA) continued his form from November and December through most of the race before a crash changed his day. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
“After I got up, my muscles got insanely stiff, and I felt really dizzy and disoriented,” he said. “I honestly thought about DNF’ing at that point and was just in survival mode to the finish.”
The split data tells the story clearly: a sharp loss of time between the 7.1- and 8.0-kilometer checkpoints, followed by a fight simply to reach the line. Ketterson finished well outside his early-race position, but his performance before the crash suggested a level of classic skiing that bodes well for the remainder of the Tour and beyond.
“I’m feeling okay now — I don’t think I injured anything, but I’ll see how things feel over the rest of the day,” he said. “My shape feels good, so hopefully I’m back in the fight on Stage 3.”
Ben Ogden (USA) looked strong early in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Ogden’s Setback Comes Early
For Ben Ogden, the defining moment came much earlier in the race.
Based on the split times, Ogden’s momentum shifted between the 3- and 5-kilometer checkpoints, where a promising early pace gave way to a sudden loss of time. The cause was broken equipment — and a prolonged scramble to find a usable replacement.
“I broke a pole right around three kilometers — maybe a little before,” Ogden said. “After that, I was kind of swapping poles until I finally got one that was the right side and the right length, which was a bummer.”
What followed was an unusually long stretch of improvisation in the middle of a World Cup race.
“I was swapping poles for probably two and a half kilometers,” he said. “I think I swapped four times — from an Italian coach, to a Swiss coach, to an American coach, and then finally to one of my own spare poles that was the right height and side.”
Ogden eventually crossed the line in 46th, a result that understated how well he felt he was skiing before the incident — and how difficult it was to mentally reset afterward.
Ben Ogden (USA) crosses the line in Toblach (ITA) with a trail of random poles scattered throughout the course behind him. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
“It was hard to get back into it mentally,” he said. “But I felt like I skied pretty well over the last couple of kilometers, so I was happy with that. I definitely wish I could have put together the race I felt capable of.”
From a Tour de Ski perspective, the lost time was costly. But Ogden emphasized that his broader season goals remain intact.
“My biggest goals this year aren’t in the Tour,” he said. “I still feel like I can take steps toward my big goals this year and feel good about that. These tours can change really quick. I’ve been in the top five in the Tour, and then after one race, I’ve been 40th, so maybe the same will happen in the opposite, but, yeah. Definitely just keep my eye on my main goals this year and trying to stay positive and keep fighting.”
Antoine Cyr (CAN) during his second World Cup race this season. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
A Canadian Return to the World Cup
Stage 2 also marked a quiet but meaningful milestone for the Canadian men, who arrived in Toblach for their first World Cup races of the season after holding Olympic trials in Canada before Christmas.
Antoine Cyr led the Canadian contingent with a solid performance just outside the top 20, while teammates followed in behind. For a group using the Tour de Ski as both a competitive platform and a form-building block toward February, the results offered a baseline — not definitive answers, but a starting point.
Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR), Mattis Stenshagen (NOR), Emil Iversen (NOR), (l-r) take the podium of the 10 K Classic in Toblach (ITA). (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
The Long View of the Tour
The Tour de Ski rarely reveals its winner on the first distance day. Instead, it reveals tendencies: who overreaches, who fades late, who absorbs pressure, and who survives adversity without letting it define the week.
In Toblach, Stenshagen showed he could control a race from the front. Klæbo showed he could defend without exposing himself. Others — Ketterson among them — showed flashes of form that mattered more than a single line in the results.
By the time the Tour leaves Toblach for Val di Fiemme, the standings will shift again. Fatigue will accumulate. Risks will sharpen. And the races will begin to resemble not just World Cups, but rehearsals.
In Italy, on familiar snow, the men are already practicing for something larger.
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It’s on — the 2026 Olympic season, that is. Devon and Nat break down six season-opening races from northern Finland, including a thriller in Sunday’s men’s race.
Contact us with fan mail, hate mail and everything in between: devon[at]fasterskier.com and nat[at]fasterskier.com. We’re looking for title and other sponsors for our Olympic coverage; email matthew[at]fasterskier.com with inquiries.
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.
Sunday morning in Ruka had the look of a place holding its breath. The sun sat low over the trees, the air hovered just on the warm side of freezing, and the men’s World Cup field stepped into the stadium with the faint stiffness of athletes who had already skied two challenging races in two days. A thin glaze shone on the 4-kilometer loop, the kind that makes skis feel nervous and alive at the same time, and even before the starter raised his arm, you sensed the day would run fast.
The stadium sits at the high point of the course in Ruka, so the men’s 20km mass-start free begins not with the controlled civility of a long climb but with a plunge. Skiers can hit 80 kilometers an hour on the opening descent, the field funneled into two uneasy lanes, and the whole pack—Johannes Høsflot Klæbo included, wearing the yellow bib and chasing the mythical 100th World Cup win—had to thread that speed through a hairpin that felt too tight for comfort even on TV.
Harald Oestberg Amundsen (NOR) finds his way through the traffic of the Men’s 20 k Freestyle mass start in Ruka (FIN). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Ruka is an odd, angular loop: long, steady work on the one side; a shorter, punchier grind up the Impilinna climb; then a sweeping dive back toward the stadium before the last drag to the line. Five laps. One early-season opportunity to reshape the winter. And an Olympic year, which meant that every Norwegian on the line was skiing for more than points—they were skiing for selection.
Among the Americans, the storylines were as varied as their bibs: Gus Schumacher and Zanden McMullen seeking another elite result after their success in Ruka a year ago, Zak Ketterson racing with newfound confidence after a career-best 14th in Friday’s classic 10 K, and a young supporting cast learning the dynamics of a fast, narrow pack on a tricky course.
Nothing broke early. The first lap was quick but calm, a kind of rolling truce among athletes who knew how violent the final lap could become. But the race’s character changed—the way good races do—at the unexpected moment.
Mika Vermeulen (AUT) leads Edvin Anger (SWE) through the stadium. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The Gamble at 9.1km
At the 9.1km sprint banner, Sweden’s Edvin Anger made the first real incision in the race. The 23-year-old surged for bonus points—as expected—but then did something far more interesting: he kept going. Mika Vermeulen of Austria latched on, the two of them taking the descent like they meant it, and for the first time all day, the pack blinked.
Within a kilometer, the gap was three seconds. Then seven. Then ten. The move was reminiscent of the early break in a bike race. The French and Germans led the chase instead of Norway. Hugo Lapalus briefly tried to bridge and cracked. The Norwegians refused to panic.
Behind the break, Schumacher and Ketterson were having very different but equally impressive races. Schumacher hovered between fourth and eighth through the middle laps, completely comfortable in traffic. Ketterson floated near the top ten, choosing clean lanes, maintaining position with a calm that looked like something new.
Further back, Einar Hedegart—the 23-year-old biathlete-turned-cross-country-skier whose win at the Norwegian opener in Beitostølen had already rattled some assumptions inside Norway’s Olympic selection system—drifted quietly toward the front.
By 13 kilometers, Anger and Vermeulen’s advantage peaked at roughly 13 seconds. It wasn’t supposed to hold. But it looked real. And it was enough to force the race’s next twist.
Einar Hedegart (NOR), follows Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR) through the stadium. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus.)
The Turn, the Crash, and the Broken Ski
Gus Schumacher’s day changed off-camera.
“The race was going super well,” Schumacher said after the finish. “It felt relatively easy; my body was super responsive with great energy. I was able to keep really good position, which is massive in this race.”
Then came the downhill at roughly 14km, the kind of section where pack dynamics feel like a living organism.
“I was gliding up on the left side, and Klæbo switched lanes right in front of me, sweeping my tips out. It was too quick and unpredictable for me to do anything,” Schumacher said. “I fell off the side of the trail, my ski ran into the hard snow on the edge, and it broke the tip.”
He skied another full lap on the damaged ski.
In the hard, fast conditions, it was just stable enough to keep him in touch—and switching skis would almost certainly have meant losing the group entirely. Remarkably, even with the partial break, Schumacher clawed back toward the front, positioning himself to sprint for a top spot.
And then the bad luck doubled.
“In the last kilometers, it got stuck in the deep snow of the test track and broke the tip fully, and that was the end.”
He finished 39th, but the skiing he showed before the equipment failure will matter more than the result does.
“I’m super proud of how I was skiing… My body is in a great place, but this weekend’s luck just hasn’t gone my way. Long season ahead.”
Andrew Musgrave (GBR) and Einar Hedegart (NOR), (l-r) during the final race of the weekend in Ruka (FIN). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The Pole Break, the Surge, and the Catch
At ~16 kilometers, Harald Oestberg Amundsen—already a pre-race favorite—snapped a pole.
It could have been the story. Instead, it became the turning point.
Service handed him a new pole instantly. Amundsen slotted back in, glanced up the trail, and began to close the gap. Hedegart came with him. Nyenget followed. The chase, which had felt half-committed earlier, finally had purpose.
With Anger and Vermeulen still dangling up the trail and the course running out of time, Amundsen moved to the front and began applying real pressure. The gap shrank visibly on the Valkosenvaara climb. By the time the race wound back toward the stadium, the two leaders were in sight, the rope fraying.
What came next was pure Amundsen.
He caught the break on the final climb. And then he kept going.
Gus Schumacher (USA), (NOR), Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR), Zak Ketterson (USA), Harald Oestberg Amundsen (NOR), and Einar Hedegart (NOR) among others climbing up the final climb of the lap in Ruka, Finland. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The Ruka Climb and the Decisive Moment
With roughly 500 meters left—just before the crest of the Ruka climb—Amundsen stepped out from the group and launched his move. It wasn’t desperate or chaotic; it was clean, timed, andconfident. Hedegart tried to respond. Nyenget tried. Anger fought with everything left.
Nobody matched him.
Amundsen crested alone, floated through the final meters, and took his 11th career World Cup win with the kind of clarity that defines a season.
In an on-air broadcast interview after the finish, he explained the day as a study in patience and timing:
“The conditions were so high-speed that I was quite nervous on the downhills,” he said. “On the first four laps I was pretty far behind and struggling to move up, but I had saved some energy. On the last lap, I felt very strong.
When they got the gap at the beginning, I was quite far behind, so I just had to wait. But on the last lap, I thought, you can’t just let this go, so I put everything in and caught them on the last uphill… I had good legs today.”
Behind him, Hedegart—just one year removed from biathlon—finished a remarkable second. Anger earned third after animating the race with the early breakaway. Nyenget was fourth; Vermeulen fifth.
And Klæbo, in a rare off-day, was 15th.
Zak Ketterson (USA), and Friedrich Moch (GER), (l-r) lapping through the stadium during the Men’s 20 k Mass Start Freestyle in Ruka (FIN). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
An American Breakthrough
Zak Ketterson recorded the best American result of the day—ninth place, the first top-10 of his World Cup career in a mass start—and the performance looked more like the product of design than circumstance.
Ketterson entered the day already benefiting from Friday’s career-best 14th in the 10 k classic, which earned him a forward bib placement on a course where position matters as much as fitness.
“I was fortunate to start really far up in the pack because of my performance in the 10 k, and that was huge in such a tight and tactical field,” Ketterson said. “I knew if I moved too far back, it’d be really hard to move back up, so I planned to defend my position as well as I could.”
He executed the plan with the kind of composure that has eluded him in past mass starts. On a slick, tense course where one mistake could cost half the field, Ketterson held clean lanes, avoided every significant disturbance, and stayed in the top 10–15 as the race stretched into the final lap.
What’s emerging this season is not just fitness, but a foundation built well before Ruka.
“This summer and fall, especially, my wife Julie and I went all in on trying to prepare as well as possible for this year,” he said. “I worked harder than I ever have and also have had a really good mindset. That it’s working so well so far is a big testament to all the hard work, and my wife Julie should get a lot of credit for being my number one support staff.”
The strongest signal of progress came in the final kilometer, when the real attrition began, and Ketterson didn’t fade—he held and even advanced.
“It meant a lot to be able to have a strong finish because, as I said earlier, I often would finish these types of races and move backwards in the pack,” he said. “I think the fact that I was able to relax so much of the race made it so that I had that energy that was necessary when the pace picked up. I am really proud of how calm I stayed, even though the race was so tight, and the conditions were super sketchy, icy, and fast.”
For a U.S. men’s program that continues to build depth quietly, Ketterson’s weekend—14th + 9th—marks a meaningful step. It also gives the team, and head coach Matt Whitcomb, a new data point as Olympic-year relay and selection conversations begin.
Einar Hedegart (NOR) celebrates the victory in Ruka (FIN). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
What This Race Means
For Norway: The selection picture grows even more impossibly crowded. Amundsen is in towering early-season form. Hedegart is no longer a curiosity—he’s a factor. Nyenget remains brutally consistent. Klæbo is still the biggest star in the sport, but his chase for World Cup win No. 100 will now continue into Trondheim.
For the rising generation: Three of the top six—Anger, Hedegart, Desloges—are 23 or younger. The youth wave is no longer a subplot; it’s the plot.
For the Americans: Ketterson’s top-10 creates new conversations about relays and the Olympics. Schumacher’s form before the crash suggests he’s ready for significant results as soon as his luck stabilizes.
For the sport: A genuine breakaway, a serious chase, a late-lap catch, a pole break, a ski break, and a new podium—all in one race.
Ruka is supposed to be the season’s prologue. This one felt like chapter one.
Einar Hedegart (NOR), Harald Oestberg Amundsen (NOR), Edvin Anger (SWE), (l-r) share the podium of the Men’s 20 k Freestyle Mass Start in Ruka, Finland. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
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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 a bright March afternoon at Dartmouth’s Oak Hill, with a soft and slow course under his skis and a band he himself had organized blasting in the stadium above, John Steel Hagenbuch approached the final climb where he learned something that would shape the early years of his career far more than any podium ever could.
He had come into the NCAA Championships with the weight of a thousand private dreams — a home championship crescendo and an entire community behind him. Then, with Utah’s Joe Davies charging to the finish line waving the Utes flag and Peter Graves’ voice echoing through the trees, Hagenbuch realized he was not going to win.
“I got dropped, and it just wasn’t gonna happen,” he says. “I told myself, you’ve got until the top of this hill to be upset about it.”
John Steel Hagenbuch was all smiles after crossing the 20k Freestyle finish in second place at the 2025 NCAA Championship where he represented Dartmouth College on their home course at Oak Hill. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
What happened next wasn’t the reaction of an athlete who had just been beaten in the race he’d been thinking about, talking about, training for, and dreaming about for three years. It was something quieter. Something older. Something that didn’t look like the scripted champion he’d imagined — but ended up becoming the cornerstone of the athlete he is now.
“I stopped poling,” he says. “And I just kind of skated through the stadium… smiling, waving, like the Penguins of Madagascar — smile and wave.”
He remembers the sunshine, the thousands of people lining the stadium, the Stripers — Dartmouth’s biggest student band, coaxed back from post-graduation life because he wanted the place to feel alive — and the thrum of friends, professors, fraternity brothers, and family in the crowd.
“Did I win the ski race? No. But it actually didn’t matter,” he says. “I was just so grateful… all the amazing things in my life that had led me to that point.”
Every day since, he thinks about that race. “But not for the reasons you’d expect.”
John Steel Hagenbuch (USA) racing the World Cup opener in Ruka (FIN) in 2023. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
Muonio, Finland: The Final Quiet Before the Season Begins
Eight months later, Hagenbuch is sitting in a small room in Muonio, Finland, speaking over a fickle internet connection. Outside, winter is closing in; inside, the early-season nervous energy is beginning to hum.
“It’s been a good way to start the season,” he says of the classic sprint and 10k skate he raced the previous weekend. “Hopefully more to come.”
He will likely stay on the World Cup through the Tour de Ski. His primary goal, stated simply and without ornament, is clear: “Primary goal is to go to the Olympics. Everything else is secondary.”
He’s 24, still at Dartmouth — technically a senior, though he took this fall off to focus on training. When winter term begins on January 7, he’ll be back in class, shifting between World Cups and essays, navigating the dual life of a college student and a professional skier the way only NCAA athletes truly understand.
But he is not rushed. Not impatient. Not gripping the rail of his career with white knuckles.
He learned something on that hill at Oak Hill, something that has become his ballast. “It reminds me why I do this,“ he says. “And why this sport is so special.”
Before he was an NCAA champion, skiing on the World Cup, and a trying to qualify for the Olympics, John Steel Hagenbuch was just a kid who loved skiing around on the trails of Sun Valley, ID. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
The Long View: Three Olympics and a Full-Moon Ski
Hagenbuch surprises you with the distance of his vision.
When asked about the future, he doesn’t talk only about Milano-Cortina in 2026. He talks about three Olympics — a decade of life sketched out in calm, confident lines.
“I would love to go to the next three Olympics,“ he says. “Milano-Cortina, then the French Alps, and then retire at the Salt Lake City 2034 Games.”
Soldier Hollow, where he has raced “probably 50 times,“ would be the perfect ending. But it’s not the race he imagines most clearly. Not the ceremony. Not the result.
It’s the lead-up.
“What will be the crown jewel of my ski career,“ he says, “is having the 2034 Olympic pre-camp in Sun Valley. At my house. With all the fellows.”
He can picture it already: the team skiing at Prairie Creek under a full moon, crispy tracks at 15 degrees after a sunny day, the quiet of the Sawtooths pressing close.
“That’s what I’m gonna remember when I’m 75,“ he says. “That Prairie Creek ski.”
In this way, Hagenbuch does not think like most 24-year-old athletes. He thinks like someone who has already lost something, already gained something, and has made peace with what remains.
A Training Philosophy Built on Feel (and a Fearless Lack of Overthinking)
In an era where professional endurance athletes run lactate strips daily and analyze heart-rate drift with the devotion of day traders, Hagenbuch stands apart.
“Do you do lactate testing?“ I ask him.
“Maybe like once a year.”
He trains primarily by feel—not just how his body feels, but what he feels like doing: long backcountry days, ridge runs, mountain biking, skiing deep into the mountains around Sun Valley. There is structure, but only when he believes it should exist.
“Not taking it too seriously,“ he says, “and kind of just going by what I would like to do and what I think is going to be fun.”
June and July? “Absolutely not“ analytical. Fall? Yes, that’s when he “locks in a bit.”
And if it ever stops being fun, he says, “I will not stick around.”
He has seen athletes grind themselves into dust out of fear of what’s next. “I respect the grit,“ he says, “but… I’m incredibly grateful to have had experiences and opportunities in my life that that’s not the case for me.”
He isn’t clinging to skiing. He’s choosing it — every day — until it no longer feels right.
That clarity is rare. Maybe even elite.
Being cheered up a climb in Soldier Hollow by one of his SVSEF coaches, Rick Kapala, John Steel Hagenbuch proves athletes like him aren’t built by themselves or through the guidance of one coach, they are lifted by a community. (Photo: Tryg Solberg/Courtesy Photo)
The Consortium: Osgood, Whitcomb, Kapala, and Holmes
Though he trains by feel, he is not without guidance. His coaching structure is more like a board of advisors — four voices, each offering a different vantage point.
“I talk with Brayton at Dartmouth, and Matt on the U.S. team, and Rick — my high school coach — and Peter Holmes on the Gold Team,“ he says. “I get input from all of those guys.”
When deciding to come to Muonio early, he called all four. Not for permission — for perspective.
“When I’m at Dartmouth, I do Brayton’s plan,“ he says. “But if I feel like I need to do something different, he’s totally cool with that.”
And contrary to what a young elite athlete might hope to hear, most of what they tell him is not “do more.“
“Oftentimes,“ he says, “it’s settled down.”
Dartmouth College’s John Steel Hagenbuch skied to a 15-second victory on his home trails in the 7.5 k Classic at the NCAA Championship. (Photo: Tobias Albrigtsen)
The Place That Built Him
If you want to understand why Hagenbuch thinks the way he does — why gratitude flows so naturally through him, and why he measures life through moments rather than medals — you have to understand Dartmouth.
“NCAA skiing is a really special thing,“ he says. “People are going to roll their eyes… but there aren’t a lot of places that have the components Dartmouth has.”
The social component is not a distraction — it’s a pillar. “Last year, every single guy on the team was in a fraternity,“ he says. “Different fraternities.”
He explains the structure: students join Greek life in their sophomore year, after they’ve already found their people, their communities, their balance.
“Everything acts as a complement,“ he says. “And providing that much balance… makes everything greater than the sum of its parts.”
The feeling at NCAAs captured this perfectly. “Anyone who was there,“ he says, “left thinking two things: college skiing is [so] sick and Dartmouth is [so] sick.”
He means it.
And he knows it won’t come again — not in this form.
Luke Allen, one of his closest friends, once asked an older alumnus if life ever gets as good as Dartmouth skiing. The man looked him straight in the eye and said, “No.“
There was lots of great energy at Oak Hill for the final day of the 2025 NCAA Championship. (Photo: Tobias Albrigtsen)
The Beauty of Losing
Here is the strange and elegant truth of Hagenbuch’s current career: his most important athletic memory is a loss.
He doesn’t hide from that. He doesn’t twist it into “motivation“ or pretend it fuels some internal fire for revenge.
Instead, he carries it like a compass.
“I think about that race every single day,“ he says. “But not because I lost… It reminds me to be grateful for these amazing people, places, and things in my life.”
He printed 150 photos at CVS the night before leaving Hanover in August — family, friends, the Haig Glacier, Sun Valley, Dartmouth — and plastered them across his fridge at home.
“Think how many times a day you walk by your fridge,“ he says. “All my friends are right there.“
It’s his daily reminder of what matters.
The Thursday classic race at NCAAs, the unexpected great day, the team’s move from fifth to first — these have become larger in his memory than the race he thought he wanted most.
“What was the special day at NCAAs?“ he says. “It was Thursday. I wasn’t even thinking about Thursday. I didn’t care how that one went.”
And yet: “I had probably my best classic race ever… it was such a culmination of a lot of hard work and belief.”
This is the philosophy he now lives by: you learn more from your losses, and sometimes the thing you didn’t expect becomes the thing you carry forever.
John Steel Hagenbuch, who won the 7.5k Classic, celebrates with his teammates after the three raced Dartmouth into the NCAA Championship lead. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
The Advice Only Someone Who Has Lived It Can Give
At the Haig Glacier last summer — years after his last high school camp there — Hagenbuch offered a piece of advice that caught the younger kids off guard.
They were expecting training insight. Intensity zones. Technique tweaks.
Instead, he told them the thing he wishes someone had told him at 15:
“Be a kid more.”
Growing up in Sun Valley, he had an idyllic childhood — but he wishes he’d stayed on the high school soccer team after freshman year. Wishes he’d allowed himself to do more of what felt right, not what looked right.
“Don’t try to do what you think you should do,“ he says. “Do what you feel you should do.”
And if your friends are doing something slightly reckless, something that wouldn’t make the parental brochure?
“Maybe… F-it, do it,“he says, laughing. “You’ll figure it out for yourself.”
Because that, too, is how you learn.
John Steel Hagenbuch (USA) racing the individual sprint at the Minneapolis World Cup. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
A Career Just Beginning, with the Wisdom of One Already Lived
Hagenbuch is young — young enough to dream of three Olympic Games, young enough to talk about walking onto the Dartmouth lightweight rowing team or running the 5k or 10k for the track team “as a fun challenge“ in his final spring on campus.
But he is also old in the ways that matter. Not jaded — never that. But precise in what deserves his attention, and ruthless in discarding what doesn’t.
He knows what a good race feels like: “When you finish and think, damn, I could have gone a little harder.”
He knows what a good life feels like: something filled with people and place, community and joy, full-moon skis and carnival tailgates and the band you recruited yourself playing you through the stadium after a loss.
And he knows — already — that the real currency of this sport isn’t medals, nor money, nor even wins.
“If you wanted to have glory or make money in sports,“ he says, “we’re all doing the wrong sport.”
So what is it about?
“It’s about the things I’ve talked about,“ he says. “It’s the parking lot tailgates. The little antics in the van. The dumb jokes with your boys. The feeling of being part of something bigger.”
And that’s why the NCAA hilltop moment carries him into this World Cup season — a season he hopes travels through Italy, under Olympic lights, wearing the colors he’s dreamed about.
Because that hill taught him the thing every great athlete eventually learns:
Sometimes the race you don’t win becomes the story you never stop telling.
Sometimes the best version of your career begins the moment you stop being upset… and start taking in the view.
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The Zoom room filled slowly, one journalist after another blinking into existence in a grid of small rectangles. Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Helsinki, Colorado, New York — not just the coordinates of U.S. skiing scattered across time zones, but also NPR, NBC, and European reporters, over 60 media outlets, all converging on a November morning. Jessie Diggins appeared in the largest box, glowing as she does all the way from Muonio, Finland, where she had arrived two nights earlier. The wooden panels on the wall behind her made it clear she sat in a Northern Scandinavian rental, probably one that has become quite recognizable to her each November. Diggin’s voice is steady and familiar, but beneath the surface, something is newly unbound.
“Hi, everyone,” she began, smiling with that practiced combination of approachability and poise that has made her — for more than a decade — the emotional center of American cross-country skiing.
It was the day after she announced her retirement.
Not an immediate farewell, but a season-long glide toward her final finish line — a full World Cup circuit, the Milano-Cortina Olympics, and a last race on home snow at the Stifel Lake Placid World Cup Finals. Her final year. Her final winter. A long goodbye in the only language she has ever known: motion.
But on this morning, she wasn’t moving at all. She was speaking — clearly, expansively — as though practicing for a stage much larger than a press conference. Which, in a way, she was.
When asked what comes next — “besides knitting,” she said, laughing — Diggins didn’t hesitate.
“I’m really excited… because I feel like when I ski race, it’s usually done with my body moving around as fast as it can, but everyone’s watching and you get this one moment to try to leave people feeling inspired,” she said. “And I want to do that — but through keynote speaking… it’s all about the storytelling and leaving people with this little piece.”
As she talked, I could see it already: a home office somewhere in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where she’ll finally get to spend time with her husband. A wooden desk, house plants, and a neatly stacked pile of notes for a TED-style talk on resilience. And above her desk, three matte-framed photographs from her career — not the ones you’d expect.
Not the historic PyeongChang team sprint.
Not the Crystal Globe.
Not the Tour de Ski.
Diggins has never defined herself by her medals. And in the conference, she explained why.
“To me, it’s not about the racing,” she said. “It’s not about medals, it’s not about results. It never has really been.”
Instead, she pointed to three moments — three stories — that she said she is most proud of. They form a different kind of highlight reel, one that reveals far more about how she sees herself, and how she hopes the sport will remember her when she’s gone.
These are the three frames above the desk.
Jessie Diggins (USA) embraced by teammate and close friend Julia Kern (USA) at the World Championships in Trondheim (NOR). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
The First Frame: Advocacy — Where Her Legacy Lives
When she was asked about impact — real impact, the kind that doesn’t fit in a results database — Diggins leaned forward slightly, like someone stepping out of a doorway into more honest light.
“One of the legacy pieces that I’m leaving behind is how US Ski & Snowboard handles mental health and how they support people,” she said. “When someone says, ‘Hey, I’m struggling with an eating disorder,’ there is so much help available for athletes… and I know I was a part of that because I was so open and shared everything along the way.”
For over a decade, she has made vulnerability her strength — not a PR tactic, not a brand, but a form of leadership she learned the hard way.
She spoke about the younger version of herself with a mix of compassion and urgency:
“18-year-old Jessie needed that so bad… if I had felt less alone and isolated when I was 18, I think I would have hopefully asked for help sooner.”
So she built what she calls a “safety net,” a phrase that recurred throughout the hour:
“When you’re in a good place of recovery… every time you meet with your therapist or your eating disorder specialist, sport dietitian, or eating-disorder doctor, you’re stitching and weaving together more of a really robust and large safety net,” she said. “You have this awesome thing ready to catch you should you need it.”
The metaphor is striking — a net woven from professional expertise, honesty, repetition, andpermission.
She also made clear that part of protecting herself meant protecting her team from having to be responsible for her recovery:
“My coaches, the wax techs, my teammates… they get to help support me, and I get to help support them, but they don’t have to work on the eating disorder side of things,” she said. “That is not something that they have to tackle. They shouldn’t feel obligated.”
Her work with Protect Our Winters (POW) — from lobbying in Washington to serving on the board — is woven into that same mission: to leave the sport stronger, safer, and more sustainable for others. Her climate story has always been an extension of her mental-health story: both about protecting what is fragile, what is at risk of disappearing.
It’s no surprise this is the first frame above the desk. This is the part of her career she insists cannot fade.
Jessie Diggins with teammates and staff after winning a historic silver medal in the 30K Freestyle at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China. (Photo: NordicFocus)
The Second Frame: The Beijing 30K — The Race She Calls Her Proudest
When asked about the moment she is most proud of as a competitor, she didn’t hesitate.
She didn’t say PyeongChang, though she acknowledged the magic of that day. She didn’t say her World Cup overall titles, though she earned those through years of relentless precision.
Instead, she chose a different story — one that most athletes would quietly bury.
“The proudest moment… was the 30K in Beijing,” she said. “Because it wasn’t about if I won or not… the fact that I had battled through food poisoning and chosen to start the race… one minute into the race I had [crashed] and got back on… everything had gone wrong… but I decided to go after it anyway.”
There is something primitive about that choice: to define greatness by suffering openly, to measure success by depth rather than placement.
She emphasized that she “had no business going in the breakaway,” no business skiing alone with a body that was “falling apart and cramping.” But she did it anyway. And she finished.
In a career built on composure and precision, this race was about something far less visible: the instinct to keep going when no one would blame you for stopping.
It is not the kind of image that hangs in a sports museum. But it belongs above her desk — the second frame — because it reminds her who she became, not merely what she achieved.
Jessie Diggins soaks in all the energy from the home crowd in Minneapolis. (Photo: Gretchen Powers, U.S. Ski & Snowboard )
The Third Frame: Minneapolis — The Moment That Surprised Even Her
Jessie Diggins’ favorite moment of her entire career was not a race, not a podium, and not a championship. It was a warm-up lap.
Not even the race itself — just the lap before it.
“It was the warm-up lap that I did in Minneapolis,” she said. “I cried like 12 times. It was the coolest moment of my entire career.”
The Minneapolis World Cup, held after years of planning and pandemic delays, drew more than 20,000 fans — kids in ski jackets, families, high school teams, masters racers, longtime volunteers, and the entire Nordic diaspora of America. She helped bring the race to Worth Park; she fought to keep it on the calendar; and then she skied into a stadium that felt like home.
“When you’re warming up, you can really see the crowd and be in it with them,” she explained. “Being a part of bringing together 20,000 plus fans… that was the coolest moment.”
This is the third frame above the desk. It captures the rarest kind of athlete achievement: the moment when an individual’s career transforms into a collective story.
This wasn’t symbolic. It was literal. She had helped create the environment in which the sport could grow.
She wasn’t skiing through fans; she was skiing through the future of U.S. skiing itself.
Staying, Leaving, Returning
If advocacy, suffering, and community are the three frames above her desk, there might be a fourth frame just below them: the one showing something from this final World Cup season or what comes next.
She says she will still support the team, “just not in a way that has to be quite so physically hard on my body.” She imagines herself as “team mom from the sidelines,” cheering but not chasing splits.
She will garden.
She will sleep in her own bed.
She will run a 100-mile race — “just for me… I don’t expect to run it quickly or competitively.”
She will finally come home.
The irony of this final season is that she wants to experience it with the full emotional force of closure — the opposite of detachment, the opposite of stoicism.
“It frees me to enjoy it even when it’s hard,” she said, describing the upcoming Olympics. “Even if it doesn’t go perfectly… my career is this entire body of work, and I just want to be there to be present… because it’s the last time I’m ever going to do this.”
Her retirement announcement wasn’t a curtain; it was an opening.
She’s letting people in.
She’s letting herself feel everything.
She’s letting the sport rush over her one last time.
The Press Conference Ends. The Story Begins.
When the final question was asked and the moderator thanked everyone for their time, Diggins’ Zoom square flickered and the screen returned to its familiar grid. Reporters signed off. Microphones muted. The call ended.
But her voice stayed in my head — not the athlete’s voice I’ve heard in mixed-zones for years, but the one she seems excited to use next.
The voice of someone shifting from performance to reflection, from competition to communication.
The voice of someone ready to tell stories for a living.
Back in Wakefield, someday soon, she’ll sit at her desk beneath those three frames. And as she maps out the arc of a keynote, or a book, or whatever comes after skiing, she’ll look up and see exactly what she spent her career building:
The people she helped.
The battles she fought.
The community she created.
Three frames.
One legacy.
And one last winter to live it fully.
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Jessie Diggins (USA) racing on home soil in Minneapolis and will do so again in Lake Placid as she concludes her storied World Cup career. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
2018 U.S. Ski Team camp at the Snow Farm in New Zealand, with author Alayna Sonnesyn (teal jacket) in the middle of the group shot. (Photo: Matt Whitcomb)
The following was written by Alayna Sonnesyn, a new member of the Stratton Mountain School (SMS) T2 Team who graduated from the University of Vermont (UVM) this past spring.
Originally from Plymouth, Minnesota, Sonnesyn, 22, raced on the UVM Ski Team for four years and qualified for four NCAA Skiing Championships teams. She placed second and third in two races at 2017 NCAA Championships, and in her senior season, won the first five Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association (EISA) races and went on to reach the podium in 10 out of 11 EISA races. Sonnesyn expressed an interest in exploring the dilemma many of the nation’s top skiing talents face out of high school: whether to attend college or get an early jump on a pro-racing career. She plans to post this two-part series on her blog as well.
***
For the first time in 17 years I will not be going back to school this fall. Saying that out loud is more daunting than I had anticipated. For the most part, the classmates that I graduated with can say that they are “going to grad school,” “starting a new job,” or “taking a year off to travel,” but I still don’t know where I lie. I am not taking any classes this year, I am not working anywhere consistently, and I am doing more than just traveling to explore, I’m traveling to race!
I am wrapping up a three-week training camp in New Zealand with the SMS, Craftsbury, and US Ski Team. When I walked through customs I had to write down my reason for visiting New Zealand: Was I a student? Was I visiting a family or friend? Was I working? What was my job? In the rush of the moment and due to habit, I wrote that I was still a student and continued on my way. I later had a few reflections; I still haven’t reached the point yet where I can say I have a job. I don’t have a salary and there are no company benefits. Yet, I work 24/7 toward my job — my job is ski racing. But why is this so hard for me to admit to myself? Is it because, for my entire life, I’ve been a student? What if I hadn’t taken this route? How do others make this decision?
National Training Group (NTG), summer 2013, in Park City, Utah.
Racing throughout high school, I was given a number of perspectives about picking skiing versus school. My friends were all preparing to go to college and I always assumed I would go to college, too. My parents and older sister went to school, why wouldn’t I go as well? But then I thought about skiing. I never had the most outstanding results in high school (never qualified to race internationally), but I was good enough to qualify for regional and national level camps like REG, NEG and NTG. I traveled to these camps and trained with other high-level athletes, getting more and more motivated by each skier or coach that I met. Then the thought came to me… what if I didn’t go to college? I could focus on training, make those vital steps toward international racing, and continue along the “pipeline” that so many Olympians had followed. Maybe I would make bigger jumps and improve my skiing exponentially? I was entering the unknown and I was unsure how to pick the right choice for me. Looking back on this four years later, I realize that I was far from alone in this predicament.
I have since had the opportunity to talk to a wide variety of skiers and competitors and have learned so much that I wish I knew in high school. It’s OK to be confused. It’s OK to make your own path. Every athlete is in a different situation, comes from diverse athletic and academic backgrounds, and has various goals that they hope to achieve post-high school.
“I’ve always believed that the most important thing to remember when discussing the decision to go to school or not (or when to go to school) is that is it a completely individual decision and the right decision for one person might not be the right decision for the next.” — Sophie Caldwell
Personally, I finally decided that taking a gap year might be too big of a jump for me. I wasn’t ready to focus on skiing and I had a lot of goals for myself academically. I decided to attend the University of Vermont and upon reflection, can admit that this was one of the best decisions of my life. Similarly, SMS teammate, Kelsey Phinney, went from high school in Boulder, Colorado, directly to Middlebury College.
“The reason I chose Middlebury College was simple: I went to visit and I was ready to unpack and stay for good. I loved the people, the area, the ski team, and the classes I sat in on.” — Kelsey Phinney
Carnival love, with Kelsey Phinney (top) and Katie Feldman.
Kelsey and I both fell in love with our schools from the start and knew we were where we belonged. We took these college experiences as learning opportunities; maybe we wouldn’t have been ready to jump right into the professional circuit but we both determined this was the right path for us.
“I loved the experiences I had on the Carnival circuit. Both good and bad times taught me a lot about life and skiing, and I felt like the balance of school and sport made me better at both,” Kelsey reflects.
Similarly, Sophie Caldwell had her mind made up without the need to hesitate over a gap year or jumping into full-time skiing.
“I chose to go to college right out of high school, and it was something I had always known I wanted to do. I knew there was a good chance I wanted to ski professionally at some point in my life, but when I was 18, I wasn’t ready to 100% commit to skiing,” Sophie, a Dartmouth graduate, explains.
With academic goals in mind and the confidence to pursue skiing in the long run, sometimes there’s no need to question it. Going directly to college might challenge you more than you think and it might make you question what you’re doing. The balance of school and skiing is great, but it’s TOUGH! At least you worked through those challenges and figured out where you want to be though.
“I definitely had my ups and downs throughout college and at times I considered not pursuing skiing after college, but by the time I entered my senior spring, I knew I wanted to give skiing professionally a shot and knew it was because it was what I wanted to do, not what I had to do,” Sophie notes.
Over the course of four years, we were able to say goodbye to our homes, grow into adults and develop as skiers, allowing a much smoother transition into the professional racing circuit post-college. This decision to go right to college made sense for Kelsey, Sophie and me — it was simple; but I recognize that this choice isn’t as straightforward for everyone.
***
“I loved my time at Burke and wasn’t quite ready to leave. I also didn’t know where I wanted to go to college as part of me wanted to go out west while part of me wanted to stay closer to home.” — Ida Sargent
The conflict of picking a school, a place we are willing to spend at least four years of our lives at, can be intimidating to anyone. Taking a year off to think and explore what motivates you once the structure of school is taken out of the picture can be extremely vital to one’s skiing longevity. Other times, this year off can be done to test out what skiing professionally is actually like.
“I wanted to test out whether I could do only professional skiing.” — Katharine Ogden
A feat that might sound easy to accomplish — ski, eat, sleep, repeat — can’t be THAT hard! But what happens when you suddenly put all of your time and energy into one goal?
“Ironically, my gap year did not turn out even close to how I had planned or imagined!” reflects Julia Kern.
Julia Kern with swollen legs after surgery, requiring A LOT of physical therapy during the summer.
After facing an early summer surgery for compartment syndrome and then an untimely back injury in the fall, Julia notes that her gap year was extremely tough with plenty of lows and setbacks.
Ida Sargent offers, “My PG year was a bit of a disappointment as I wasn’t as happy as I was expecting and I also didn’t feel like I made as big of a jump with my results as I had hoped.”
“I think in hindsight it was a good philosophy but I think I approached it wrong. I didn’t do a good job securing other things to do besides training and was thus pretty bored, which led to me putting a lot of stress on skiing and racing,” says Katharine Ogden.
Maybe taking a gap year isn’t as easy as it sounds? Coming face-to-face with this type of ski-focused intensity as an 18 year old can be challenging.
“It showed me how much I really wanted to go to college,” offers Katharine.
It can also be validating, as it can prove to oneself where they really belong at that point in their life.
“It made me realize that I wasn’t ready to ski full time and I still needed balance in my life,” reflects Ida.
What might be the most beneficial aspect of taking a gap year are the lessons you learn throughout. How to deal with the pressure, free time, potential obstacles, and how to respond when you’re suddenly put in an unfamiliar situation.
“My gap year turned out to be far from ideal from a training/fitness standpoint, but I became very in tune with my body, learned how my body responds to training, became mentally tougher, and learned that I love the skiing lifestyle (even if it is tough sometimes) and that I want to ski at the highest level possible,” says Julia.
Some things you just can’t learn in a classroom.
Julia Kern (on table) still smiling!Julia Kern taking the time to think about something other than skiing during her gap year. (Photo: Julia Kern) How to pass the time away, when you have so much of it. (Photo: Julia Kern)
After taking a gap year to figure out what skiing was like full-time; Ida, Katharine, and Julia attended Dartmouth College (via various routes):
Ida states, “I started by going to school full time and I raced for Dartmouth for three years and then made the National team so I took my senior winter off to race for the USST and then I went back for a spring term my fifth year.”
“One year in [as a traditional student], I am very happy at Dartmouth and racing the collegiate circuit last year reignited my love for the sport,” adds Katharine.
While Julia contributes, “I chose Dartmouth because I wasn’t sure what skiing and school balance I wanted to have, but I did know that I wanted to be able to take terms off to race internationally.”
Regardless of which Dartmouth plan they followed, all three skiers seem to have enjoyed the choices they made. Whether taking a gap year is or isn’t part of your plan, the most important takeaway is that you should TAKE SOMETHING AWAY! Learn something new about yourself, about skiing, or about classes you want to study.
So what about other options for pursuing a ski career? Jessie Diggins and Andy Newell both chose to skip college and go straight into skiing. Stay tuned for my next post when I’ll include input from both of them as well as what U.S. Ski Team coach Matt Whitcomb has to say on this topic.
