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Tag: U.S. Cross Country Ski Team

  • Chris Hecker and the Moment the Sun Came Out

    Chris Hecker and the Moment the Sun Came Out

    This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers.  If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.

    If you are a parent or coach and have been responsible for waxing skis for an important race — a state championship, a Junior National Qualifier — you know how stressful that can be. Now imagine it’s the morning of the Team Sprint at the Olympics, and you are responsible for Gus Schumacher’s skis. Feel your blood pressure rising yet?

    Welcome to the life of Chris Hecker, the US Cross-Country Ski Team service tech who leads the glide program and is Schumacher’s personal tech. Hecker, at this point, knows Schumacher well and that he has logged nearly 1,000 hours of training annually for years, and that he has dreamed of this specific day since the end of last season.

    “One of the most stressful moments actually came [on race day], about 45 minutes before the Men’s Team Sprint. I had selected the race skis for Gus and felt confident in the decision. At the time, it was clearly the best pair for the conditions.”

    Everything seemed to be playing out as Hecker had hoped, but then everything changed.

    “Then, about five minutes later, the sun came out. The course started to break down and got noticeably wetter. I still had a few minutes before beginning to wax, so I decided to run one more quick test. In the ten minutes between tests, the two top pairs kept getting closer and closer in performance.”

    These are the moments when experience, confidence, and a little tech magic can make or break a race. “In the end, I chose what was technically Gus’s second-best pair at that moment,” Hecker recalled. “As more athletes skied and the temperature continued to rise, there’s a good chance those skis actually became the faster option anyway.”

    Hecker was quick to point out that “Gus and Ben were on another level. Regardless of which skis Gus raced on, I’m confident the result would have been the same. They were [racing] on another level.”

    We may never really know, but maybe that decision did have something to do with Schumacher and Ben Ogden winning silver in the Team Sprint? For Hecker, it was a choice that was actually years in the making.

    Guided by family and noted mentors

    Hecker grew up in a family of skiers; his father, Mike, was a Pelton ski and Exel pole rep in the Midwest and had Chris on skis when he was just nine months old, “shuffling around and falling down.” Mike and his wife would pack the entire family, including Chris and his older brother Jeremy, and spend weekends traveling to different ski shows and venues. The parents told Chris and Jeremy it was their ‘vacation’, but in reality, it was just a family deeply invested in both the industry and the lifestyle.

    “So we were skiing from a really, really early age, and then we got into racing,” said Chris. When Chris was in middle school and high school, he raced for Anoka High School, in Minnesota, a northern suburb of Minneapolis. After graduating in 2013, he headed to St. Scholastica in Duluth, where he raced for three years under Chad Salmela and, in his senior year, under Maria Stuber.

    After graduating from St. Scholastica in 2017, Hecker took a job with Rex Ski Wax for the 2018 / 2019 season.

    “I worked with them for a year, spent a year on the World Cup being their racing service manager and research and development, kind of lead testing for all the new products, testing all the old products, and then walking around and working with the teams and saying, What do you need from us?”

    Hecker made himself available to World Cup teams, asking which products he could help with and which they thought were working well and which needed improvement. He continued this work for three full seasons before starting with the US Ski Team in 2020; this is now his sixth full season with the team.

    Two brothers… “Give me something weird.”

    Chris’s older brother, Jeremy, has kept the family tradition alive too, serving as a full-time employee of Pioneer Midwest and, in addition, as the domestic rep and race service lead for Rex ski wax.

    “We talk multiple times a week, and we get really deep into the weeds,” says Chris, who gives his brother lots of respect and praise. “He’s a really good wax tech, and sometimes you just need an idea from an outside source.”

    So when waxing domestically, Jeremy will ask his brother at the World Cup, “Give me something weird, give me something random to go out and test,” because he has all the normal, routine choices down.

    “He’ll always ask me for one random suggestion to try out for some of those race weekends. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

    For the most part, the two brothers talk about local races and how Jeremy can better support local skiers, since the products Chris is working on for the World Cup aren’t available to domestic skiers.

    “But it is also fun to talk about, when we have a really good day, like in Goms, or a really good day, like in the Val de Fiemme, on the final hill climb.”

    When that happens, Jeremy can spot it on the livestream and will call up Chris and ask, “Oh, what’d you guys do differently!”

    A lot more than two pairs of skis… like over 100

    In addition to being Schumacher’s personal tech, Chris Hecker is also responsible for Novie McCabe when she is on the World Cup and when she raced at the Olympics.

    In addition, Hecker is responsible for managing both athletes’ ski fleets. For McCabe, that means 38 pairs of skis and another 65 pairs for Schumacher, but even that can be variable, “like, Gus gets a ski [from Rossignol] maybe every other weekend or every third weekend because they’re always coming out with new prototypes and new skis.”

    McCabe is a Fischer-sponsored athlete, and they are admittedly a bit more controlled on allocating skis, but if Hecker and McCabe decide to “knock out a bad ski,” they can give it back to them and get another for her quiver.

    The new Rossignol skis arriving can introduce many more variables for Schumacher and Hecker to consider. As Hecker says, “ it can be new base material, new grinds, new core materials… the construction of the ski can be different.”

    Every little tweak has a purpose, “maybe it’s an easier kicking classic ski, maybe it’s a faster base material on a state ski.” As Hecker continues… “Maybe it’s a different laminate on a zero ski,” and what becomes quickly obvious is that all of these subtle variations make for endless possibilities.

    Building a rapport

    Hecker and Schumacher have been working together for two years now. Last season, Hecker was not responsible for another athlete, so he could focus on Schumacher, and the two quickly bonded.

    From the beginning, “working with him was really fun,” said Hecker . “We were trying to build a rapport as a new athlete and tech combination between the two of us.”

    Schumacher’s previous tech had left for the Swiss Biathlon Team, but Hecker and Schumacher found a lot of success last season with several top 10s and a podium in Falun, Sweden. As they started this season, they got right back to work.

    “Then starting this year, it was like jumping right back into it.” The two had a full year of experience to build on, and the dialogue and descriptions began to get more dialed, which is critical in the relationship between a tech and an athlete.

    Hecker began to know what Schumacher “likes for kick in skis, what feeling and stability he likes on skate skis,” and the two have been able to build that “innate rapport” which leads to a trusting relationship.

    As Hecker puts it, “[Schumacher] is one of the most astute athletes that I’ve worked with. He always comes with a question or two on race day. ‘Do you think we should try testing over on this side of the course instead of that side of the course, because I’m really trying to execute a plan here. Can we try focusing on glide for this half of the course, and maybe do a couple of glide outs here?”

    Hecker continues to describe how impressed he is with Schumacher as an athlete:

    “And so he’s always equally thinking as a wax tech and as an athlete when we’re out skiing together, and he’s really trying to dissect where the best places to test are. And it’s not just my job to revive the skis for him, but it’s also his job to pick the correct skis for him. And so he needs to know almost as much as I do about his skis and what is working and why it’s working, because ultimately we have to come to the decision together. He is racing, not me, and so we have a really cool relationship together to kind of pick and choose what we want to race on as a team.”

    Learning what he likes instead of what you like

    At this level, picking the right ski for an athlete is not just about what is fastest. It is also about picking a ski that responds the way the athlete prefers, and that matches the way a skier races.

    For Schumacher, that means a ski that is “extremely stable and forward tracking.” Hecker knows the way Schumacher skis, and how “when he pushes off to the left or to the right, and he goes fully onto one ski, he wants it to go straight.”

    “He doesn’t want the tip to move at all. He just wants it to point and shoot straight.”

    That isn’t a characteristic Hecker is personally always looking for in a ski, but he knows that’s what Schumacher wants. “So when I’m looking and testing without him some days, I say, ‘Okay, this ski is for sure going to be moving on because this feels better for him.’ And so we kind of have differing opinions sometimes on feeling, because I like a slightly different ski.”

    For Hecker, though, what is most important is that he understands not just what will ski fast, but also what will work best for Schumacher in different conditions, based on how he will race.

    “On a really firm course, he’ll look for this ski that just goes straight. And I think the reason why he likes that is that he will free skate a lot and likes being able to just push with his legs. And he’s so strong at that, and so relaxed when he does it, and so he can conserve a lot of energy.

    So it’s a really cool technique change from him, because I don’t think a lot of people utilize that on the men’s field. You see a lot of people always V2ing, and you’ll see him kind of free skating in the middle of the pack, just relaxing his upper body and giving half of his body a rest.”

    Inside the wax truck: how race morning actually works

    On a stable day, glide testing is fairly methodical.

    “We usually have four fleets of skis that go out,” Hecker explained. “Eight structure skis, eight paraffin skis, eight topping skis, and four to six application skis.”

    Before any athlete even gets to the venue, there is what the service team calls a “thinking period.” Jason [Cork], Tim [Baucom], Hecker, and anyone else in the truck who wants to join in, gather around a table with wax options.

    “We’ll put maybe 10 to 12 waxes in,” Hecker said. “Eli [Brown] might give us a wax. Oleg [Ragilo], our head of service, might give us a wax. Bernie [Nelson] might give us a wax. Then at the end of the table, it’s on me to narrow it down.”

    Ten or twelve become eight after the team removes the overlapping options. Some are eliminated because something similar tested better earlier in the week. Predictability and durability matter as much as outright speed.

    Structure follows a similar pattern. Baucom pulls 10 or 12 patterns before narrowing to eight that fit the day’s snow. The brainstorming narrows the options, then the skis go outside for testing.

    When results come back, they’re measured in inches and sometimes just two or three separate first from third.

    “If there are three that are really close,” Hecker said, “we might race on third place. Even if it’s two inches behind.”

    Because two inches in early testing might not matter if the wax is more durable, safer, or better, as temperatures rise and the track grows glazy under the skis of a throng of World Cup skiers.

    “It’s up to us to make a call,” Hecker said. “This is the wax we’re going to run today, even though it may not have won.”

    Once the athletes start warming up and testing skis, the techs have to add that feedback to the equation as well. Often, Hecker has one ear tuned to Gus’s feedback and the other to the incoming results.

    “When Gus is racing, a lot of these tests are going on,” he said. “I have to have my head on both testing skis with Gus, but also on the results that are coming in.”

    A call might come mid-session: pair 47 instead of pair 45. At this level, it’s small changes, constant recalibration, and decisions layered on decisions.

    For spectators, the race begins at the gun. For the glide team, it began hours earlier — likely in the dark — and never really stops until the racers reach the first checkpoint in the race and the team knows whether their choices put them in the race or not.

    “It’s definitely the hardest part of this job.”

    For Hecker, this will be his last season as part of the US World Cup service team.

    “It’s been a thing that I decided at the end of the year last year,” Hecker said. “I gave a fairly big heads up to the team in Bend in April.”

    This season marks the end of a third Olympic cycle for Hecker, but it is not that moments like the Olympic Team Sprint are wearing him down. That is not the hardest part of the job. The hardest part of the job is being away from his wife, Katie, family, and his dog.

    “It’s time to be at home with my wife and be more with my family and be back at home with my dog. And, yeah, right now it is time to retire after this year, and we’ll see what happens after that.”

    Like other staff and coaches on the US Ski Team, Hecker was able to sneak home twice so far this season, but those opportunities are few and far between.

    “Yeah, it’s, it’s definitely the hardest part of this job, not that waxing isn’t hard, but being away from your family, being away from loved ones for so long. It’s really hard.”

    This decision wasn’t made lightly because there are many things about being on the World Cup that Hecker will miss. Most significantly, the US Ski Team has done an amazing job creating a unified family.

    “It’s hard because this team is like a second family. Being away from these guys for long stretches is tough. I love working with them. When you like the person you’re rooming with every weekend, that means something. So leaving the team feels like leaving family.

    But I know it’s the right decision for me. I’m getting tired. There was a time when traveling to Europe was exciting, going to new venues, seeing new places. That was fun.

    Now it’s, ‘Okay, we’re going back to Val di Fiemme. We’re going back to Oberhof. We’re driving the wax truck to Oslo again.’ Last year, I realized I wasn’t looking forward to the travel anymore. I’d be excited once I got there, but the constant moving was wearing on me. That’s when I knew it might be time.”

    Gus Schumacher and Ben Ogden (USA), (l-r) celebrate their Olympic silver medal in the Team Sprint in Tesero, Italy. (Photo: Vanzetta/NordicFocus)
    On another level

    When the sun came out in Italy last Wednesday morning, it forced a decision. A choice was made to go with a slower pair of skis, but that decision was not a whim; it was not a swing for a bases-loaded grand slam to win the World Series. It was choosing an option that presented itself through a trusted process, through seasons of tested routines, and having the experience to trust instinct.

    By the time Gus Schumacher and Ben Ogden pushed off the line in the Team Sprint, the work had already been done, in the dark, in the truck, in inches measured on a test lane. Structures narrowed from twelve to eight, waxes debated and eliminated.

    The silver medal will always belong to the athletes. They were, as Hecker put it, “on another level.”

    But long before Schumacher chased down Johannes Høsflot Klæbo on the anchor leg, before the crowd roared in excitement, before the final sprint up the Zorzi Climb, there was a moment when the sun came out, and a technician had to make a decision.

    And one detail to remember when the story of the 2026 Olympic Team Sprint is retold for years to come is that the United States service team, on that day, was also ‘on another level.’

     

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  • Full Bellies for Fast Skiers: Inside Megan Chacosky’s Olympic Kitchen

    Full Bellies for Fast Skiers: Inside Megan Chacosky’s Olympic Kitchen

    This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped us put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.

    Megan Chacosky hauling one of many loads of groceries for hungry skiers. (Photo: Megan Chacosky)

    Megan Chacosky had just finished cleaning up from dinner when she hopped on the Zoom from the US Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team’s pre-Olympic training camp in Livigno, Italy.

    “Yeah, that’s okay,” she said. “I appreciate you waiting for me to reply while I cook dinner.”

    When Chacosky isn’t back in Vermont at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, she’s often doing the unseen work that keeps elite endurance athletes moving: shopping, planning, cooking, adapting — and doing it in places where the grocery store might have four chicken breasts and a cart that doesn’t want to go straight.

    “Especially with the Euro grocery carts,” she said, “because they, like, Tokyo, drift in each direction. So once you weigh them down at all, you’re just bumping into everything.”

    Chacosky’s path to this role didn’t start with a lifelong plan to work in skiing. It started with kitchens — and with the realization that restaurant hours and athletic training don’t always coexist.

    “I really liked it,” she said of her early restaurant experience, “but I recognized really early I was a two-sport athlete in college at the time that it was really difficult to be cooking for a full day, and then still try to be an athlete and move my body.”

    She went back to school for nutrition, initially without much sense that sports nutrition was its own lane. “Thinking that sports nutrition didn’t even exist yet at that point,” she said. But at the University of Utah, she found herself in the right place at the right time: volunteering with the ski team, then stepping into a hybrid chef-dietitian role. “That was 2013, my first year with the team,” she said.

    Chacosky stayed on full-time through the PyeongChang quadrennial, then spent four years at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, overseeing sport nutrition for winter athletes. But she kept circling back toward cross-country skiing.

    “Always throughout that time, I’ve tried to maintain a connection with cross-country and with this team in particular,” she said, adding that the athletes “really value nutrition and they value the staff who come in to support them in these contractor roles.”

    She also didn’t romanticize what she saw when she first arrived at the highest level of sport.

    “It’s easy to overclaim, maybe the Olympics, or what it looks like and feels like at the professional level,” she said. “And then you kind of see all these athletes who are footing their own bill for most of the season, or they are, you know, they’re really working to get more financial support, to get more resource support in general.”

    When Chacosky talks about fueling athletes, she doesn’t talk like someone selling a single perfect plan. Her starting point is simpler, and harder: build meals that can work for many different athletes, training loads, preferences, and moods — even if she isn’t the primary dietitian guiding each athlete day to day.

    “I have to assume that every individual from this team is going to walk into this room with a different goal for what they want, their nutrition, or their kind of fueling experience to look and feel like,” she said.

    In those situations, she aims for variety and flexibility. “Really try to make it kind of as, you know, choose your own adventure as it can be,” she said. “So I try to make it feel like everybody walks in and they think, ‘Oh, this meal was made for me,’ even if there’s 20 people walking into the room.”

    The job is equal parts logistics and psychology. Chacosky will ask athletes what they miss, then shape menus around those answers. It could be a “food from home that [they] really want to see, like, a specific hot sauce that I’m going to bring,” she said.

    She’s found patterns. “Any Mexican food and Asian food is usually popular with anybody in the group,” she said, because in much of Europe those flavors can be hard to find — especially in the team hotels athletes rotate through during the winter. “Those are really difficult flavors to find,” she said.

    She also tries to keep herself learning. “It’s been a goal of mine on every trip to try to pick a new meal that I haven’t made before,” she said. In Italy, that might mean leaning into where she is. “Maybe I’m going to try making fresh pasta or making gnocchi,” she said.

    All of it, however, depends on what she can actually buy — and that’s where the day-to-day grind starts.

    “I go to the grocery store at least once a day, every day, since I’ve been here,” she said.

    The reason is scale. At altitude, with athletes stacking long training sessions, food disappears quickly. “It’s just a mental exception, like, I just need to accept I’m going to go to the store every day,” she said.

    In Livigno, she’s had help. “[Coach] Jason [Cork] has been driving me to the store,” she said. “Very, very appreciative of his help.” When someone can share the errand, it changes the rhythm. “To be able to hand him a list, and just know he can go through the store and get some of those things and help me,” she said.

    Even with help, the optics are what you’d expect: foreigners filling carts, locals watching. “And then we just fill up two carts, and we go online, and we get laughs and sneers from a lot of the people who are there,” she said. “It’s like, what are you doing?”

    Sometimes it backfires. “Russia was probably the most,” she said, remembering an incident from years ago. “I accidentally dropped a container of blueberries… and they kicked us out of the store because I dropped the blueberries.”

    Sometimes it works better if she can communicate ahead of time. “We can talk to the grocer and tell them, ‘Hey, we’re staying here for two weeks. I’m going to be buying this amount of food every single day,’” she said. “So… we can actually communicate and just let them know, ‘like I’m going to be eating all of the eggs that you have. So if you can get more from your supplier… that might help you out.’”

    In Livigno, the constraints can be more basic, as in what the shelves can actually hold. Chacosky described walking into small Italian shops and finding limited quantities of meat. “There’s, you know, like four chicken breasts that are there,” she said. “Because that’s just what the butcher brought in. That’s what the farm was able to provide that day.”

    That scarcity has an upside: the quality. “Just the quality of… the meat and dairy products here have been really, really good,” she said.

    Then there are the unexpected windfalls — the strange currency of a long European winter: podium prizes and leftovers.

    The U.S. team arrived with a trio of cheese blocks from recent success; Chacosky said she’d used Gruyère “at almost every single meal so far.” Athletes, she explained, treat it as a snack as much as an ingredient. “They’ve gone through almost a wheel… just in snacking,” she said. But she’s cooked with it too: “I did a bunch of the grilled paninis the other day… We did some pasta and meatballs.”

    She’s also dealing with another inheritance: “There was, like, 20 bags of trail mix from Oberhof,” she said. Rather than let it sit, she’s been breaking it down. “I’ve been sorting the dried fruit and nuts from the trail mix to use for different things throughout the week.”

    Her approach is shaped by her work back home. “My full-time role is with Craftsbury and the Green Racing Project,” she said, “and I think part of that too, I really like to bring this kind of degree of sustainability and resourcefulness when I go on the road.” The goal isn’t just abundance; it’s abundance without waste. “Trying to… get down to as little food waste as possible at the end [of a trip], has become kind of another project of mine,” she said.

    That kind of planning gets more complicated when you add medical constraints — the things that can’t be solved by enthusiasm and another shopping trip.

    “So we have one celiac allergy with us right now,” she said. “And celiac has such an easy cross-contamination zone.” Her response is immediate and practical. “I will travel with painters’ tape and Sharpie,” she said, “and I will just immediately… label them. Like, ‘this is gluten-free only.’”

    There’s another allergy on the coaching staff side that changes everything. “Chris Grover (US Cross-Country Ski Team program director) is probably the weirdest,” she said. “He has a poultry allergy.” She described the implications plainly: “chicken is, like, only one of the best proteins that you can serve… and he can’t.” At a previous championship, she took extreme measures. “In Trondheim for World Champs,” she said, “I would cook chicken in the sports Med Room.”

    These are details athletes sometimes mention in passing, but they define Chacosky’s work: building a kitchen that is fast, safe, flexible, and — somehow — comforting.

    When asked what meals get the biggest reaction, she didn’t point to anything trendy. She pointed to the things that feel almost too easy.

    “It’s probably ‘Brinner’,” she said, explaining: “the breakfast for dinner.” She laughed at herself a little. “I could make it every single day, and I don’t think anybody would complain.”

    Then she offered another surprise: “the soup and sandwich day.” For her, it can feel like she’s cutting corners. For athletes, it can feel like exactly what they needed.

    “It’s all of the meals to me that feel like I’m not doing my job,” she said. “Like I’ve just made a tomato soup and put some grilled cheese together with ham and a fruit and veggie tray. And I was like, ‘this is like, cheating.’” But then: “They just are out of their minds excited about it.”

    The team’s appetite isn’t only for comfort. It’s also for familiarity — the branded products and specific flavors they’ve trained with for years, the stuff they don’t want to gamble on when the stakes rise. Chacosky is involved in that, too: the long process of shipping a slice of home across an ocean.

    “I actually get to be a part of the process too, for all of the food that we ship over from the US to the games,” she said. This year, because Italy’s venues are spread out, cross-country skiing got something rare. “Cross-country, got to pick, we got our own budget to kind of pick our own pallet of food to send for just these athletes,” she said. “Which is such a huge benefit.”

    The list is partly performance, partly preference. “We send a survey out to athletes,” she said. If someone needs a very specific bar flavor, she can put it on the pallet. “Jesse loves peppermint Luna bars,” she said. “I want two cases of those, and we’re going to put them on the pallet.”

    The freight itself is a slow-moving, months-long commitment. “They… put them on a pallet, typically at the end of October,” she said. “To be shipped over.”

    Some places require an absurd amount of paperwork. For Beijing, she remembered, “every product, including different flavors… had to have four pieces of paperwork.” Italy, she said, has been easier on packaged goods, though anything involving meat or dairy still brings extra scrutiny.

    Her description of what they shipped this time sounded like a team trying to control the controllables: hydration mixes they already use, recovery drinks in familiar flavors, and enough real food for the staff who may be away from the hotel all day.

    “We added a bunch of Maurten products,” she said. “We got a lot of Skratch product as well for hydration support.” And for the technicians: “We’ve got some ramen or like Annie’s mac and cheese cups going to them.”

    She paused on that point — the staff. “Some of our focus, too, was very intentionally for the tech staff as well,” she said, because on race days they may be at the venue “from the morning till the night.”

    On television, the sport is skiers, split times, a leaderboard, and a finish line. In the background, there are also shopping carts that won’t roll straight, a roll of painter’s tape, a curated pallet of food from home, and the daily decision to go back to the store again.

     

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  • US Head Coach, Matt Whitcomb—Excited, Centered, Prepared

    US Head Coach, Matt Whitcomb—Excited, Centered, Prepared

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    06.02.2026, Tesero, Italy (ITA):
    Athlete form USA – XXV. Olympic Winter Games Milano-Cortina 2026, Cross-Country, training, Tesero (ITA). www.nordicfocus.com. © Vanzetta/NordicFocus. For editorial use only.

    On the eve of the opening event of the Olympic cross-country program, U.S. head coach Matt Whitcomb sounded equal parts energized and grounded. Speaking with FasterSkier’s Nat Herz in the mixed zone, Whitcomb touched on everything from ski exchanges and early-Games logistics to the long arc of the U.S. program—and the feeling inside the team right now.

    One technical focus that has drawn attention ahead of the Skiathlon is the ski exchange, especially after Jessie Diggins (USA) and Frida Karlsson (SWE) tangled while lining up for their respective individual exchange boxes in the last World Cup Skiathlon, but Whitcomb emphasized that there’s no single formula.

    “It really varies,” he said. “This is a skill that we’ve practiced over a decade and a half in some cases, but each athlete really takes their own initiative.”

    Some athletes choose to practice exchanges using the same straps on two pairs of poles; others use separate straps for each pair. The calculus, Whitcomb explained, comes down to risk versus reward.

    “The thing that can go wrong in the ski exchange is everything,” he said. “And the thing that can go right is you can gain a second or two. And then the pack’s back together.”

    That balance—between chasing marginal gains and avoiding catastrophic mistakes—often reflects an athlete’s mindset. Whitcomb pointed to Diggins, who had been practicing exchanges at full speed the day before, including simulated interference.

    “She’s somebody who visualizes things, tries to practice them, goes back to visualizing, and then does it again,” he said. “You try a few different scenarios, and those all become part of your visualization. One thing we can guarantee is that there’ll be a lot of people in a small space. If that’s part of your visualization, you won’t be disappointed.”

    Beyond the technical details, Whitcomb acknowledged the peculiar chaos that comes with the opening days of the Olympic Games.

    “The schedules in the first few days are a little bit chaotic,” he said. “You’ve got press conferences, headshots—things that are kind of smack in the middle of a complicated schedule. And then on top of that, you’ve got 16 athletes with 16 different workouts.”

    That congestion, he noted, eases once racing begins. Only four athletes per country race per day, and there’s a single training window on the course—simplifying logistics and allowing the staff to think about getting athletes off-site for training once the championships settle. Whitcomb mentioned options such as skiing the Marcialonga course or heading to Passo Lavazè or Predazzo for quality terrain and sunshine, but wanted to be careful to avoid too much altitude.

    Asked how the team felt in that moment, Whitcomb didn’t hesitate.

    “Really excited,” he said. “Very centered. Prepared. Our team is vibing in a really incredible way.”

    Despite the athletes coming from different clubs and training backgrounds, he said the atmosphere feels unified.

    “It feels like it is Team USA,” Whitcomb said. “It’s not one club versus another club. It’s just this amazing union. And I think the athletes would agree with that.”

    Whitcomb also reflected on how much the program—and the sport in the U.S.—has changed over the course of Jessie Diggins’ career. He recalled the early years, when training camps meant homestays and catered enchiladas from a local Mexican restaurant, and waxing operations ran out of two Conex containers that had to be loaded and unloaded before and after every race.

    “Now we’re renting houses and bringing a chef,” he said. “We’re in two trucks instead of two Conexes. We’re not moving 2,000 pounds of equipment every time.”

    Just as striking, he said, is how expectations have shifted.

    “We used to really celebrate a single top-30 on the whole team,” Whitcomb said. “We had a banner where we’d write those results down—29th in a World Cup, that went on the banner. And just the way the standard has changed across the board…”

    That evolution, he explained, has been the product of steady, incremental growth rather than dramatic leaps. Whitcomb traced it back to the mid-2000s, when Pete Vordenberg secured funding to build a development team and expand the women’s program.

    “I’ve benefited from nearly incremental progress every year with regard to budget,” he said. “And I think more than anything, the stability—not having a huge gap that takes us back five or ten years—has been key.”

    Through all that growth, Whitcomb said the program has retained something essential.

    “As the level of professionalism and resources has climbed, it’s remained fun and enjoyable, and we haven’t lost a human value,” he said. “That’s perhaps the thing I’m most proud of.”

    He credited that culture in part to athletes like Diggins, Rosie Brennan, and Julia Kern—athletes whose long careers have helped define what the team is now.

    As the racing is about to begin, Whitcomb’s message was clear: the work is done, the team is ready, and the foundation beneath it has been years in the making.

     

    FasterSkier’s Nat Herz reporting from the Mixed Zone.

     

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  • Bernie Nelson and When Control Changes Hands

    Bernie Nelson and When Control Changes Hands

    This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.

    Jack Young and Bernie Nelson testing in Toblach for this year’s Tour de Ski – they have a lot of fun. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    At some point before every race, there is a moment when the conversation ends.

    The skis are ready. All the questions have been answered. The athlete has described, more than once, how the ski felt through the camber, how it released, and how it held when needed. Their part is done. Then, they leave the wax truck.

    “There’s sort of like a Venn diagram of what the athlete controls and what the tech controls,” Bernie Nelson said. “And once the athlete leaves the room, that part is on us.”

    There is nothing dramatic about the exit. No speeches or big gestures. Jack Young doesn’t hand over responsibility; he simply sets it aside. But the change is instant. The skis, once a shared object, now become a problem to solve, a risk to manage, and a promise to keep.

    “They’ve done their part,” Nelson said. “They’ve told us what they need. And then they kind of have to let go.”

    Letting go is one of the least visible but most important exchanges in cross-country ski racing. Athletes are judged by what happens after the race starts, but long before that, control has already shifted. The responsibility for speed, traction, and how the ski handles changing surfaces moves to someone else.

    Nelson takes a selfie during the podium ceremony in Davos, Switzerland, from this year’s Tour de Ski when both Jack Young and Ben Ogden finished in the top six. (Photo: Bernie Nelson)

    For Nelson, that responsibility comes from familiarity, not theory. She works closely with Young, and their partnership is built on a shared language developed through repeated experience, not just formulas or measurements.

    “It’s a lot about feel,” she said. “Like, I know what Jack is looking for because we’ve spent so many hours testing together.”

    Here, testing isn’t about collecting data points. It’s about building a shared vocabulary. Over many training sessions and race weekends, Young has described what he feels underfoot—how the ski responds to pressure, how it releases as speed builds, and how it acts when conditions change. Nelson listens, tests, and learns these sensations until they become her own reference.

    “At this point,” she said, “I can get on a ski, and I know if it’s right or not for him.”

    This knowledge can’t be easily passed on or turned into a checklist. It comes from shared experience—hours spent skiing the same loops, talking about small differences, and learning what matters. Nelson isn’t trying to copy Young’s race; she wants to understand his expectations well enough to meet them when he’s not there.

    That is especially true in classic racing, where the margin between enough and too much is thin.

    “With classic, especially,” she said, “it’s about that balance. You want enough kick so it’s there when you need it, but you don’t want it to feel draggy.”

    The goal is not perfection, but confidence. When Young steps onto the start line, he needs to believe that the skis under him will do what they are supposed to do. That belief begins hours earlier, in the wax truck, where decisions are made quietly and are completely owned by someone else.

    It all started in the driveway for Bernie Nelson. As Nelson says, she has been playing outside in the snow ever since: Just part of growing up in Tahoe. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Nobody Owns the Speed Alone

    It might seem like the hand-off is a solitary moment—one technician, one set of skis, one athlete’s result. But Nelson quickly rejects that idea.

    “I think of it like a chain,” she said. “You know, you can replace any link in the chain, and it still works, as long as everything’s connected.”

    The metaphor is important because it shows how responsibility can be shared without becoming fragile. Nelson may be Young’s main contact, but she doesn’t work alone. Every decision she makes is shaped by a system that spreads out knowledge, work, and accountability.

    “Someone else can wax Jack’s skis,” she said, “and that’s totally fine, because we’re all communicating the same thing.”

    This is one of the quiet changes in modern service work. The old image of a single tech guarding secrets and working alone late at night has been replaced by a more collaborative and, surprisingly, more resilient approach. In the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team’s service operation, having backup isn’t wasteful—it’s a form of insurance.

    The chain is made up of people with different specialties and overlapping skills. Some focus on glide, others on kick. Some handle structure decisions, while others work on wax application and testing. Information moves constantly between them—about snow, about feel, and about what worked earlier in the day and what didn’t.

    What holds it together is communication. Not just the volume of it, but its consistency.

    When the athlete leaves the room, the system doesn’t get smaller—it grows. Decisions that might seem individual from the outside are actually the result of many conversations layered together.

    Some of the US Service Team, including Jason Cork, Chris Hecker, Bernie Nelson, Tim Baucom, Eli Brown, and Paul Choudoir (l-r) in Ruka, Finland, this year. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Ten People, One Direction

    The rhythm of that system becomes most visible at the end of the day.

    “At the end of every day, we all sit down and talk about what worked and what didn’t,” Nelson said.

    It happens whether the races went well or not. The format doesn’t change. The expectation doesn’t either.

    “The meeting looks the same whether it was a great day or a terrible day,” she said.

    There are no major celebrations on good days and no blame on bad ones. Each technician shares what they saw, what they tried, and what they would change. The goal isn’t to assign blame, but to build a clearer picture of the conditions and the choices that followed.

    “It’s never about pointing fingers,” Nelson said. “It’s about figuring out what we can do better.”

    Being curious instead of defensive is what helps the chain work under pressure. Speed in cross-country skiing depends on many factors, most beyond anyone’s control. What the service team can control is how they respond: how they share information, admit mistakes, and carry lessons forward.

    The meetings turn the day’s work into preparation for the next. They also reinforce trust—not just between techs, but between the system and the people who depend on it.

    Because tomorrow, another athlete will leave the wax truck. Another set of skis will change hands. And the chain will tighten again, ready to carry the weight.

    The US Service Team in Engadin, Switzerland, last year on the porch of their wax truck, Yolanda. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Question the Skis, Not the People

    Pressure has a way of revealing culture.

    In a service room, pressure can show up as defensiveness, silence, or people sticking to their roles. But it can also appear as humor, rituals, and a shared understanding that mistakes will happen, but negative reactions are a choice.

    Over time, the U.S. team has built its own mechanisms for navigating that pressure. They are small, almost absurd on their face, but they carry real weight.

    “We have this thing called the Try Hard Trophy,” Bernie Nelson said. “And it’s basically for whoever just put everything they had into the day.”

    The trophy, one of many, isn’t for perfect decisions or the fastest skis. It’s for effort—for staying engaged when conditions are tough, when answers aren’t clear, and when the work is demanding. In a job where results depend on many things no one can control, effort is the only steady measure.

    There are other objects, too.

    “If someone messes up,” Nelson said, “there’s an ‘I’m Sorry’ mouse. You own it, you apologize, and then we move on.”

    The ritual is deliberate. The mistake isn’t ignored or softened. It’s acknowledged publicly, quickly, and without spectacle. The apology clears the air so the work can continue. There is no dragging of guilt into the next race.

    “We say brothers and sisters fight,” Nelson added, “but you still have to come back together.”

    These rituals aren’t just about morale. They’re about making things work. In a system where speed relies on teamwork, unresolved tension isn’t just personal—it’s a risk to performance. The culture is there to keep the chain strong when pressure rises.

    And pressure always spikes.

    Bernie Nelson in Lillehammer, Norway, in 2025. Course bibs are a finite resource, but FIS provides two red bibs, which can only be used by women. The US Cross-Country Ski Team takes full advantage of them, and the team even shared and coordinated the women’s bibs for this race, with more than 2 female staff on site (AWESOME). The Team bib is purple under the radio harness. (Photo: Gretchen Powers)

    When the Skis Aren’t Fast Enough

    Not every race goes well. Sometimes the skis aren’t competitive. Sometimes the margin is so small that you question everything.

    What happens next matters more than what went wrong.

    “We question the speed,” Nelson said. “We don’t question the effort or the intent.”

    That difference is key to how the service team gets through a long season, especially during the Olympics. Speed can be questioned. Decisions can be reviewed. Processes can be improved. But questioning intent damages trust, and once trust is lost, the hand-off becomes fragile.

    After a difficult race, the work looks much the same as it does after a good one. The team sits down. They talk through what they saw. They compare notes. They stay curious.

    “You still have to be curious,” Nelson said, “even when it didn’t go well.”

    Curiosity keeps the system open. It lets technicians adjust without becoming defensive or making enemies. It also means that when responsibility is shared and the chain works, failure is handled together, not blamed on one person.

    For the athlete, that matters. The race may already be over, but the relationship isn’t. Trust has to survive the bad days if it’s going to mean anything on the good ones.

    Nelson with her partner, Dakota Blackhorse-von Jess, in Falun, Sweden, in 2015 for World Champs. Dakota was racing in the sprint for Team USA. Qualified in 30th and was trending on Twitter/X in Sweden because of his last name. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    This Isn’t CPR

    Nelson hasn’t always worked in ski service. For a while, she left the sport and became a nurse. This decision was partly influenced by losing her mother and wanting to understand pressure in a new way.

    “I worked as a nurse for a while,” she said, “and it really changed how I think about pressure.”

    The comparison isn’t rhetorical. Nursing recalibrated what urgency looks like, what stakes feel like, and what consequences truly mean.

    “At the end of the day,” Nelson said, “this isn’t CPR. It’s ski racing.”

    The line isn’t meant to dismiss the sport. It’s a reminder to stay grounded. Cross-country skiing at the Olympic level is intense, career-changing, and deeply important to those involved. But it’s not a medical emergency. No one’s life depends on picking the perfect ski flex or structure.

    That perspective doesn’t lessen commitment; it makes it sharper. Without panic, Nelson can stay focused when conditions change and quick decisions are needed. Calm is an advantage, not a sign of not caring.

    Leanne Bentley, the team’s Press Officer, reinforces that calibration.

    “Leanne always says, ‘It’s just ski racing,’” Nelson said. “And that really sticks with me.”

    The phrase circulates not as a joke, but as a reminder: urgency without clarity helps no one.

    Dakota and Bernie in Falun for the World Cup in 2025. Exactly 10 years after the previous photo. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    No Home Runs in February

    The Olympics compress everything.

    “They’re career-changing for athletes,” Nelson said. “There’s no getting around that.”

    Four years of preparation come down to just a few races. Weather windows get smaller. Snow conditions change by the hour. In that environment, it’s tempting to look for something extraordinary—a new structure, a wax combination, or a last-minute change that makes everything certain.

    The service team resists that impulse deliberately.

    “You don’t want to be trying something totally new on race day,” Nelson said.

    At the Olympic level, restraint is a strategy. Big changes bring risk, and risk adds up fast when conditions are already unstable. The goal isn’t perfection, but to be consistently competitive.

    “We’re not looking for home runs,” Nelson said. “We’re looking to be competitive.”

    That approach comes from experience, including in Italy, where the team has usually felt confident in its preparation. But confidence isn’t the same as complacency. Every race still needs attention, testing, and communication. Past success doesn’t replace current effort.

    The chain is strongest at times like these. Decisions are double-checked. Ideas are discussed. No one person carries all the weight, even when the responsibility feels heavier than ever.

    Dakota, Bernie, Bernie’s late mom, Noelle. Noelle was a longtime coach for Stanford Field Hockey and played goalie for the US Field Hockey Team. Bernie credits many of her life (and coaching) lessons to her mom. The Nelsons were a big sports family – always outside playing games. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Tomorrow, It Happens Again

    After the race, the skis come back. They are cleaned, evaluated, and re-prepped. Notes are taken. Meetings happen. The process resets.

    “The process doesn’t really change,” Nelson said. “You just do it again the next day.”

    Trust isn’t earned once and saved. It’s built again and again through consistency and follow-through.

    “That trust gets rebuilt every single race,” she said.

    Tomorrow, another athlete will sit in the service room. Another conversation about feel will take place. Another set of skis will be chosen. And at some point, quietly, control will change hands again.

    “You show up,” Nelson said. “You do the work, and you hope you gave them what they needed.”

    The athlete will leave the truck. The chain will hold. And the work—unseen, essential, and rarely recognized—will go on.

    Help Support Our Olympic Coverage!

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    Eli Brown gave Nelson this shirt. Feel the Burn. Frequent in the rotation. “It’s an honor to share a bench with Eli Brown, he’s full of stories,” Nelson says. “We have a blast together. His feet still hit the floor with the same level of enthusiasm every day.” (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
    Service Truck snack haul – Oslo, Norway, edition. Nelson says, “This is a weekly event, we ski a lot!” (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
  • Eli Brown – The Ski Caddy

    Eli Brown – The Ski Caddy

    This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.

    Waxing Julia Kern’s skis in Toblach New Years 2026. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    On race mornings, when the athletes are still quiet, and the stadium hasn’t yet decided what kind of day it wants to be, Eli Brown is already working through choices that won’t appear anywhere in the results sheet.

    Brown is a technician for the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team, a job title that undersells the reality of what he does. He manages ski fleets that can swell to dozens of pairs for each athlete, interprets snow that changes by the hour, balances structure, flex, base material, and wax, and does it all while standing between an athlete’s confidence and the unforgiving arithmetic of international racing. He describes the role with a metaphor that is so perfect and precise.

    “It’s kind of like being a golf caddy,” Brown said. “You’re advising. You’re coaching. You’re listening. There’s some sports psychology in there. And at the end of the day, it’s teamwork.”

    The difference, of course, is speed. Brown’s athletes are making decisions at speeds that at times surpass fifty kilometers an hour, on snow that doesn’t care how good yesterday felt. His job is to make sure they don’t have to think about their skis at all.

    This week, as the U.S. team arrives in Val di Fiemme for the 2026 Olympic Games, Brown is heading into his third Olympics as a full-time national team technician. He works primarily with Julia Kern and Ben Ogden, two athletes who could hardly be more different in how they move through the sport — or through their skis.

    What ties them together is Brown’s ability to translate snow into something usable and pressure into something manageable.

    The Mora (Minnesota) Vasaloppet in 1983. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Before the Truck

    Brown didn’t arrive in the U.S. Ski Team wax truck by accident, or through a single decisive turn. He arrived there by staying in the sport long enough to see it from nearly every angle.

    He grew up outside Minneapolis, where skiing was part of the landscape rather than a specialization. From there, he headed north to Northern Michigan University, spending time embedded in one of the country’s most storied distance programs. He raced, trained, and lived the rhythms of high-level skiing there, even if the academic endpoint never quite aligned. The years mattered anyway.

    After Northern, Brown continued racing at a high level, lining up on the SuperTour with the Maine Winter Sports Center. Those seasons placed him squarely inside the domestic pipeline, moving between venues, teams, and support systems that most fans never see. It was an education in how competitive skiing actually functions in the United States — who does what, who makes decisions, and how outcomes are shaped long before race day.

    Coaching followed. Brown took over as head coach at the University of Utah, a role that asked him to shift from personal performance to collective responsibility. Coaching meant planning seasons, managing personalities, and learning how to communicate under pressure — skills that would later prove just as valuable off the racecourse as on it. It was also in Utah that he completed his degree, closing a chapter that had remained open since his time at Northern.

    His transition into technician work came gradually. After the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Brown began volunteering with the U.S. Ski Team as a tech, contributing where he could and learning how the national program operated from the inside. There was no formal on-ramp. He showed up, worked, and earned trust in the most durable way possible.

    Later that year, he became a full-time member of the U.S. Ski Team staff. He has remained in that role since, now heading into his third Olympic Games as a technician.

    That long, nonlinear path matters because it produced range. Brown understands athletes because he has been one. He understands coaches because he has been one. And he understands the demands of elite racing because he has lived alongside them for decades, in roles that rarely attract attention.

    By the time he steps into the wax truck now, Brown isn’t just a specialist. He’s a translator — carrying experience forward from each stage of his career and applying it quietly, in service of athletes who don’t have time to wonder how their skis came to be ready.

    Trailside support back in the 90’s. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    The Job Is Not the Ski

    Brown came up in an era when elite racers still did most of their own ski work. He’s part of what he calls “the last generation of full-time racers who maintained their own equipment,” a background that shapes how he approaches the modern technician’s role.

    Today, that role is far more layered than waxing alone. A tech has to understand how structure reduces suction in wet snow, how flex interacts with kick wax in classic skiing and changes contact on skate skiing, how base materials respond to temperature and moisture, and how all of that feels under an athlete who has preferences, moves differently, and skis faster than the tech ever will.

    “It’s complicated,” Brown said, describing how structure, grinds, and brands interact. “How it interacts with different brands and different grinds. Now we have to make sure that it interacts with our new grinds as we develop them, especially for race days in the games coming up.”

    The complexity has only increased in recent years. Product cycles are shorter. Wax formulations change constantly. “If you ask me what waxes we use,” Brown said, “it’s a combination of letters and numbers. From Swix or whoever. It’s always changing.”

    That instability has pushed the job away from recipes and toward judgment. Brown doesn’t describe himself as a scientist. He calls himself an artist.

    “I rely heavily on feel,” he said, contrasting his approach with colleagues who lean more on data. “There’s subjective testing, and that’s still really important.”

    The goal is simple, even if the path there isn’t: remove friction, remove doubt, and give the athlete skis they can trust without thinking.

    Julia Kern, Eli Brown, and Ben Ogden at the Planica World Championship. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    One Pair of Skis, Two Skiers

    Brown’s ability to individualize that trust is most obvious in the contrast between the two athletes he supports.

    “They’re such different athletes,” he said of Kern and Ogden. “And the way they ski, I think, is also different in the way that their ski brands are also different. So it’s hard to say there’s much crossover or similarity there.”

    Kern (Atomic) and Ogden (Madshus) race on different brands, which means separate quivers, separate development conversations, and separate ways of defining what “good” feels like. Over time, those preferences shape the skis themselves.

    “The quiver of skis develops kind of along with what the athlete wants,” Brown said. “Whether by effort or by chance.”

    For Brown, that means his own body becomes a tool — a reference point for athletes whose sensations he can’t fully replicate. In classic skiing, especially, the feedback loop is intimate and physical.

    “With Julia,” Brown said, “if I can feel the wax, then it’s good. And with Ben, I need to jump on those things and make them work. I need a hammer almost to keep up with him when he’s skiing easy.”

    Kern wants skis that give her clear feedback. Ogden wants skis that disappear under him.

    “She calls it the Eli Factor,” Brown said. “I ski in her skis a lot, and it’s like, yeah, she’ll like it if it feels a touch slow. And I question if it’s fast enough, then it’s perfect for her.”

    That calibration — knowing when “slow” is actually right — is the kind of knowledge that doesn’t show up in spreadsheets. It lives in repetition, in trust, and in the willingness to be wrong and adjust.

    Eli modeling the new Kappa kit inside the wax truck. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Inside Yolanda

    The work happens inside a semi-truck the team calls Yolanda, a mobile workshop and nerve center that houses eight technicians during World Cup weekends and championships.

    “When you walk into Yolanda,” Brown said, “on the left, there’s Jason. He’s like the door security.”

    Jason Cork oversees Jesse Diggins’ skis and manages data. Across from him sits Chris Heckler, the team’s glide specialist, responsible for Gus Schumacher’s skis and for pushing development at the cutting edge. In the back corner is Oleg Ragilo, “a quiet boss from Estonia,” the head of kick wax and the truck’s mechanic. Tim Baucom, recently returned from retirement, handles hand structure. Bernie Nelson works with Jack Young and specializes in high-speed testing and emotional steadiness. Bjorn Heimdal and Per Erik Bjørnstad, both from northern Norway, bring decades of experience across glide and kick.

    “And then at table three,” Brown said, “it’s Bernie and me.”

    Everyone can wear any hat if needed, but the structure matters. Decisions are made by conversation, testing, and sometimes by vote. Kick wax choices are made by committee — “two out of three or three out of three votes advance skis” — a system designed to protect athletes from any single person’s blind spot.

    There’s humor inside the pressure. The team maintains a set of traveling trophies, passed around to mark gratitude, effort, or apology. It’s a way of acknowledging that success and failure are shared.

    “You’re on a roller coaster together,” Brown said. “The emotional roller coaster part.”

    Team Kern: Eli Brown, Julia Kern, and Kristen Bourne in Toblach. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Relearning Speed

    The current era of ski preparation is defined by change. Products come and go. Environmental and health concerns have reshaped what’s allowed. Even trusted solutions can’t be trusted for long.

    “We’re on the cutting edge,” Brown said, “and it’s constantly changing.”

    That volatility has made high-speed testing more important than ever, especially in skate races where structure and glide decisions can hinge on how skis behave at race pace on the actual course. Hand structure tools, brand-specific grinds, and new base materials all interact in ways that don’t fully reveal themselves on paper.

    Brown sees his role as filtering that uncertainty before it reaches the athlete.

    “I don’t want them thinking about it,” he said. “I want them to just ski.”

    The Olympics compress all of that work. The venue in Val di Fiemme is familiar, but transformed by Olympic infrastructure. Warm weather looms as a wildcard. The margin for error narrows.

    Looking back on the Tour de Ski, Brown is candid about what he’d change. “I wish I’d given Julia slightly more kick,” he said. “Ben slightly less kick.”

    That kind of reflection isn’t self-flagellation. It’s the process.

    Eli and fiancé Colleen above snowy Predazzo days before the Olympics start. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    The Emotional Work

    If the technical demands are invisible, the emotional ones are even more so. A tech absorbs disappointment, so an athlete doesn’t have to. He steadies confidence when results wobble. He celebrates quietly when things click.

    Brown talks about success in broader terms than medals.

    “Gold is the goal,” he said. “But it’s also maintaining team relationships and health through an intense period.”

    That perspective extends beyond race results to the ecosystem around the sport. Brown worries about industry instability, about layoffs and shrinking budgets, about whether the work he and others do will continue to be supported.

    “We’re all one big community trying to do something special,” he said. “It’s my little cog in the machine.”

    Inside Yolanda, that belief takes practical form. Shared meals. Shared jokes. Shared responsibility when something goes wrong. The trophies circulate. The work continues.

    Skiing the 2025 Birkie with his dad, Elton Brown. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    What Happens When It Works

    When it works, there’s no single moment that announces it. No flag. No statistic. Just an athlete skiing freely, unencumbered by doubt.

    Brown watches from the side of the course or from inside the truck, reading body language, listening for feedback, and filing away information for the next decision. The skis disappear. The job is done.

    That’s the paradox of being a golf caddy or maybe more accurately a ski caddy: success means becoming invisible.

    For Eli Brown, that invisibility is the point.

     

    Help Support Our Olympic Coverage!

    FasterSkier will have our own Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics, which, to be honest, is a very big financial lift for us. If you value the thoughtful work and access FasterSkier provides at championships like this one, please consider becoming a Voluntary Subscriber. Your support directly fuels the work we do to cover the people, places, and moments that make our sport special.

    Join the FasterSkier community!

     

    Eli and fiancé Colleen doing some pre Olympic cruising. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
  • Paul Choudoir — “The Right-Brain Grinder”

    Paul Choudoir — “The Right-Brain Grinder”

    This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers.  If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.  

    Paul Choudoir with his wife Julia Curry. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    A Portfolio, Not a Resume

    Paul Choudoir did not set out to work at the Olympic Games. He did not study engineering. He did not grow up in a wax room, nor did he apprentice under a legendary grinder with a machine humming in the background. He went to school for communications. Advertising, specifically. He built a portfolio. He expected a desk.

    “I was a communications major,” Choudoir said. “Yeah, in advertising.”

    In 2018, his life looked orderly in the way young professionals’ lives often do just before they don’t. He was finishing school, assembling work samples, and preparing to enter an industry with defined pathways and predictable ladders. He interviewed at an ad agency. They liked him.

    “The next day, they offered me the job,” he said.

    The day after that, something else happened.

    “And I told them that I took a job with the snowboard team,” Choudoir said. “And I couldn’t be more grateful that I turned that down.”

    That second offer was seasonal. It was physical. It came with no guarantee of permanence. It was also the beginning of a career that would, eight years later, place Choudoir at the center of the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team’s Olympic preparation, responsible for the grinding program that shapes the skis American athletes will consider racing on when the Winter Games begin this Saturday.

    It is not a path that makes immediate sense on paper. Which, in many ways, is the point.

    Growing Up on Skis, Not Destined for Them

    Choudoir grew up in central Wisconsin, five minutes from his local ski trails. Skiing was present from the start, not as destiny but as texture—something you did because it was there.

    “I’ve been skiing all my life,” he said. “As soon as you could walk, you played on skis.”

    He raced. He trained. He went to college and skied there too, though he is careful not to mythologize that part of the story.

    “Not exactly an illustrious college career,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t done that.”

    The tone matters. Choudoir does not frame himself as a near-miss Olympian or an athlete who found a second life in service. He is precise about what his racing was and wasn’t. Skiing gave him familiarity with snow, equipment, and race culture. It did not hand him a blueprint.

    What it did give him—though he didn’t know it at the time—was an eye.

    US Snowboard Cross Team started using cross-country skis and techs to help determine what to do to their snowboards for races. Choudoir was one of those techs at the last Olympics. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    Learning to See the Ski

    “I fell in love with the service side of the sport,” Choudoir said.

    That love did not arrive fully formed. It developed slowly, through observation, repetition, and mentorship. One name comes up again and again when Choudoir talks about learning to grind: David Chamberlain.

    “David taught me to grind,” he said. “I’ve been grinding since… about ten years now.”

    Grinding, at its simplest, is the process of cutting microscopic patterns into the base of a ski using a stone grinder. Those patterns—called structure—help manage how water behaves between the ski and the snow. Too much suction and the ski sticks. Too little contact and it chatters. In dry snow, structure can be minimal. In wet snow, it can be decisive.

    But Choudoir resists explaining grinding as a purely technical exercise. What matters, he suggests, is not just the machine but how you look at the ski coming off it.

    “When running a grinding machine,” he said, “I think you need both. You need right-brain and left-brain people.”

    There are databases. There are measurements. There are RA values, stone parameters, and logs that stretch back years. And then there is feel.

    “You need the people who have the database of what we waxed with here three years ago,” he said. “And you need the gut-instinct people.”

    Choudoir’s background in visual communication—learning how images convey meaning, how patterns read, how subtle differences change perception—became an asset. Grinding is, in many ways, about pattern recognition. Noticing when something looks right. Or wrong.

    The First Call to Europe

    The moment when Choudoir’s interest hardened into commitment came not in a classroom or a wax room, but through a phone call.

    “Someone had to bail from the OPA Cup trip,” he said. “And [Bryan] Fish was asking around.”

    Chamberlain’s name came up. So did Choudoir’s.

    “David immediately asked me,” he said.

    The trip was three weeks long. It was his first sustained exposure to European racing, to the rhythm of international service work, to the stakes that live just behind the results sheet.

    “I went on that trip for three weeks,” Choudoir said. “And that kind of solidified what I wanted to do.”

    Service at that level is relentless. Skis arrive. Conditions change. Decisions must be made quickly and defended quietly. There is no time to romanticize the work. But for Choudoir, it clarified something fundamental: this was where his skills mattered.

    Constructing the Arrow While Shooting It

    “This grinding development project is kind of my baby,” Choudoir said.

    He is referring to the U.S. team’s effort to build a modern, resilient grinding program—one capable of producing skis that perform across a wide range of snow conditions, with limited resources and little margin for error.

    “We’re kind of constructing the arrow while we’re shooting it,” he said.

    The phrase captures both the ambition and the constraint. Unlike larger federations, the U.S. does not have the luxury of endless testing or redundancy. Time, money, and personnel are finite. That reality shapes every decision.

    The goal is not perfection. It is coverage.

    There have been moments of early confirmation along the way. Certain grinds have worked immediately, validating months of off-season testing and reinforcing the idea that the overall approach is sound. But Choudoir is quick to note that genuine development rarely happens when the calendar is full. Race weekends compress decision-making into survival mode: skis need to be ready, not experimental. Time disappears, weather intrudes, and the consequences of being wrong grow heavier. Building new structure in those moments is less about innovation than restraint—knowing when to trust what already exists, and when to leave the next step for another week.

    “You’re trying to limit catastrophe,” Choudoir said. “You’re trying to make sure you’re never hand-structuring a ski and making it slower.”

    The program relies on building a menu of grinds—each tested, logged, and understood well enough that when race day arrives, choices can be made with confidence rather than desperation. It is a philosophy rooted in risk management as much as speed.

    Choudoir with US Snowboard athletes and techs at the last Olympics in Beijing, China. (Photo: Courtesy Photo)

    The Detour That Mattered: Snowboard Cross

    Before Choudoir arrived in cross-country, he spent six seasons with the U.S. Snowboard Cross Team.

    “Not exactly the trajectory I thought,” he said. “But I was with them for six seasons.”

    Snowboard Cross is chaotic by design. Courses change. Weather shifts. Equipment choices are compressed into narrow windows. The service environment is intense.

    “I went to Beijing with that crew,” Choudoir said. “Had a blast.”

    He is not being flippant. Beijing mattered. It was his first Olympics, his first exposure to that particular compression of pressure and permanence. Mistakes echo. Success is fleeting. Everything is amplified.

    “Very different environment,” he said, “but still kind of doing the same thing.”

    What transferred was not discipline-specific knowledge but temperament. The ability to make decisions under stress. To stay calm when the margins disappear.

    Pressure Without a Bib

    “I still wake up on race day with that nervous stomach,” Choudoir said.

    It is an admission that disrupts the usual hierarchy of anxiety. Athletes are expected to feel it. Techs are supposed to be invisible. But Choudoir does not pretend otherwise.

    “We’re being demanded to perform,” he said.

    Service technicians do not get a lane. They do not get a split time. Their work is judged indirectly, through glide, through kick, through moments when an athlete looks down mid-race and knows something is wrong—or right.

    “If we’re the first ones to freak out,” Choudoir said, “that trickles down.”

    Pressure in the wax room is quiet. It hums rather than roars. It lives in choices made hours before a start, when weather models disagree, and snow crystals are in flux.

    No Assholes in the Wax Room

    “Nobody wants to work with an asshole,” Choudoir said.

    It is a blunt statement, and an accurate one. Service teams operate on trust. Ego corrodes that trust quickly.

    “We have to be calm,” he said. “If we’re calm, the athletes are calm.”

    Calm does not mean passive. It means deliberate. It means creating an environment where athletes feel supported rather than scrutinized. Music plays. Routines settle. Decisions are explained clearly and without drama.

    Choudoir describes a culture where competence is expected, and humility is enforced—not through policy, but through proximity.

    Collaboration, Not Espionage

    There is a persistent myth that ski service at the highest level is governed entirely by secrecy. Locked rooms. Guarded notebooks. Stolen glances.

    The reality, Choudoir suggests, is more complicated.

    “People help each other more than fans realize,” he said.

    There are boundaries, of course. Proprietary information remains protected. But when a machine breaks, when conditions confound everyone equally, assistance flows.

    “Nobody wants to see anyone fail because of equipment,” he said.

    It is a quiet fraternity, built on shared exposure to the same uncontrollable variables.

    Saturday

    “At some point, the decisions are made,” Choudoir said. “After that, it’s just execution.”

    As the Olympic races begin this coming Saturday, the grinding lists are locked. The skis are prepared. The patterns have been chosen based on months of testing and years of accumulated knowledge.

    What remains is the weather. And trust.

    Choudoir will be there, awake early, stomach tight, listening to the machines and watching the snow. His name will not appear on the results sheet. But his work will.

    And that, for him, will be enough.

     

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  • Matintalo First, Diggins Second: A Classic 20 K Test Before the Olympics

    Matintalo First, Diggins Second: A Classic 20 K Test Before the Olympics

    This coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence 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.

    Emma Ribom (SWE), Moa Ilar (SWE), Kerttu Niskanen (FIN), Karoline Simpson-Larsen (NOR), (l-r) lead early in the women’s 20 K Classic Mass Start in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    The sky above the Goms Nordic Centre on Sunday morning had the washed-out look of winter at altitude — pale and reflective. Snow had fallen overnight — not enough to transform the valley, but enough to affect ski behavior. The tracks were glazed in some places and soft in others, offering a surface that challenged kick, balance, and restraint.

    This was the third and final race of the last World Cup weekend before the Olympic Games. The final challenge came in the form of a 20-kilometer Classic Mass Start — a distance long enough to punish impatience, short enough to reward precision. In many ways, it felt like a rehearsal, a partial preview of the Olympic 50 k to come, even as two of the discipline’s defining figures — Sweden’s Ebba Andersson and Frida Karlsson — were notably absent.

    Fifty-six women started. Not all of them finished. None of them were anonymous by the time the race ended.

    Jessie Diggins (USA) and Astrid Oeyre Slind (NOR), (l-r) got away early in the first lap before being brought back by the chase pack around 6.5 K. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    An Early Question — and a Fast Answer

    From the opening kilometers, the field confirmed what the course profile had suggested: this would be a race shaped less by outright speed than by rhythm and positioning. Short climbs arrived in quick succession, descents offered only brief relief, and the peloton stretched and compressed like an accordion with every change in gradient.

    The first clear question of the day was posed early.

    On the opening lap, Norway’s Astrid Øyre Slind moved decisively off the front. Jessie Diggins, wearing bib one and leading both the overall and distance World Cup standings, responded immediately. For a moment, the two skied clear — a clean, purposeful break that suggested collaboration rather than desperation.

    The gap grew briefly, then stalled. By roughly 6.5 kilometers, the chase pack — patient, organized, and unwilling to let the race fracture too soon — closed the door. The break dissolved without drama, but not without meaning. The message was clear: separation would be earned later, not gifted early.

    Through the first full lap and into the second, the splits told a consistent story. No one was allowed to escape. The front group remained compact, with the top ten separated by only a few seconds at successive checkpoints. Every surge was answered. Every acceleration absorbed.

    Karoline Simpson-Larsen (NOR), Dariya Nepryaeva (AIN), Katharina Hennig Dotzler (GER), Johanna Matintalo (FIN), and Kerttu Niskanen (FIN), (l-r) work to bring back Diggins and Slind. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    The Long Middle: Where Races Are Actually Won

    What followed was the part of mass-start racing that rarely makes highlight reels but defines outcomes: the long middle.

    The snow conditions amplified this dynamic. The fresh layer over a firmer base rewarded good kick but punished over-striding. Downhills carried enough draft that working alone was inefficient. On climbs, being out of position meant burning matches simply to stay attached.

    Julia Kern spent much of this phase skiing in between packs — strong enough to feel underutilized, cautious enough to avoid overreaching.

    Julia Kern (USA) and Tiril Udnes Weng (NOR), (l-r) trying to maintain contact. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    “Today’s race was definitely a really hilly one, and not that fast, given the new snow,” Kern said afterward. “The tracks were a bit glazed, but also powder. The techs did a really good job giving us great kick, and I really needed that for how much climbing there was.”

    She described a race defined by indecision forced by circumstance rather than confidence.

    “I skied a lot of the race kind of stuck in between two packs,” she said. “In the second lap, I wasn’t sure if I should really go with the pack and risk it. I didn’t want to blow up, especially at semi-altitude. It was just hard to say with such a long, slow race.”

    When a small bridge attempt formed later in the race, Kern hesitated — not from fear, but from realism.

    “It was one of those days where I was feeling stronger than the pack I was skiing in, but not quite sure I could keep up with the pack in front,” she said. “They started to slow down, so it was a little bit of yo-yoing.”

    For Kern, the result — 16th — came with clarity rather than frustration. The margins were small, the lessons specific, and the work ahead clearly defined.

    Hailey Swirbul (USA) coming up the final climb with teammate Kendall Kramer (USA) slightly behind. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    Moving Forward from the Back

    If Kern’s race unfolded in the gray area between groups, Novie McCabe and Hailey Swirbul experienced the race from its deepest end.

    McCabe started with bib 57. Swirbul with 58. Both expected chaos early — and neither panicked when it arrived.

    “I kind of expected the accordion,” McCabe said. “I talked to my tech before the race, and he thought it would be a good idea to stay calm early. When it strung out, that’s when I should try to move up.”

    That patience paid dividends. As the field gradually fractured, McCabe began to advance — not in dramatic surges, but in deliberate steps.

    “I tried to push up to whoever was ahead, then tuck in and rest,” she said. “Eventually, I got into a good group with Catherine Stewart-Jones and some others. At that point, it was about hanging on a little more.”

    The effort came at a cost. McCabe admitted she was suffering late, but also recognized the value of the experience.

    “It was nice to have such a good classic skier to ski behind and try to relax in there,” she said.

    Swirbul’s approach mirrored that composure, shaped by perspective earned through time away from the sport.

    “The start of the race actually didn’t feel stressful to me,” she said. “There’s not much you can do to move up until it breaks up a little bit, so I took that as an opportunity to relax and work into the race.”

    She broke the race into manageable pieces.

    “I like trying to pick people off in a mass start,” she said. “It helps to focus on closing one gap at a time.”

    Swirbul finished 24th, McCabe 22nd — both having moved forward through nearly the entire field.

    Samantha Smith (USA), Hailey Swirbul (USA), and Rosie Brennan (USA), (l-r) early on in the women’s 20 K Classic Mass Start in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    Rosie Brennan: The Value of a Steady Day

    For Rosie Brennan, Goms was not a race defined by sharp inflection points or dramatic movement through the field. Instead, it was a professional, workmanlike effort — the kind that rarely demands attention but often proves essential when teams begin to think about Olympic lineups, relays, and durability.

    Brennan skied much of the race just outside the most active chase groups, navigating the same glazed tracks and punchy climbs that tested everyone else. On a course that punished inefficiency, her race was marked by steadiness rather than volatility. She did not chase moves that would cost more than they offered, nor did she allow the race’s elastic rhythm to pull her into repeated accelerations that would compound fatigue.

    In a season where results are scrutinized as much for how they are achieved as where they land, Brennan’s day in Goms served as a reminder of her role within the U.S. program: a veteran presence capable of managing long classic efforts even when conditions and dynamics do not invite heroics.

    These are the kinds of races that rarely make headlines — and yet, as part of Olympic preparation, they often matter most.

    Kendall Kramer (USA) comes to the line with a top 30. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    Kendall Kramer: Learning in Plain Sight

    Kendall Kramer’s race unfolded quietly, but not inconsequentially. Still early in her World Cup career and newly named to her first Olympic team, Kramer approached the 20 K Classic as both an examination and an education.

    She remained engaged with the race as it evolved, skiing within her limits while absorbing the tactical realities of a mass start at altitude: when the field compresses, when it stretches, and how much energy it costs simply to stay connected on repeated climbs. In a race where early overcommitment was punished and late positioning proved decisive, Kramer’s task was not to force relevance, but to understand it.

    Her finish inside the top 30 (27th) reflected a growing familiarity with World Cup distance racing — not yet a statement, but a step. For an athlete still building the physical and tactical base required for races of this length, Goms offered clarity about where the work remains, and confidence that she belongs in the conversation.

    Samantha Smith (USA) nears the end of the 20 K in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    Samantha Smith: Building the Long View

    For Samantha Smith, the 20 K Classic represented another piece in a longer developmental arc — one that continues to unfold quietly but deliberately.

    Smith skied the full distance with control, settling into the rhythm of the race rather than fighting it. In a field that included Olympic medalists, Crystal Globe contenders, and seasoned distance specialists, her goal was not to dictate the race but to measure herself against it. The result reflected that intention: steady pacing, minimal volatility, and a complete performance on a demanding course.

    At this stage of her career, races like Goms are less about immediate return and more about accumulation — learning how long classic efforts feel when contested at World Cup intensity, how fatigue presents itself late, and how small tactical decisions compound over 20 kilometers.

    Those lessons are not always visible on a results sheet. But they are foundational — and necessary — for what comes next.

    Alison Mackie (CAN) continued her strong season as the U23 leader. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    The Canadian Women: Depth That Shapes the Race

    While the podium fight ultimately played out among familiar names, the Canadian women were far from passive participants in the race’s structure.

    Alison Mackie, wearing the under-23 leader’s green bib, skied assertively within the main chase group for much of the race. Starting deeper in the field, she navigated the accordion effect with composure, staying attached as the pace fluctuated and the snow conditions demanded constant adjustment. Her performance reinforced why she has emerged as one of the most promising young distance skiers in the World Cup field.

    Katherine Stewart-Jones, meanwhile, played a quieter but equally influential role. Her presence in the chase packs — particularly later in the race — provided both pace and stability. For athletes moving forward from the back, including Novie McCabe and Hailey Swirbul, Stewart-Jones’ classic proficiency offered a valuable reference point, a wheel worth following when the race began to exact its toll.

    Together, the Canadian performances underscored a broader truth about modern World Cup distance racing: influence is not limited to podium contenders. Nations with depth — even without a skier contesting the final sprint — shape how races unfold, how packs form, and how energy is spent.

    Astrid Oeyre Slind (NOR), Johanna Matintalo (FIN), and Jessie Diggins (USA), (l-r) charge for the podium. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    The Final Selection

    By the final lap, the race had distilled itself down to a familiar truth: six women remained, and no one else was coming back.

    Diggins had conserved. Øyre Slind remained vigilant. Finland’s Johanna Matintalo had been quiet — almost invisible — in the way that often precedes a decisive move.

    Diggins knew exactly what she had left, and just as importantly, what she didn’t.

    “I knew I was going to need to ride the draft as much as possible and save my energy,” she said. “It’s been a really big training week for me, so I knew I kind of had one shot.”

    Her plan was precise.

    “I was going to need to launch that move as late as possible, probably on the hill,” she said. “I had amazing kick. Double-poling isn’t quite my strength right now.”

    On the final major climb, Diggins moved. So did Øyre Slind. But Matintalo matched them — and crested first.

    From there, the race tipped irrevocably. Matintalo exited the climb with speed, controlled the final straight, and claimed her first World Cup victory. Diggins finished second, securing her 77th individual World Cup podium. Øyre Slind followed in third.

    Johanna Matintalo (FIN) claims the victory, with Jessie Diggins (USA) second, and Astrid Oeyre Slind (NOR) third. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus) 

     

    What It Means Going Forward

    This was the final race before the Olympic Games. Diggins left Goms having extended her lead in both the overall and distance World Cup standings. More importantly, she leaves having confirmed — again — that her classic skiing is no longer something she manages, but something she trusts.

    “I try not to overthink it,” Diggins said of the looming 50 k. “All you can do is the best you can in the moment with the tools you have that day.”

    That sentiment echoed through the U.S. team’s performances — from podium contention to patient rebuilding.

    The race in Goms did not offer easy answers. But it did offer honest ones.

    Jessie Diggins (USA), Johanna Matintalo (FIN), and Astrid Oeyre Slind (NOR), (l-r) share the 20 K Classic Mass Start podium in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
    A Quiet Confidence

    By the time the fog settled back into the valley and the stadium emptied, the course had revealed itself fully. It had rewarded patience. It had punished haste. And it had reminded everyone watching — and skiing — that distance racing rarely announces itself loudly.

    The Olympic 50 k will be longer. The stakes will be higher. The margins may be smaller still.

    But the questions asked in Goms were the right ones — and the answers, for those willing to listen, were already there.

     

    Goms World Cup Women’s 20 k Classic Mass Start RESULTS

    Women’s World Cup DISTANCE STANDINGS

    Women’s World Cup OVERALL STANDINGS

     

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    Jessie Diggins (USA) and the US team celebrate another podium in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
  • Svahn Returns to the Top as Olympic Stakes Sharpen in Goms Women’s Classic Sprint

    Svahn Returns to the Top as Olympic Stakes Sharpen in Goms Women’s Classic Sprint


    This coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence 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.

    Maja Dahlqvist (SWE) and Laura Gimmler (GER), (l-r) with Jessie Diggins (USA) just behind during the Classic Sprint heats in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    By the time the women clicked into their classic skis in the upper Rhône Valley on Saturday morning, the sprint course in Goms had already made its argument. This would not be a day for pure glide, or pure kick. It would be a day for the awkward in-between—the calculus of wax, confidence, and courage. The kind of skiing that rewards athletes who keep their heads when the track changes mid-lap, when the fastest line is also the most exposed. Here, “relaxed” and “hard” have to mean the same thing.

    The official report called the surface “hard packed.” Air was just above freezing (0.4°C). Snow was far colder (-8.0°C). This split-temperature setup can turn one polished corner into a skating rink, and one kick zone into a question you must answer at speed.

    With Milano Cortina looming—the last World Cup weekend before Olympic racing in Val di Fiemme—every answer carried extra weight. Sweden, in particular, arrived with a familiar burden: racing to win and also to clarify which few women might fill the nation’s four Olympic start spots in the classic sprint. The day’s story was not just about who won. It was about the ones who looked ready to be chosen.

    At the center of it all was Linn Svahn—back on top of a World Cup sprint after what she described, in a post-race on-air interview with FIS, as a challenging year.

    “So nice to be back and compete again,” Svahn said. “It’s been like a roller coaster year… It’s one of my favorite courses of the whole World Cup. But it was tough.”

    She looked more than “back.” She looked inevitable.

    Lauren Jortberg (USA) during qualification. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Qualification: fast snow, sharp edges, and a fraction too much ice

    Svahn set the tone immediately, winning the qualification in 3:46.07, with Switzerland’s Nadine Fähndrich second (+1.84) and Finland’s Jasmi Joensuu third (+4.35).

    For the Americans, the qualification round was both encouraging and cruel, as sprint prologues often are: three into the top 30, one out by a place.

    • Jessie Diggins qualified 6th in 3:54.81 (+8.74).
    • Julia Kern qualified 15th in 3:58.58 (+12.51).
    • Samantha Smith qualified 26th in 4:00.71 (+14.64).
    • Lauren Jortberg—was so close—finishing 31st, 4:01.74 (+15.67), one spot out of the heats.

    Jortberg’s own description of the qualification captured the emotional violence of that single place. Her plan, she said, was to ski “as relaxed and smoothly as I can,” then push the fast pieces—downhills and turns—hard. She believed she executed that plan almost everywhere.

    Except, crucially, at the top of the major climb.

    “It was way icier… than when we were warming up on it, and I wasn’t anticipating that at all,” Jortberg said. “I lost a ton of time. I nearly fell because I slipped so much—so that’s really brutal, especially being 31st.”

    Her immediate feeling, she admitted, was a strange split: “both devastation and almost like tears of joy,” because of how much she had struggled in classic sprinting in the past—and because, on this day, she could finally feel the gap closing. “There’s more to come,” she said. “I’m really excited to keep working on my classic skiing and showing that I’m a threat in both classic and skate.”

    On paper, it reads like a line item: 31st, not qualified. In the body, it feels like something very positive is brewing from many years of hard work.

    Julia Kern (USA) and Samantha Smith (USA), (l-r) during the Classic Sprint quarterfinals in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    The heats: Sweden’s depth, Switzerland’s home-course fire, and the shape of the final

    The women’s sprint in Goms unfolded in the standard format: five quarterfinal heats of six, two automatic qualifiers from each, plus two “lucky losers” on time; then two semifinals with the same rule; then a final of six.

    What made Saturday distinct was how quickly the day shifted from “times” to “tactics.” Goms is not a flat drag race. It’s a course that asks athletes to make decisions—when to risk the inside line, when to conserve, when to surge. Kern noted afterward that those decisions are hard to replicate outside racing.

    “For me, nothing beats the effort of racing head-to-head to practice digging really deep,” Kern said. “Those surges and tactics are hard to emulate in training.”

    That mattered because Kern arrived at this World Cup period still chasing a particular feeling—what she has described as race sharpness—after time back home training.

    On Saturday, she said, she finally felt it.

    “Today I felt sharper than I have in any sprint so far this season,” Kern said. Even in a moment when she was sixth over the top of the first climb, she believed she could re-enter the race: “I knew I could charge the second climb and that I wasn’t out of it.”

    Kern also described the way she is trying to reprogram the smallest pieces of sprint execution—especially the opening of the qualifier, where she has struggled.

    “One of my goals was to start faster in the qualifier… and I did today,” she said. In the heats, the goals shifted: “continue to believe and never count myself out,” keep technique cues in mind, “send the downhill,” and practice cornering. And the most important sign, to her, was the feeling on the second climb: “I felt my second hill surge… and that’s encouraging for the last bit of training before the games.”

    Kern ultimately exited in the quarterfinals, finishing 15th overall on the day. But the quote that lingered was not about the placing—it was about learning to believe, again and again, in the middle of the heat, when the race tries to convince you you’re done.

    Smith also advanced out of qualification and into the quarters—another solid marker in a season where her trajectory has been trending upward. She finished 23rd overall.

    Her takeaway was precise and practical, the kind of detail you can only identify when you’re close enough to feel time leak out of the run.

    “Looking ahead, the next few weeks, I’m really going to prioritize transition moments because I felt like I lost a lot of time there on the course,” Smith said. “But I know it’s something I can practice and sharpen with some intentionality.”

    She also pointed to tactics: “I think there’s a lot I can improve tactically, and definitely walking away from today’s race with some stuff to focus on for the next few weeks.”

    Her plan between now and the Games is a familiar championship build: “I’m going to use the next two weeks as an opportunity to build volume before sharpening with some faster and higher-intensity workouts,” she said, adding that she’ll keep her preparation similar to what has worked for her before major championships.

    Maja Dahlqvist (SWE), Jessie Diggins (USA), Nicole Monsorno (ITA), and Magdalena Scherz (AUT), (l-r) stride up one of the two long climbs on the sprint course in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    For Diggins, the day held a different kind of meaning. She arrived in Goms wearing the World Cup leader’s yellow bib, but approached the classic sprint less as a referendum on form and more as a laboratory — a chance to learn, adapt, and sharpen instincts under pressure.

    In the quarterfinals, Diggins said her skis felt “a little bit slick,” prompting an adjustment before the semifinals as conditions continued to glaze over. “We added more for the semi, which I was super, super happy about,” she said, noting how quickly the track changed as the day wore on. “I was really impressed with the team’s ability to shift mid-round when it turns out, like, oh, it’s getting a little more glazy.”

    Rather than fight the conditions, Diggins leaned into them. She said she made a conscious decision to seek out firmer, faster snow and to corner aggressively, skiing where the surface had stayed icy instead of getting churned into powder. “Downhills are my strength, so I was like, I’m going to play my strengths here,” she said. “I was really psyched about that — and also really impressed with my ski speed. I’m really, really grateful to our team.”

    Diggins qualified sixth, advanced through the rounds, and finished 7th overall, exiting in the semifinals. In a day defined by razor edges, she looked close. The difference between “final” and “semis” felt less like fitness, and more like the thousand small interactions between ski feel, kick security, and how aggressively you can take space in traffic.

    Diggins framed the race as part of a broader Olympic preparation, even with the acknowledgement that racing under training load makes the experience different than what awaits in Val di Fiemme. “I was really just seeing this as great practice for the Olympics,” she said. “You can still learn so much — learn where your strengths are, what you think you need, how you might want to pace.”

    She described the day as “a learning mission,” an expedition of sorts to gather information she can use over the final weeks before the Games. While the classic sprint is not her primary Olympic focus, Diggins said that doesn’t change how she approaches it. “If I’m going to do it, I want to really go for it and give it the best that I can.”

    Technically, Diggins said the Goms sprint offered a valuable reminder of what she is still actively refining in classic skiing. On a long sprint course with slow, natural snow early in the day, her focus was on what she called “relaxed power.”

    “I was thinking a lot about not skiing frantically,” Diggins said, describing cues she used throughout the race — staying tall on the steep sections instead of folding forward at the waist, leading with her hands when fatigue set in, and prioritizing efficiency over force. “Lots of little cues,” she said, all aimed at skiing as economically as possible when the course demanded patience as much as aggression. I

    Maja Dahlqvist (SWE), Johanna Matintalo (FIN), Laura Gimmler (GER), Linn Svahn (SWE), and Nadine Faehndrich (SUI), (l-r) come down the home stretch. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    The final: Svahn returns, and the podium reshapes itself

    By the time the final arrived, the field had taken on an instructive shape: three Swedes (Svahn, Dahlqvist, Emma Ribom), a Swiss home favorite (Fähndrich), a German (Laura Gimmler), and a Finn (Johanna Matintalo).

    If Sweden came to Goms needing clarity, this was the clearest possible argument: depth, multiplied.

    Svahn won the final in 3:46.07. Behind her, Gimmler took second at +10.54, with Fähndrich third at +12.38 (listed as +1.84 behind Gimmler in the results display). Dahlqvist finished fourth, Matintalo fifth, and Ribom sixth.

    For Svahn, the victory read like both a return and a resolution. In that FIS on-air interview, she framed the months since then as having reshaped her perspective.

    “I think [the nerves are] quite all right,” she said of the Olympic approach. “It feels like the last year has given me a lot of challenges. So [it] feels like I’m just happy to be back racing.”

    The subtext—the thing everyone in sprint skiing understands without saying—is that “happy” is not the same as “soft.” Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes it’s what happens when fear gets replaced by appetite.

    Jessie Diggins (USA) battled her way to 7th place in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    What the Americans take from Goms

    For the U.S., Saturday offered a compact set of truths:

    1. Diggins is still Diggins—top-six in qualification, semifinal caliber in classic sprinting, and moving through the day with the poise of someone who is not guessing anymore.
    2. Kern’s sharpness is arriving at the right time, and she can feel it—not as a vague confidence, but as the ability to surge when the race says you can’t.
    3. Smith is identifying controllable time, the kind that can realistically be found in the last weeks before a championship: transitions, tactical decisions, and intentional sharpening.
    4. Jortberg is at the door, close enough that a single icy misread becomes the whole story—and also close enough that “devastation” can coexist with proof of progress.

    That last point may be the most emotionally resonant, because sprinting is brutally literal: it doesn’t care how well you’ve been training, or how much you’ve improved, or what you deserve. It cares what happened on the one lap, on the one climb, when the track turned slicker than it was ten minutes earlier.

    Still, if you listened carefully to Jortberg, you could hear the deeper shift: the sense that classic sprinting is no longer a weakness she is managing, but a skill she is building. “There’s more to come,” she said—and she didn’t sound like she was trying to convince herself.

    It was a close battle to the line of the finals between Maja Dahlqvist (SWE), Laura Gimmler (GER), Linn Svahn (SWE), and Nadine Faehndrich (SUI) (l-r). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    A last World Cup weekend, and the feeling of the calendar tightening

    The phrase “before the Olympics” can make everything sound ceremonial. In reality, it makes everything feel compressed. It turns a ski change into an existential decision. It turns a quarterfinal exit into either a warning or a reassurance, depending on your mood, your coaches, and your confidence in the training you still need to do.

    In Goms, the course didn’t let anyone hide from that compression. It asked for kick and glide, yes—but also for willingness: willingness to trust your skis when the track changes, willingness to believe you’re not out of it when you crest a climb in sixth, willingness to keep choosing speed through corners, through transitions, through the parts of the course where time disappears quietly.

    Svahn won because she looked like someone who had already made peace with the hard months—and decided to race anyway. Diggins moved through the day like someone who understands exactly what she needs and what she doesn’t. Kern sounded like an athlete who could finally feel the race returning to her body. Smith sounded like an athlete who knows where the seconds are. Jortberg sounded like an athlete who knows how thin the line is between “in” and “out”—and how much it matters that she’s standing on it at all.

    Diggins also spoke with pride about the broader U.S. team atmosphere in Goms, describing the rounds as collaborative as much as competitive. She said she and Julia Kern spent time discussing tactics and strategies between heats, and she pointed to Samantha Smith’s growing confidence as a highlight of the weekend.

    “Seeing Sammy gain confidence and get into the rounds with a really great strike rate has been so cool for me to see,” Diggins said. “I’m just incredibly proud.” She added that the momentum extended across the team, noting breakthroughs on the men’s side as well — moments she described as “really beautiful to see.”

    The Olympics, when they arrive, will not care about any of this context. They will simply happen. But if Goms offered any preview, it was this: the women who will matter most in Val di Fiemme are the ones who can treat uncertainty not as a threat, but as part of the job.

    And on a hard-packed, split-temperature day in Switzerland—on a course Svahn calls her favorite, on a climb that turned to ice without warning—you could see who is learning to do exactly that.

     

    Goms World Cup Women’s Classic Sprint QUALIFYING

    Goms World Cup Women’s Freestyle Team Sprint RESULTS

     

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    Laura Gimmler (GER), Linn Svahn (SWE), and Nadine Faehndrich (SUI), (l-r) share the Classic Sprint podium in Goms, Switzerland. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
  • Nyenget Takes Oberhof 10 k Classic as Americans Build Momentum

    Nyenget Takes Oberhof 10 k Classic as Americans Build Momentum

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    Martin Loewstroem Nyenget (NOR) came back to World Cup racing, posting the fastest time in the 10 k Interval Start Classic in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    On Sunday morning in Oberhof, the snow had the kind of sheen that tells the truth before the clock ever does. It glittered under a clean winter sun, polished by a freeze–thaw cycle that left the tracks fast, brittle, and unforgiving. At 823 meters, tucked into the Thuringian Forest, the course looked generous from a distance—wide lanes, long sightlines—but it was the sort of generosity that disappears the moment a skier commits to a mistake. The margins here were not loud. They were sharp.

    This was the men’s 10-kilometer Classic Interval Start, a format that does not tolerate theater. There would be no pack to hide in, no draft to borrow, no tactical stalemates to blame. Every thirty seconds, a skier pushed out of the start gate alone, carrying only his pacing plan, his skis, his poles, and whatever composure he had managed to preserve through an Olympic build that has been compressing time for months. Period Three had begun. The calendar was no longer abstract.

    Classic skiing in these conditions demands restraint masquerading as confidence. The climbs are short but decisive; the downhills are technical enough that speed becomes a negotiation rather than a gift. Grip must be trusted without being tested. Push too hard too early, and the skis slide away beneath you; hesitate, and seconds vanish into the ice. It is possible—common, even—to ski very hard here and still ski poorly.

    Iivo Niskanen (FIN) was formerly the king of the 15 k Classic and showed he is one of the best in the 10 k Classic in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    The interval start turns this dynamic inward. The course does not change for you, but your relationship to it does. You pass athletes who started ahead of you and are passed by those who did not. You hear split times shouted from the side of the trail—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—and you decide whether to believe them. In Oberhof, where artificial snow breaks down as the sun rises and the grooves lose their bite, the course becomes a moving target. Early starters gamble on freshness; later starters trade glide for information. No one gets everything.

    Absent from the start list were some of the sport’s most reliable reference points. Norway’s biggest names were racing at home, their national championships pulling them away from this quiet, consequential weekend, or focused on a pre-Olympic training block. Their absence opened space on the results sheet, but not relief. If anything, it sharpened the test. Without familiar benchmarks, the race would be defined less by expectation than by execution.

    The 10 k classic has become a strange distance in modern cross-country skiing—short enough to reward urgency, long enough to punish impatience. It asks skiers to operate just below the edge of recklessness and to stay there for more than twenty minutes. In Oberhof, that edge was particularly thin. The tracks shone. The corners demanded respect. The kind of mistake that costs half a second in softer snow could cost five places here.

    Erik Valnes (NOR) on his way to third and another statement to the Norwegian Olympic selection committee in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    For the Americans, this was the last weekend considered in Olympic team deliberations, a fact everyone knew and no one needed to say out loud. The weight of it showed up not in desperation but in discipline. There were no grand gestures in the start lane. What mattered was whether an athlete could trust the work he had done and let the race unfold on its own terms.

    One by one, skiers disappeared into the forest, double-poling through the opening flats before settling into the rhythm that classic skiing requires when it is done well: patient climbs, clean transitions, downhill speed carried without panic. The clock ticked. The sun climbed. The track began to change.

    By the time the later starters reached the first split, the course had already started to tell its story. Early leaders came back. Conservative openings paid dividends. The race did not break open so much as it clarified itself, revealing who could manage the terrain without forcing it—and who could not.

    In an interval start, there is a particular moment when the race stops being about possibility and becomes about reckoning. It arrives quietly. A skier hears that he is catching someone he should not be catching. Another learns that the pace he thought was safe is not. In Oberhof, that moment came late and all at once, when the day’s best classic skier finally aligned patience with power and turned control into separation.

    By the finish, the gaps would look clean and decisive. They always do. But the truth of this race lived earlier, in the choices made on icy corners and rolling climbs, in the decision to ski smooth instead of merely hard. Oberhof did not demand brilliance. It demanded honesty.

    Martin Loewstroem Nyenget (NOR) on his way to the win. (Photo: Reichert/NordicFocus)

    A Course That Reveals Its Verdict Slowly

    The first skiers through the opening kilometers set times that looked sharp but provisional, the kind that exist only until the course and the day reveal themselves. The early splits came quickly, then stalled. The ice underneath the tracks was still holding, but the sun was beginning to soften the surface just enough to punish excess force. The race was already sorting itself by feel rather than bravado.

    Martin Loewstroem Nyenget (NOR) navigates the sugary snow in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Nyenget’s Patience Turns Into Separation

    When Martin Løwstrøm Nyenget finally entered the picture, it was without urgency. His opening lap was measured, almost quiet, the sort of start that invites doubt if one is inclined to look for it. But Nyenget had not come to Oberhof to prove speed in the first five kilometers. He had come to test something else.

    “I hadn’t planned to open very hard,” Nyenget said afterward in an interview aired on the FIS World Cup broadcast. “I’ve been training really hard for the last four weeks, so I didn’t quite have the speed on the first lap. But as soon as I heard that I was catching people, I started to feel really strong, and I knew I had something extra for the day.”

    The catching began gradually, then decisively. Where others tightened under the strain of the second lap, Nyenget loosened. His skiing did not change in form, only in intent. The double pole grew heavier, the transitions cleaner. On a course that demanded constant negotiation, he removed the argument.

    By the final kilometers, the race had become unmistakable. Nyenget was no longer racing the field so much as confirming what the course had already suggested. He crossed the line alone, the margins behind him clear and earned, his victory built not on dominance but on patience applied at exactly the right moment.

    “It’s fantastic to be back,” Nyenget said. “The longer I keep going in my career, the more fun I have racing. The training part isn’t always that fun anymore, so it’s great to be here in Oberhof with good conditions and really enjoy racing again.”

     

    An American Throughline: Skiing Well, Not Just Hard

    Behind him, the podium filled with familiar names and familiar styles — Iivo Niskanen (FIN +13.8) in second and Erik Valanes (NOR +14.5) in third — skiers who understand how to survive a day like this without surrendering it. The gaps were tight, the order decisive. It was the kind of race that leaves little room for argument afterward.

    For the American men, the story unfolded less in places gained than in choices validated.

    Zanden Mcmullen (USA) making one final statement to the US Olympic Team selection committee in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    McMullen Finds His Shape Again

    Zanden McMullen arrived in Oberhof carrying momentum that had begun to take shape weeks earlier at U.S. Nationals. There, his skiing had looked settled again — confident without being rigid, aggressive without being rushed. In Oberhof, that trend continued.

    “I feel like I’ve started to find myself again, which is really reassuring,” McMullen said. “I think I was fully capable of skiing like this earlier in the season, but I needed a little more racing and confidence under my belt. This weekend feels like the tip of the iceberg.”

    His approach to the race was deliberate. Rather than forcing the issue early, McMullen allowed the course to come to him, focusing on terrain management rather than constant pressure.

    “My goal today was just to ski well through the terrain of the entire course,” he said. “Earlier this season, when I felt like I needed to force a good result, I wasn’t skiing well — I was skiing very hard, but not well. Today I focused on skiing smooth and fast rather than just hard, and I think that really paid off.”

    There were moments of vulnerability — a slight lapse near the end of the first lap — but McMullen recognized it in time to convert restraint into opportunity.

    “I was able to use that extra energy to ski hard and fast through the second half of the race,” he said.

    McMullen finished 18th, a result that read plainly on paper but carried deeper meaning inside an Olympic season defined by accumulation rather than singular peaks.

    “I know I’ve done what I can,” he said. “I’m happy to be back where I left off last year before I got sick. Now I can shift my focus to preparation. Olympic qualification is just the first step. I have very big goals for the Games themselves.”

    Hunter Wonders (USA) continued his 10 k Classic form he showed at US Nationals in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Hunter Wonders and the Familiar Language of Classic Distance

    For Hunter Wonders, Oberhof reinforced something that has been quietly consistent in his career: when the race is a classic distance interval start, the task tends to make sense. There is clarity in pacing, in grip management, in the slow accumulation of pressure rather than the sudden chaos of a sprint.

    Wonders skied into the points again, backing up his showing from U.S. Nationals with another disciplined performance on snow that rewarded trust over impulse. In conditions where early aggression often came undone later, his race held together. The opening kilometers were controlled, the middle steady, the final lap about preservation rather than rescue.

    That continuity mattered. In a field where seconds dissolved quickly into places, Wonders avoided the kind of oscillations that define fragile races. He neither chased the early benchmarks nor retreated from them. Instead, he stayed within a rhythm that allowed the course to do less damage than it did to many around him.

    On a day when classic specialists quietly rose, Wonders looked like one — not flashy, not forced, but coherent from start to finish.

    Luke Jager (USA) celebrated his birthday weekend in Oberhof (GER) with a top 30 in the 10 k Classic. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Luke Jager and the Discipline of Attention

    A few minutes later, Luke Jager crossed the line inside the top 30, finishing a race that mirrored his own quiet trajectory. Though the calendar had marked it as his birthday weekend, the day itself passed without ceremony.

    “My main goal was just to be fully immersed in the experience,” Jager said. “To focus on doing my best and skiing each section of the course as well as I could.”

    On a course where margins evaporated quickly, that focus mattered.

    “The margins were definitely thin, but they always seem to be on the World Cup these days,” he said. “It doesn’t really help to stress about that, so I try to keep my attention on what’s right in front of me, so that when I cross the finish line I can say I found as many of those little margins as I could.”

    John Steel Hagenbuch (USA) striding his way to 52nd place. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    John Steel Hagenbuch and the Cost of Precision

    For John Steel Hagenbuch, Oberhof was less forgiving, finishing in 52nd place. Fast, icy tracks compress the margin for error until technique, pacing, and decision-making overlap completely. There is no room to separate them. When one slips, the others tend to follow.

    Hagenbuch’s race never unraveled dramatically, but it never fully unlocked either. The speed was there in moments; the continuity was harder to hold. In an interval start, that can be enough to drift backward without a single obvious mistake to point to afterward.

    Classic skiing on firm conditions is often less about what goes wrong than about what never quite arrives. A corner taken cautiously becomes a gap. A climb approached defensively compounds over kilometers. Oberhof exposed those small hesitations with clarity.

    Still, there were pieces to build from. Hagenbuch moved efficiently through the terrain, and his ski handling held under pressure. What the race demanded next — and what it withheld — was the seamless connection between intention and execution that defines skiing at this level.

    Zachary Jayne (USA) raced his first World Cup races of his career in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    A ‘Welcome to the League’ Weekend

    For Zach Jayne, the weekend carried a different weight. After a breakthrough performance at U.S. Nationals, Oberhof marked his first exposure to the full scale of World Cup racing — the cameras, the movement, the relentless compression of time and attention.

    “After a good week at Nationals, I’m honestly pretty disappointed with my first few World Cup starts,” Jayne said. “I’m grateful to be here racing against some of the best in the world, but I really wanted to do something with my starts.”

    What surprised him most was not the pace but the environment.

    “There’s just a lot more going on — cameras, people, spectators,” he said. “For me, that translates into more stress, and I’m still learning how to manage that.”

    Still, Jayne was clear-eyed about the lesson.

    “I definitely had my ‘welcome to the league’ moment this weekend,” he said. “Now I have something bigger and better to shoot for.”

    Antoine Cyr (CAN) on his way to a top 30 finish in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    The Canadians: Cyr Steady, Ritchie Searching

    Canada arrived in Oberhof with different objectives but shared terrain.

    Antoine Cyr delivered another composed World Cup performance, finishing inside the top 30 on a course that rewarded calm decision-making. His skiing carried the marks of experience: stable pacing, clean transitions, and an understanding of when to let speed come rather than chase it.

    In fast conditions, Cyr avoided the trap of overreaching. His race did not hinge on a single sector or surge but on the absence of mistakes — a strategy that proved effective as the track continued to glaze and soften through the day.

    For Graham Ritchie, the race served a different function. Returning to World Cup competition after a disrupted season, Oberhof was less about result than recalibration. The course asked questions he is still working back toward answering: how much risk to take, how much speed to trust, how long it takes to feel at home again in this environment.

    Ritchie skied through to the finish without drama, but the gaps reflected the difference between re-entry and fluency. On a day when the margins punished uncertainty, Oberhof made clear how narrow the corridor back to comfort can be.

    What Oberhof Demanded

    By the time the final starters finished, the course had softened just enough to underline its earlier warnings. The results sheet settled into place. Some athletes left Oberhof with confirmation, others with questions, all with fewer places left to hide.

    “It feels like everything is important right now — every part of the preparation,” Nyenget said. “Today, the goal was just to focus on the task. But of course, it’s a step closer to the bigger goal.”

    In Oberhof, the task had been clear all along: ski well, ski honestly, and let the rest follow.

     

    Men’s 10 k Classic Interval Start RESULTS

    Men’s FIS World Cup OVERALL DISTANCE STANDINGS

     

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    Iivo Niskanen (FIN), Martin Loewstroem Nyenget (NOR), and Erik Valnes (NOR), (l-r) share the 10 k Classic Interval Start in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
  • Where the Snow Hardens and Decisions Stick

    Where the Snow Hardens and Decisions Stick

    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.

    Jonna Sundling (SWE) and Laura Gimmler (GER), (l-r) during the heats of the World Cup Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    By the time the stadium lights fully took over in Oberhof, the snow had begun to change its mind.

    What started as a pliable winter surface—the kind that both softens and creates mistakes—tightened as the temperature dropped, and each pass of a ski left a polished, glistening trail under the lit German night. The Thuringian Forest, quiet by geography but loud by reputation, had settled into one of those evenings that reward certainty. Edges held if you trusted them. Hesitation showed immediately. And in an Olympic season, there was very little room for either.

    Saturday’s women’s Freestyle Sprint marked the World Cup’s return after the Tour de Ski, but the pause had not dulled the stakes. For several nations—and particularly for the United States—Oberhof represented the final sprint in the window that matters most for Olympic selection. That context did not announce itself loudly. It rarely does. Instead, it threaded through the day in subtler ways: in heat selection, in how aggressively athletes protected space, and in the quiet tension between racing for today and building the version of yourself you’ll need in February.

    At the front, the results followed familiar lines. Jonna Sundling (SWE) qualified near the top and then won every round she entered, finishing the job decisively for her 15th individual World Cup victory. Coletta Rydzek (GER), fed by a home crowd that never stopped leaning forward, closed hard for second. Maja Dahlqvist (SWE) completed the podium in third, another entry in Sweden’s sprint abundance—a luxury that, paradoxically, can complicate Olympic selection rather than simplify it.

    But Oberhof was not only about dominance. It was about positioning, intent, and the quieter victories that occur well outside the top three—where a season can tilt not with a trophy, but with a single, well-timed decision in a quarterfinal.

    Hailey Swirbul (USA) take the first corner during her quarterfinal in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    A Course That Punishes Drift

    Oberhof’s sprint course is deceptive in its simplicity: an out-and-back layout, one major climb, a technical descent, and a finishing stretch that arrives already under load. What separates it from more straightforward sprint venues is how early it demands decisions. The opening stretch funnels athletes into a tight corner almost immediately, compressing the field before it has a chance to stretch. The central climb—long, steep, and increasingly rutted and churned as the day progresses—forces skiers to declare themselves sooner than they might like.

    There is little room to hide here. Miss the first corner, and you’re fighting for oxygen before the race has found its rhythm. Drift into the wrong line on the climb, and the surface punishes you. Get boxed entering the final turn, and momentum disappears instantly. Oberhof rewards skiers who are decisive without being reckless, aggressive without being impatient.

    Those dynamics shaped the day for the Americans in distinctly different ways, producing four very different American stories inside the heats—plus one clarifying, unfortunate footnote that mattered for selection math and for morale: Alayna Sonnesyn (USA) did start, but crashed and did not finish.

    Jessie Diggins (USA) during qualification in the World Cup Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Before the Racing: Compassion, and a Reminder Not to “Try Harder”

    On paper, the Olympic selection criteria reads like a legal document—because, in many ways, it is one. It is also, inevitably, a psychological environment: a room everyone lives in, even when no one speaks about it.

    U.S. Head Coach Matt Whitcomb described the team’s internal emphasis heading into Oberhof in terms that had nothing to do with points or spreadsheets.

    The first message, he said, was simple: have compassion—for yourself and for your teammates.

    “This is a stressful job,” Whitcomb said. Some athletes may feel safely “inside” the team; others may feel perched on the edge; others may already feel disappointment. And the team, he stressed, needs to remember that everyone is absorbing the same pressure in different ways. “Read the room,” he said, especially if you have a great race—take care of each other through a stressful period.

    His second point was the one that, in a sprint weekend like this, can save an athlete from the most common selection-week mistake: mistaking urgency for a new identity.

    Because “this may be one’s last opportunity,” Whitcomb said, it’s tempting to believe you can manufacture something extra—try harder, ski differently, do something dramatic. But that instinct is usually the trap.

    “You can’t try something dramatically different,” he said. “What you have to do… is you ski the way that got you here.”

    In Oberhof, Whitcomb felt the athletes largely did that. The plans were executed; warm-ups and routines stayed intact. “We qualified a bunch of people,” he said. The day simply didn’t convert into the results they wanted.

    That, too, is sprinting: sometimes you do many things right, and the course—plus the speed of the other nations—still asks for more.

    Jessie Diggins (USA) during qualification in the World Cup Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Racing as Training: Jessie Diggins

    For Jessie Diggins (USA), Oberhof was never meant to stand alone.

    Coming off the Tour de Ski, Diggins framed this weekend not as a test of peak form, but as a carefully placed piece of a longer arc: racing as a training stimulus, not a destination.

    “Essentially, I’m using these races as training stimulus,” Diggins said. “It’s a chance to get more reps—working on the tactics, working on communication, just working on all the little things that you really can’t practice any other way unless you’re racing World Cup.”

    That philosophy has long guided Diggins’ career. She has rarely spoken about “peaking” the way outsiders want athletes to: as a clean line on a calendar, a simple on/off switch. For her, form is something you keep building in public, in the only environment where it truly exists—under the clock, in contact, with consequence.

    “So [I’m] keeping the training load really quite high,” she explained, “but just recovering enough that I can still punch some hard race efforts and have that be part of the training and the lead-up. And for me, that’s always been a really important thing.”

    She added a line that sounds like personal preference until you watch her career and realize it’s closer to a blueprint: “I think I race well when I am racing pretty often. I might not do every single race, but just enough that I feel like I’m using them as a really helpful part of my lead-up.”

    Diggins’ day ended in the quarterfinals—13th overall on the official results sheet. But that early exit doesn’t necessarily conflict with the way she described the weekend. In an Olympic season defined less by accumulation than timing, Diggins tends to measure progress in subtler signals than finish position: how quickly the body responds, how efficiently it recovers, whether the details are sharpening rather than dulling.

    Oberhof, in that sense, fits neatly into the plan. Not every race has to be a verdict. Some are simply data—hard efforts taken at speed, recorded by the body, filed away for February.

    Samantha Smith (USA) during qualification in the World Cup Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    A Wild Arc, Embraced: Samantha Smith

    If Diggins arrived in Oberhof as a veteran calibrating form, Samantha Smith (USA) arrived by a far less conventional route—one that still feels almost implausible when you say it out loud.

    The last couple of months, Smith said, have been “wild.” She helped Stanford reach the NCAA soccer final. She put her skis on for the first time this season in December. She raced into shape at U.S. Nationals. And suddenly, she was back on a World Cup start line—aware of the stakes, but determined not to let the stakes steal the experience.

    “I’m so grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had,” Smith said. “To have a chance to play for Stanford has been such an incredible journey… and now to be back skiing, it feels great to be out here and competing with everyone.”

    Smith kept returning to the same theme: presence. She likes the work itself—the daily process—whether it’s skis or soccer.

    “I really enjoy the process,” she said. “I love to train, I love to race, I love to play soccer games. So [I’ve] just been trying to focus on enjoying every moment… embracing the opportunities that I have and just trying to be very present.”

    That presence mattered on a day when nerves were unavoidable.

    “Coming in today, I was definitely nervous,” Smith said. “I feel like the first World Cup races of the year are a bit nerve-wracking, especially when you haven’t had a ton of time on snow or a ton of opportunities to really gauge fitness.”

    So she narrowed her goals to what she could actually execute: ski clean; work transitions; be diligent in the “working sections” where Oberhof can hand you time or take it away quietly.

    “I didn’t really have an outcome goal,” she said. “It was just to ski hard, do what I could, and if I got into heats, to really compete.”

    And then, in her quarterfinal, came the moment that extended her day—and changed, materially, what this weekend could mean.

    Smith described herself as not being in the position she wanted over the first big hill. She could see the risk: that the heat would compress into a pure sprint finish, where you either have the lane or you don’t. And then—briefly—she did.

    “Into the last climb before the finish, I saw a window on the inside,” Smith said. “I saw the space open up, and I just tried to take it. To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting that it was going to open up.”

    It did. She went. And she made the move that sprint racing requires: the one that looks obvious in replay and feels like a gamble in real time.

    “I was worried it was going to come down to a complete sprint finish at the end,” she said, “but I think I got pretty lucky… There was a bit of open space, and I was able to make my way up.”

    The reward was tangible: Smith advanced to the semifinals and finished 12th overall. Just as important—at least in the language of selection criteria—she also climbed to 42nd on the women’s Sprint World Cup standings after Oberhof.

    In a season where criteria can hinge on ranking thresholds, that is not a small detail. It is the kind that turns a good day into a consequential one.

    Whitcomb’s reaction captured the strange emotional geometry of selection weekends: elation, paired with an awareness that someone else is hurting.

    “We’re absolutely ecstatic with Sammy,” he said—and then, almost immediately, he acknowledged the other side of it: “It’s always bittersweet because on literally every race I’ve ever been to, there have been people that have good races and then people that are really disappointed.”

    In sprinting, the margins are often only a few meters. In Olympic selection, those meters can echo.

    Hailey Swirbul (USA) during qualification in the World Cup Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Joy Without Illusion: Hailey Swirbul

    For Hailey Swirbul (USA), the day began with something rarer than confidence: uncomplicated joy.

    “I was genuinely excited just to be back racing and to make the rounds today,” Swirbul said. “It felt like a treat. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it. I was hopeful that I might have that opportunity, but getting to be in the heats was really fun.”

    What stood out wasn’t that she smiled—it was why.

    “My smiles were genuine out there,” she said, “and I felt an excitement and joy to get to be part of it, rather than a fear or pressure… to live up to some expectation that I might set for myself.”

    Swirbul approached qualifying with a clear-eyed strategy built around her own technical history. She identified the steep jump-skating (V1) section that had dominated the day’s conversation and made a choice.

    “There’s a lot of pressure, a lot of expectation around that steep V1 hill in the middle of the course,” she said, “and that’s just historically not my strength… I felt like I was able to do the working sections well.”

    The plan worked. She advanced into the heats and finished 22nd overall.

    In the quarterfinal, the course delivered its blunt lesson: once you lose contact, you often don’t get it back.

    “I maybe tried to ski my own race a little too much,” Swirbul said. “Once you’re off the main pack, it’s really hard to get back on… I was excited to have a strong finish… but it’s just not enough at this level.”

    The sentence contains both honesty and optimism—because Swirbul wasn’t treating Saturday as an endpoint. She was treating it as preparation for what, in her case, may be the weekend’s more natural opportunity: Sunday’s 10-kilometer classic interval start.

    “I’m excited—really looking forward to the classic 10 k tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve had a couple of good ones this year, so [I] hope I can keep the momentum going.”

    And then she said something that explains why so many distance skiers quietly enjoy sprinting before a 10 k: it’s a way to wake the system up.

    “I do actually really like racing a sprint, especially a qualifier plus a quarter right before a 10 k,” she said. “I think that’s kind of ideal race prep for 10 k. So I’m hoping that can help power me through tomorrow’s race.”

    Swirbul’s mindset for Sunday, she said, would be built on a simple distinction: what she can control, and what she can’t.

    “Every course and every day has so many variables… out of my control,” she said. “So I just want to try to control what I can and do my best at those things.”

    It’s a professional skier’s sentence. It’s also, in an Olympic season, a survival skill.

    Lauren Jortberg (USA) during qualification in the World Cup Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Boldness, Not Regret: Lauren Jortberg

    Lauren Jortberg (USA) did not set out to lead her quarterfinal. It happened anyway, fast and almost accidentally—the kind of start that changes your entire heat because it changes your options.

    “I took control early… wasn’t necessarily on purpose,” Jortberg said. “I just had a really fast start, and there’s a big corner right away, so I wanted to have good positioning there.”

    She connected that early positioning to what she sees as a strength: the major climbs. In Oberhof, you don’t get to drift into those climbs. You arrive either with space or without it.

    “I wanted… good positioning for the major climbs,” she said. “I feel like that’s one of my strengths.”

    Late in the heat, the day turned on a familiar sprint mechanism: contact and congestion at exactly the wrong time.

    “I got a bit of a tangle… into the final turn,” Jortberg said. “I lost all my speed there.”

    Importantly, she rejected the clean narrative that would blame her early assertiveness for the late cost.

    “I don’t necessarily think that leading… came at a cost,” she said. “I just think… I lost all my speed when we got tangled.”

    And then she said what, in an Olympic-selection sprint, many athletes think, but not all athletes will say out loud: she did not come to Oberhof to hide.

    “With the Olympic implications, I don’t really want to sit in the back and just chill,” Jortberg said. “That’s not really how I like to race heats.”

    She described her approach as an attempt to avoid the passive sprint fate: getting boxed in, stuck behind, hoping someone else would make a mistake.

    “I just really want to try to ski well,” she said. “At least [I] tried to move… and try to ski my best out there rather than just… getting boxed.”

    Jortberg finished 29th overall. But what she took from the day was not despair—it was proof of belonging.

    “A lot of my confidence is just knowing that I really can ski with these women who are really strong,” she said. “That’s important for confidence moving forward.”

    Even in a heat that didn’t break her way, she will leave Oberhof with something World Cup weekends can either confirm or erase: the belief that she belongs on this stage.

    Maja Dahlqvist (SWE), Jonna Sundling (SWE) and Iris De Martin Pinter (ITA), get set to start their semifinal in the Freestyle Sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    The Final, and the Moment That Changed It

    The women’s final unfolded at speed—and then, briefly, at the mercy of chance.

    Sundling drove the pace as expected, forcing the field into single-file. Dahlqvist tracked smoothly. Rydzek hovered, patient and dangerous. Behind them, Iris De Martin Pinter (ITA) skied with poise well beyond her years, positioned to contend.

    And then she wasn’t.

    De Martin Pinter fell, fracturing the race at the worst possible moment—the kind of incident sprinting produces with brutal efficiency. Sundling’s growing gap became decisive. In a course that rewards momentum and punishes disruption, the fall functioned like a door closing: abruptly, unfairly, and permanently.

    Sundling closed the remaining distance with authority. Rydzek surged for second. Dahlqvist held on for third.

    Jessie Diggins (USA), Hilla Niemela (FIN), Nicole Monsorno (ITA), Milla Andreassen (NOR), Samantha Smith (USA), Alina Meier (SUI), (l-r) come around the first corner of their quarterfinal. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Skis, Speed, and the Truth You Can See on a Downhill

    No sprint weekend exists in a vacuum. Equipment matters, and in Oberhof, that reality was visible in the most unforgiving place: the downhills where small gaps become facts.

    Whitcomb, careful about specifics because he had not yet been fully able to review the race video, acknowledged what many observers sensed: the U.S. skis were close, but not quite at the level of the very best nations on the day.

    “I think that’s a safe and fair assessment,” Whitcomb said. He emphasized that the team was competitive—but in sprinting, “competitive” is often not enough.

    “You need the best skis to go up against other teams that have the best skis,” he said, citing nations that, on this day, appeared to have exceptional speed.

    It’s the part of sprinting that can feel cruelest to athletes: you can execute your plan, hit your cues, make good tactical decisions—and still watch a gap open on a downhill you skied correctly. In Oberhof, where the course magnifies drift, ski speed is not a luxury. It is oxygen.

    Samantha Smith (USA) for the first time advanced into the semifinals in the World Cup sprint in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Selection Without Ceremony

    For the United States, day one in Oberhof didn’t resolve Olympic selection questions. It narrowed them.

    U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s selection language ties nomination, in part, to World Cup standings thresholds, with specific mention of Top 50 (or Top 45 under certain conditions) in the Sprint or Distance World Cup standings on January 18, 2026.

    Inside that structure, Saturday’s most significant American movement belonged to Smith.

    With her semifinal, she, in just one World Cup race, vaulted to 42nd in the Sprint World Cup standings. That is the kind of number that changes the texture of a season, because it moves her into the zone where the objective criteria has been met.

    The other Americans’ days mattered in quieter ways. Diggins stayed on her February-focused arc, treating racing as stimulus and sharpening. Swirbul used the sprint as both a joyful return to the rounds and a deliberate set-up for Sunday’s classic 10k, a race she believes suits her. Jortberg confirmed her willingness to race with intent rather than hide from consequence, even when the margin for error is razor-thin.

    And Sonnesyn’s crash—real, abrupt, and emotionally expensive—served as a reminder that selection seasons do not always give you clean data. Sometimes they give you a fall, a DNF, and the long work of resetting.

    Jonna Sundling (SWE) comes to the line for the win in the finals. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    What Remains

    By nightfall, the snow had hardened completely. The course no longer absorbed uncertainty. It reflected it.

    Some athletes left with podiums. Others left with confirmation, calibration, or unfinished business. In an Olympic winter, not every race is meant to answer questions outright. Some exist to refine them—to strip them down to what actually matters.

    Whitcomb’s framing, in that light, felt less like a coach’s speech and more like a survival manual for the next month: be compassionate; don’t weaponize the criteria against each other; and when the moment arrives, resist the temptation to become someone new out of panic.

    You can’t “try harder” into an Olympic team. You can only ski the way that got you here—cleanly, boldly, and with enough self-trust to hold your line when the window opens.

    In Oberhof, Samantha Smith did exactly that. And for one night in the German cold, that single choice—one inside lane, one late move—was the difference between a good day and a consequential one.

    Women’s Freestyle Sprint Qualification RESULTS

    Women’s Freestyle Sprint Final RESULTS

    Women’s FIS World Cup OVERALL SPRINT STANDINGS

     

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    Coletta Rydzek (GER), Jonna Sundling (SWE), and Maja Dahlqvist (SWE), (l-r) share the sprint podium in Oberhof (GER). (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)
  • US Ski Team Announces Period 3 Starts

    US Ski Team Announces Period 3 Starts

    Dear Cross Country Community,

     

    We are pleased to announce the Team for Period 3 of the 2025-26 World Cup season:

    Oberhof Sprint F

    Men

    Zach Jayne                                Objective          25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader

    Ben Ogden                                Objective          4th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Jack Young                                Objective          21st 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Gus Schumacher                       Objective          27th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    JC Schoonmaker                        Objective          36th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Kevin Bolger                             Objective          40th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Zak Ketterson                           Discretion         18th Val di Fiemme Sprint C, 36th Toblach Sprint F

    Zanden McMullen                     Alternate          1st US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    Owen Young                             Alternate          2nd US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    Michael Earnhart                      Alternate          3rd US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    Women

    Hailey Swirbul                           Objective          25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader

    Jessie Diggins                            Objective          25-26 Overall World Cup Leader

    Julia Kern                                  Objective          20th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Alayna Sonnesyn                       Discretion         27th Davos Sprint F

    Rosie Brennan                          Discretion         15th Ruka Sprint C, 32nd Davos Sprint F

    Sammy Smith                            Discretion         1st US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    Lauren Jortberg                        Discretion         3rd US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    Ava Thurston                            Discretion         4th US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    Emma Albrecht                         Alternate          5th US Nationals Sprint F qualifier

    J.C. Schoonmaker (USA) racing in Oberhof (GER) in 2024. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    Oberhof 10 km C & Goms 20 km C Mass Start

    Men

    Zach Jayne                                Objective          25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader

    Gus Schumacher                       Objective          15th 25-26 Distance World Cup

    Zak Ketterson                           Objective          29th 25-26 Distance World Cup

    Ben Ogden                                Discretion         29th Toblach 20 km C Pursuit

    Hunter Wonders                       Discretion         1st US Nationals 10 km C

    Luke Jager                                Discretion         2nd US Nationals 10 km C

    John Hagenbuch                       Discretion         4th US Nationals 10 km C

    Zanden McMullen                     Alternate          5th US Nationals 10 km C

    JC Schoonmaker                        Alternate          Historic WC Distance C Results

     

    Women

    Hailey Swirbul                           Objective          25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader

    Jessie Diggins                            Objective          25-26 Overall World Cup Leader

    Julia Kern                                  Objective          30th 25-26 Distance World Cup

    Rosie Brennan                          Discretion         24th Ruka 10 km C

    Novie McCabe                          Discretion         2nd US Nationals 10 km C

    Sammy Smith                            Discretion         3rd US Nationals 10 km C

    Ava Thurston                            Discretion         4th US Nationals 10 km C

    Kendall Kramer                         Discretion         5th US Nationals 10 km C

    Alayna Sonnesyn                       Alternate          27th Ruka 20 km Mass Start

    Samantha Smith (USA) racing the World Cup individual sprint in Goms (SUI) in 2024. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    Goms Sprint C

    Men

    Zach Jayne                                Objective          25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader

    Ben Ogden                                Objective          4th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Jack Young                                Objective          21st 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Gus Schumacher                       Objective          27th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    JC Schoonmaker                        Objective          36th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Kevin Bolger                             Objective          40th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Zak Ketterson                           Discretion         18th Val di Fiemme Sprint C, 36th Toblach Sprint F

    John Schwinghamer                  Alternate          1st US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

    Will Koch                                  Alternate          2nd US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

    Owen Young                             Alternate          3rd US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

     

    Women

    Hailey Swirbul                           Objective          25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader

    Jessie Diggins                            Objective          25-26 Overall World Cup Leader

    Julia Kern                                  Objective          20th 25-26 Sprint World Cup

    Rosie Brennan                          Discretion         15th Ruka Sprint C

    Sammy Smith                            Discretion         1st US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

    Ava Thurston                            Discretion         3rd US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

    Erin Bianco                               Discretion         4th US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

    Lauren Jortberg                        Discretion         5th US Nationals Sprint C qualifier

    Alayna Sonnesyn                       Alternate          27th Davos Sprint F

    Jessie Diggins (USA) and Frida Karlsson (SWE), (l-r) coming to the line in Goms (SUI) in 2024. (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    The above discretionary selections were nominated by a 15-person working group that included:

    James Southam                         Athlete Rep

    Ida Sargent                               Athlete Rep

    Perry Thomas                           Mansfield Pro Nordic Team

    Chad Salmela                            Team Birkie

    Andy Newell                             Bridger Ski Foundation

    Erik Flora                                  Alaska Pacific University

    Pepa Miloucheva                      Craftsbury GRP

    Colin Rodgers                            SMS T2

    Peter Holmes                            SVSEF Gold Team

    Sophie Caldwell                        Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club

    Eliška Albrigtsen                        Denver University

    Chris Grover                             USST

    Matt Whitcomb                        USST

    Jason Cork                                USST

    Kristen Bourne                          USST

     

    The nominations were then approved by a discretionary selection review group comprised of:

     

    Tyler Kornfield                          U.S. Ski & Snowboard Athlete Rep

    Anouk Patty                              U.S. Ski & Snowboard Chief of Sport

    Bryan Fish                                 U.S. Ski & Snowboard Development Director

     

    The above discretionary selection process will be repeated for each period of World Cup this coming season.  As always, if you have questions or concerns about this process, feel free to contact me directly.

     

    Sincerely,

    Chris Grover

    Cross Country Program Director, U.S. Ski Team

    chris.grover@usskiandsnowboard.org

  • A Narrow Door, Held Open: The Men’s 20 k Freestyle at U.S. Nationals

    A Narrow Door, Held Open: The Men’s 20 k Freestyle at U.S. Nationals

    This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.

    The start of the US National Cross-Country Ski Championship Men’s 20 k Freestyle Mass Start. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    There are moments in endurance sport when the noise falls away—not because the stakes are small, but because they are too large to announce themselves loudly. The men who gathered on the start line at Mount Van Hoevenberg on Thursday afternoon understood that kind of quiet. The banners said US National Championships. The calendar said 20 k Freestyle Mass Start. The course—four laps of five kilometers, stitched together by long climbs and fast descents—said this will be honest. But the silence said Olympics!

    For much of the week in Lake Placid, honesty had come quickly. The 10 k classic individual start exposed margins. The sprint laid bare specialization. By the time the men lined up for the 20 k Freestyle Mass Start, the argument had narrowed. There were medals to be won, yes, but more importantly, there were questions still unresolved about who might fit through the narrowing door of Olympic selection.

    For Zanden McMullen, the stakes were explicit. “Today’s race was a ‘one shot, one opportunity’ type of race for me,” he said later. He knew that anything short of a win would leave his Olympic case incomplete. That knowledge sat heavily over the first kilometers—not as panic, but as pressure carefully managed.

    What followed was not a race that fractured early or declared itself with theatrics. Instead, it unfolded as a study in restraint.

    A large, shifting group stayed at the front early on in the race. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    A Race That Refused to Break

    From the opening lap, the field behaved in a way that confounded expectations. In contrast to the women’s race earlier in the day, no decisive break formed. Attacks surfaced briefly—on climbs, into transitions—but were quickly absorbed by the physics of the course. Downhills regrouped the field. Drafting mattered. The snow was fast, the air cold enough to preserve glide, and separation proved expensive.

    John Steel Hagenbuch allowed himself to drift deep into the pack early—sometimes close to twentieth—an approach that looked counterintuitive given both his fitness and his history on the course. It was neither indecision nor passivity. “I was just staying relaxed and letting people work out some energy that I knew wasn’t going to result in any meaningful gain,” he explained. “Racing in the U.S. is very different than racing on the World Cup, and being able to relax at the start of a mass start race is perhaps the best example of that.”

    Zanden McMullen (APU) and his APU teammates Hunter Wonders (#208) and Luke Jager (#204). (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    The early splits reflected this tension. Leaders rotated through the front, but gaps rarely exceeded a handful of seconds. By the midpoint of the race, the field had thinned not through violence but through attrition—skiers falling off the back as the pace remained relentlessly honest.

    McMullen, meanwhile, adhered to a plan that demanded patience. “My race strategy was to conserve as much energy as possible,” he said. “Every time a move was made, I made sure to match it calmly but decisively.” By the second lap, he sensed the race’s texture changing. The pack stretched. Breathing deepened. The small inefficiencies of earlier surges began to show.

    Zach Jayne, consistently present near the front group, felt that tension acutely. “Holding position is always difficult,” he said. “So being aware while racing is important.” In a race defined by proximity rather than separation, awareness became a skill as valuable as strength.

    Olivier Leveille (CNEPH), John Steel Hagenbuch (Dartmouth), Zanden McMullen (APU), Jakob Elias Moch (CU), and Brian Bushey (Craftsbury) (l -r). (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    Decisions Not Taken

    If the race hinged on a single moment, it may have been defined instead by two moments when nothing happened.

    Hagenbuch identified them clearly. The first came at the start of the third lap, at the base of the long climb—a place where he has both won and lost races before. “Looking back at it now,” he said, “the one that makes me wonder the most is the decision to not attack on the third lap.” His reasoning was sound. The conditions were fast. The field regrouped quickly on descents. “In order to get away, you would have to be very fit and have the best skis in the race,” he said. Unsure that any gap would hold, he chose restraint.

    Mons Melbye (UU) leads Zanden McMullen (APU) and John Steel Hagenbuch (Dartmouth), and Jakob Elias Moch (CU) (r – l) down the final downhill into the stadium. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    The second moment arrived on the final sprint climb before the descent into the stadium. Again, Hagenbuch assessed the cost-benefit. He believed he could crest first—but likely only to be swallowed by the draft. “As such, I decided to follow Zanden over the top,” he said. “I think this was the correct thing to do tactically.”

    That calculus—when to go, when to wait—defined the race for several athletes. McMullen made the same choice from the opposite perspective. “There was no need to do anything rash,” he said. “Just go out and race hard and smart.”

    The result was a front group of four that arrived at the final kilometer together, legs full but not shattered, tension compressed into seconds.

    Zanden McMullen (APU) and John Steel Hagenbuch (Dartmouth) follow Jakob Elias Moch (CU) near the end of the race. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    The Finish

    As the leaders dropped off the final descent and into the stadium, the race became what everyone suspected it would be: a matter of position, timing, and nerve.

    McMullen entered the final stretch calm by design. “During the final lap, I knew it would come down to the final meters,” he said, “and I just made sure to relax as much as I could.”

    Hagenbuch, attempting to execute his finishing move, found the narrow margins of mass-start racing unforgiving. “Getting around Jakob was the crux move of the finishing maneuver I was trying to execute,” he said. “And there just wasn’t enough room for me to come around.” Pushed slightly wide through the final sweeping corner, he lost the speed he needed. “That’s racing,” he added. “It didn’t pan out, but it doesn’t always.”

    McMullen surged cleanly to the line, stopping the clock at 47:37.0. The University of Utah’s Mons Melby was 7-tenths of a second behind, with Hagenbuch a second from the win for third. Behind them, the rest of the field streamed in—gaps small, order consequential.

    Zanden McMullen (APU), John Steel Hagenbuch (Dartmouth), and Jakob Elias Moch (CU) — with Mons Melbye (UU) off camera — come down the finish stretch. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    What the Race Revealed

    On paper, the result was simple: a national champion crowned. In context, it was anything but.

    For McMullen, the victory represented survival as much as success. “The Olympic selection has definitely been looming over my head all week,” he admitted. The stress was real. So was the clarity. He did what he could do.

    For Hagenbuch, the outcome carried both frustration and resolve. “I still have faith that there is a path for me to the Olympics,” he said, while acknowledging that the decision now sits elsewhere. He stood by his choice to skip the Tour de Ski, citing health and long-term belief. It was not a plea, but a statement of readiness.

    Zach Jayne, who again placed himself among the front contenders, viewed the week through a longer lens. “If you look at my results a year ago or two, I was barely a name in the competitive field,” he said. Improvement, for him, is cumulative. “Overall development is just as important to me as any given race.”

    The national podium for the US National Cross-Country Ski Championship Men’s 20 k Freestyle Mass Start with Zanden McMullen (APU) first, John Steel Hagenbuch (Dartmouth) second, and Zach Jayne (UU) third. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

    A Door, Not Yet Closed

    National championships often promise clarity. This one offered something subtler: differentiation without finality. The men’s 20 k freestyle did not decide everything, but it sharpened the picture. It showed who could manage pressure, who could read a race, who could wait—and who could finish.

    In an Olympic winter, those qualities matter as much as any single result.

    As the stadium emptied and the snow settled back into quiet, the door to Milan–Cortina did not swing wide. But for one, and hopefully two skiers, it remained open, narrow, demanding, and earned.

     

    RESULTS:

    US Nationals Men’s 20 k Freestyle Mass Start

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    The feed zone is always full of chaos and excitement during a mass start. (Photo: Nancie Battaglia)
  • Two Degrees, One Dream: How a Future Teacher Found Her Way to the World Cup

    Two Degrees, One Dream: How a Future Teacher Found Her Way to the World Cup

    The Hill That Got Easier

    On an ordinary winter afternoon in Fairbanks, before NCAA titles and World Cup bibs and FIS profiles, there was just a loop—eight hundred meters of snow and one long, unforgiving hill.

    Middle-school Kendall Kramer skied it after class, day after day, with her dad. Birch Hill. Blue Loop. One big climb, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow. What changed was how it felt.

    “We would just go for, like, 30 minutes after middle school every day,” she remembers. “And I remember really liking the feeling of this specific loop in Fairbanks at Birch Hill called Blue Loop. It’s like 800 meters, but it has this really big, steep, long hill. And we would do that every day. And I became really addicted to feeling like the hill was easier to get up every single day.”

    Kramer didn’t start as the kid who loved hard things. She started as the kid who had to be bribed—stickers, money, chocolate, extra iPad time—just to go outside with her very active dad, a former Washington State runner who picked up skiing when he moved back home to Fairbanks.

    “I really didn’t like hard things. I didn’t like pushing myself. I didn’t like going outside. I didn’t like athleticism,” she says now, half amused, half incredulous. “I was into theater, and I went to art camps, and I went to fashion designing and sewing camps, and I was just doing a bunch of art stuff until seventh grade.”

    The shift did not come from some early, noble desire to maximize her potential. It came from middle-school social dynamics: her best friend and the “cool, funny kids” were in the local ski club, FXC. They were getting strong; she wanted in.

    “All of the cool, funny kids, and my best friend, were on the ski club FXC,” she says. “I noticed that she was getting really muscular. And, I want to get muscular too. That was literally my motivation. I wanted to spend more time with my friends.”

    So she flipped the script. The kid who once needed bribing was suddenly begging to ski. “In middle school, I asked [my dad] to take me skiing every day,” she says. “I liked the feeling of the work I was putting in quantifying to something. You don’t get that with everything in life.”

    That tiny addiction—to feeling the hill get easier—would quietly rewire the course of her life.

    Running Into an Identity

    Before she thought of herself as an athlete, there was one race that hinted at what might be possible: a local 5K in eighth grade.

    “There was this one race,” she says. “There was this local 5K, and I won that. And I beat a UAF girl. And I was in eighth grade. And so then I thought, oh, I could start training for another level at this.”

    It’s a funny hinge moment: a middle-schooler passing a college athlete on a random Fairbanks course—”I think it was the Chena River Run 5K”—and suddenly reevaluating what “participation” might mean.

    From there, skiing and running braided together. Everyone in her circle seemed to do both—cross-country in the fall, cross-country skiing in the winter, track in the spring. The sports gave structure to adolescence. They also gave her a first glimpse of what high-level results feel like: she made Junior Nationals, then Junior Worlds, and at 16, in her first year there, she finished fourth.

    It looked, from the outside, like a linear rise.

    It wasn’t.

    Kendall Kramer on her way to fourth place in the U20 15 k classic mass start at World Juniors in Lahti, Finland. (Photo: Doug Stephen)

    Burnout at the Top of the Podium

    The breakout year rolled into something heavier. Right as college coaches were calling and scholarships were appearing, Kramer’s relationship with skiing began to fracture.

    “After my breakout year, I went through a large burnout of skiing,” she says. “Looking back, maybe kind of predicted with how huge a jump it was… but I went through a huge burnout that happened to coincide with my senior year of high school.”

    She was in the rare position of being heavily recruited and deeply ambivalent about the thing doing the recruiting.

    “I didn’t want to do any athletics,” she says. “I wanted to go to school. I just wanted to do academics. I only applied to Ivy League colleges, [but] I didn’t get into them.”

    The plan, as she saw it then, was to walk away from elite sport altogether. No more ski clubs, no more interval sessions, no more World Juniors. She would be a student, full stop.

    But mid-winter, another pivot arrived. Running, with its promise of a single daily practice and a more contained lifestyle, began to look like a compromise.

    “I was like, I’ll run,” she recalls. “I really feel like I could have a balanced life if I just ran in college. I might as well do something athletic.” She started talking “very seriously” with Northwestern—”for quite a few months,” she says, laughing at how she kept mixing it up with Northeastern.

    Still, skiing lurked in the background. Friends were planning official visits. There were trips to New England—Dartmouth, UVM—to meet both ski and running coaches. “We worked out a plan for me,” she says of Dartmouth, “like what days I would go to running practice, what days I’d go to ski practice, how I would do all of that.”

    In those conversations, UAF—her hometown university in Fairbanks—barely registered as a serious option. If anything, it was the anti-option.

    “There’s a FasterSkier article where [Jason Albert] interviewed me my senior year of high school,” she says. “I did say, ‘Oh, I’m definitely not going to UAF.’ Because I need to get away. Just like every high school senior.”

    The only reason she even agreed to visit was for social reasons. “I had a bunch of friends at that time… they were also going on an official visit, and I wanted to hang out with them at UAF for that weekend,” she says. “I was like, ugh, okay, fine, I’ll go to UAF for the weekend.”

    That reluctant trip changed everything.

    Choosing the “Wrong” School

    UAF did not look like the kind of program that impresses strangers in an Instagram bio. It looked like something else: a coherent life.

    Kramer noticed first what happened away from intervals and wax benches.

    “The team I felt really… not only got along just at practice, and practice was fun, but they chose to hang out with each other as people outside,” she says. “They really felt genuine about it. They are really friends with each other. They actually care about each other. They’re having fun. They’re all a little bit weird.”

    The second revelation was structural. At UAF, running and skiing weren’t two programs negotiating over a dual-sport athlete’s time. They were one.

    “At UAF, it’s literally one program,” she says. “We share a locker room and a team room, and the coaches have their offices in the same room. Like, it’s really the same program, cross-country running and skiing.” While coaches at other schools were willing to coordinate, the Fairbanks setup was seamless. “I barely had to, like, go out of my way. I didn’t have to change my training at all with UAF, and that was really valuable.”

    There was also something less tangible: the sense that staying close to home might be protective at a time when she was “really… sensitive mentally.”

    “This is really a tumultuous time for me,“ she recalls thinking. “I can stay close to home. I don’t have to change too much while I’m in this mental state. I can see my family every single week. I think that would be a really good move for me.“

    From the outside, it didn’t fit the script; hometown program, Div. II running, and a school she had publicly ruled out. She knew people would talk.

    “Of course, people, you know, judge me for staying in my hometown,“ she says now. “People still are like, ah, you needed to finally leave Fairbanks. You need to get out. But I know that didn’t sound the best, that I’m going to UAF, because it’s not ‘the‘ program. But I’m really glad that I let what things ‘sound like‘ go, because it gave me a lot of happiness, and it made me feel like it was my choice.“

    Reverse Podiums and the Slow Build Back

    UAF didn’t magically solve everything. Her first years there were heavy.

    “My first two years, not only was I recovering from burnout and not wanting to go to practice at all and really trying to get back into sport my whole freshman year of college,“ she says, “I was also super overtrained, and I could not go fast for the life of me. I think that I was getting a ‘reverse podium’ in my Western college races.“

    The COVID year wiped out her first NCAA running season entirely—”there’s just no running races held,“ she notes. In skiing, she salvaged an All-American by the end of winter, but the trajectory felt nothing like her high-school ascent.

    If her junior years had been a rocket ship, college was more like a slow climb back onto the trail.

    “Luckily, I feel like one of my strengths athletically, besides that, blip, is consistency,“ she says. “I did feel like it was a gradual buildup leading up to my last year at UAF, where both [sports] were progressing from that low burnout point.“

    On the running side, her NCAA results tell the story: 170th in her first nationals, then 8th—”because it was cold and super late, so I was already in ski form”—then 20th, then runner-up in Sacramento. She says, simply, “That was really cool.”

    In skiing, she went from anonymous trips to the NCAA Championship to a national title. Before that win, she says, “I don’t think I got better than seventh at other NCAAs.“ Last March, she finally broke through and won.

    It wasn’t a straight line. But it was, in its own way, a larger version of the Blue Loop lesson: keep showing up, let the hill get fractionally easier, trust that one day you crest the top.

    Two Degrees, One Classroom

    Through all of this, Kramer was not just an athlete. She was building an intellectual life, too.

    “Yes. Biology, specifically, arctic ecology, which was cool. And psychology,“ she says, almost offhand, when asked about her majors.

    The combination sounds eclectic until she explains her real career ambition.

    “It seems unrelated to both of them,“ she says, “but it is actually related to both of them, as I want to teach.” She’s not yet sure about age group—”I am leaning towards high school”—but the vision is clear: “I want to teach high school science and high school psychology. I think [that] is a way to be still involved with both of my subjects.“

    This is not a vague, post-sport idea. She’s already testing it. This year, while racing and training out of Anchorage, Kramer has been substitute teaching.

    “I’ve been substitute teaching, actually, this year in Anchorage,“ she says. “That’s been really cool. That’s exposed me to that, and I have really confirmed that it’s something that I enjoy going into, and I feel fulfilled after I do the job, and I really enjoy it, and it’s something new every day.“

    The logistics fit surprisingly well with elite training. Kramer logs into the Anchorage School District’s database, looks a week ahead, and drops half-days into the white space between sessions.

    “You can go into the online database every week,“ she explains. “You’re like, oh, I don’t have training Monday, and it’s on your own Wednesday, and we have our afternoons off on Thursdays, so I could do all those days. And then you just sign up for what you can do.“ Elementaries offer half-days—”like 11:30 to 2:30″—which sit perfectly between morning and afternoon workouts. “It’s really good pay,“ she adds, “and that’s completely in between the two sessions, so it’s really been perfect.“

    There is also a deeper satisfaction. “I think it’s a really respectable career,“ she says of teaching. “I think that it’s… one of the pillars of society. And so I would feel really fulfilled every day doing that.“

    It makes the future feel less contingent on a result sheet.

    “In my personal life aspect,“ she says, “to know that I have a career available for me at any time that I want to take it, that I really am passionate and excited about, not just something that pays a bill… I’d be perfectly fine if I were doing that.“

    The Type-A Gap Year

    Kramer did not grow up assuming she would ski professionally.

    “I still am… it was a surprise to me that I am even skiing past college,“ she says. “I really was planning on, you know, doing my absolute best through college, but ending on a high note.“

    This season, now that she’s graduated, is something different: “an experimental year in the first place of just trying out professional skiing, giving myself, like, a gap year of sorts and seeing how it plays out.“

    She is grateful that the experiment is optional, not existential.

    “I’m really grateful to have some educational and career stuff that I really am also passionate and fulfilled by to fall back on,“ she says. “If along the lines [skiing] becomes not what I’m enjoying anymore… I really am enjoying it right now, so that’s what I’m finding in my gap year, I guess. But yeah, I really am taking it year by year.“

    It’s an outlook that sits a little oddly with the logistics of the World Cup, where you can’t plan a life too far in advance. Her personality wants spreadsheets; the selection system gives you “we’ll tell you Sunday.“

    “I’m extremely Type-A,“ she says, laughing at herself. “I packed my ski bag for this Europe trip, like, two weeks before I left. And everyone I was asking what skis they’re bringing, they’re like, ‘I haven’t even thought about it.‘ I like to plan months in advance for things.“

    Right now, as she races into mid-winter, that Type-A planner is bumping against the uncertainty of World Cup selection. Tour de Ski rosters, for example, are announced three days after Davos.

    “I haven’t necessarily done something that makes it, like, super obvious that I’m going to Tour de Ski,“ she admits. “I haven’t gotten a top 30 or 20 or whatever. And so I’m actually completely unsure. I’m definitely having a freak-out situation where on Sunday night, when I finish my Davos race, I don’t know where I’m going.“

    She’d love to do the Tour—”I would take the opportunity… if it’s granted to me”—but she’s honest that she hasn’t hit the automatic criteria, and that there may be Lake Placid nationals in her near future instead. “There are no bad options,“ she says, sounding like someone who has practiced this perspective.

    Kendall Kramer (USA) racing the 10 k Freestyle this past weekend in Trondheim (NOR). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    Racing in the Deep End

    On paper, her World Cup results this year might make casual fans nervous: numbers in the 30s and 40s, no breakthrough into the top 20—yet. From inside the bib, it feels very different.

    “I feel like I have done really good races,“ she says. “I felt like I could push every second. I feel like I’m recovering really fast. I feel strong in my skiing. I’m really liking how I’m taking the races, and I’m going absolutely as hard as I can.“

    What’s changed, she says, is her understanding of context.

    “I think that it’s opened my eyes to… how things look on paper on a ski race,“ she says. “People back home have maybe been watching, and they’ve seen placement numbers near my name that they haven’t seen before… And I don’t think that people understand the context of the strength of these athletes that we’re against here.“

    Everyone is there in Period 1. Everyone is fit. Everyone is fighting for the same 0.3 seconds.

    “Even though we are strong and fast as well,“ she says, “that’s just where we’re ending up in this pool of really… the strongest and fastest in the world.“

    Kendall Kramer (USA) on her way to 18th place in the 10km Freestyle iin, Cogne (ITA) last February. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Still, the goals are clear. “I definitely go into any World Cup wanting a top 30,“ she says. “That opens a lot of doors for the national team… I have reached that level before,“ she adds, noting her 18th in a World Cup 10K skate last year. “Top 30 is a pretty sweet spot.“

    She is also honest about the practical stakes. “Top 30s will get you nominations for more things,“ she says. “That’s a really good number.“

    On the Olympic question, she doesn’t dodge.

    “Yeah,“ she says when asked if making the team is a big goal. Then she pauses. “I’m trying to… so far, I could just take it weekend by weekend. I really hope that by doing my best every single time and making the correct decisions, it can build up to that, and I can do well enough to earn a spot there. But I’m not going to define if my season was worthwhile or if I’m a talented athlete or whatnot on that.“

    It’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s that she refuses to let a quadrennial selection meeting be the sole judge of her life.

    Kendall  Kramer (USA) – racing the Mixed Relay in Engadin (SUI) last January. (Photo: Authamayou/NordicFocus)

    Process Over Podiums

    If you want to understand how she’s trying to get there, you don’t look at the results sheet. You look at the small, specific things she’s attacking.

    “I’m trying to be braver on downhills,“ she says. “I’ve always been very cautious because I think I’ve just had too many instances where I’ve tried to be crazy on something, and then I break something, and it ends up costing more time than if I just skittered a little bit.“

    She’s working on classic technique so she doesn’t feel like she’s “just flailing around and fighting my kick all the time.” She’s learning to lean into the brutality of World Cup individual starts, where a tenth of a second can be the difference between important FIS points she is chasing.

    She is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an individual-start partisan. Mass starts have burned her before.

    “In every Junior World mass start race, I’ve had somebody knock into me and break my pole, and then I’m out of it,“ she says. “Or I fall, and I’m out of it… Your race was defined by someone else.“ On the World Cup, she loves that an individual start feels like “how I ski the course against how other people ski the course, as opposed to if you’re in the right place at the right time.“

    She also wants something simpler: volume.

    “I really want to take every opportunity presented to me,“ she says. “I really like to race, and I like being in the thick of race season. I want to race a lot, and I feel like I’ve built up now a tolerance to building on a lot of races.“ For the first time, she’s planning to carry a full season through the SuperTour Finals. “I want to have a real ski season like the rest of the skiers who start racing in December instead of August… and keep myself together through the end of Spring Series.“

    It’s a small, quiet ambition. It’s also a radical one in a sport where so many seasons end in March with more relief than joy.

    Kramer racing the World Cup 10 k Freestyle in Minneapolis (USA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    The Hill, Again

    These days, Kramer spends more time on World Cup courses than on the Blue Loop. The hills are longer now. The stakes are higher. There are TV cameras, FIS points, and spreadsheets full of criteria that will determine who gets a call before the Olympics.

    But if you strip all of that away—if you put her on a snowy climb and ask what she’s chasing—it doesn’t sound all that different from the middle-schooler trying to make it to the top without stopping.

    “I like the feeling of bettering myself,“ she said of those first, shaky loops at Birch Hill.

    This fall, between substitute teaching shifts and Type-A packing lists, and this winter between Tour de Ski uncertainties and top-30 dreams, she is still chasing that feeling: the knowledge that the hill is getting a little easier, and that the life she’s building, with two degrees, one dream, and a classroom waiting, makes sense no matter what the result sheet says.

     

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  • The U.S. Ski Team Star You Won’t See on Snow This Weekend

    The U.S. Ski Team Star You Won’t See on Snow This Weekend

    On Friday afternoon, as World Cup sprinters snap into their skis in Trondheim and the SuperTour fields gather in Fairbanks, one of the United States’ most electrifying young Nordic athletes will step onto an entirely different stage. Stanford University, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Women’s Soccer Tournament, is marching toward the College Cup—and at the center of it all is a player who, in just a matter of days, will also begin her bid for the U.S. Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team.

    The athlete is Sammy Smith: 20 years old, a national-team skier, an Environmental Systems Engineering major, and a starter for one of the most dominant college soccer programs in the country. The U.S. Ski Team views her as one of the most promising sprinters of her generation. And yet this weekend, instead of warming up on hard-packed snow in Norway or chasing early-season points in Alaska, she’ll be preparing to face Duke with advancing to the NCAA Championship Game on the line.

    “Get ready to cheer for one of the U.S. Ski Team’s top skiers this weekend,” you might tell Nordic fans. “Just… not on skis.”

    From the outside, the collision of seasons looks impossible to manage. For Smith, it is simply the life she has known since childhood.

    Idaho in Two Parts

    Smith grew up in a pattern that almost feels mythic now: winters in Sun Valley, summers and the rest of the year in Boise. Her family built the rhythm—her mom moving the kids north each winter so they could ski full-time and homeschool them in those snowy months.

    “I kind of grew up splitting time between Boise and Sun Valley,” Smith says. “My mom would move up to Sun Valley during the winter with my siblings and me so we could ski, and she would homeschool us up there… I did that all through high school.”

    In Boise, she was a typical public school student. In Sun Valley, she became a multi-sport anomaly. Her childhood was not just active—it was encyclopedic.

    “Growing up, I played about every sport one can imagine,” she says. “I ran track and cross country all through high school… I played hockey for a long time. Played football. Yeah, like, you name it, I pretty much did it.”

    Soccer was the constant. She started as soon as a child could sign up—though the Smiths occasionally bent age rules to make sure she could play with older kids. When her older sister started soccer, she was right behind her.

    “It’s probably like three years old when I started,” Smith says.

    And then there was freestyle skiing—a considerable part of her identity, something she expected to pursue more seriously than Nordic. Until one day, she couldn’t.

    “I ended up fracturing my tibia in my sophomore year,” she says. “And so I focused on Nordic that winter… I ended up having a great season, and then haven’t really looked back since.”

    The transition was abrupt, but the groundwork had already been laid: years of downhill confidence, years of skiing, years of learning to read terrain and push limits.

    “I’ve been on skis my entire life,” she says. “Very comfortable on downhills… I love to ski aggressively.”

    The athlete emerging in those years was already something unusual. The athlete she would become—balancing multiple sports at world-class levels—was still unimaginable.

    Against the Specialization Tide

    From the outside, Smith’s career appears to defy the common wisdom of modern youth sports. Increasingly, top athletes specialize early; by high school, many are all-in on one discipline.

    Smith resisted that. Not because she lacked ambition, but because multiple sports gave her joy—and made her better.

    “I think that’s something I’ve really thought a lot about,” she says. “There’s been more and more pressure to specialize… but growing up and doing so many different sports just kind of added to different components of skiing that I think are really important.”

    Soccer, for example, translates directly into sprint racing.

    “It’s a very high-paced game,” she says. “There’s a lot of change of direction, a lot of accelerating and decelerating. Particularly when you’re looking at heats, a lot of it is reacting to other people’s moves, trying to find little gaps and squeeze through.”

    The skill set becomes a competitive edge: quickness, agility, and decision-making under pressure.

    “That ability to shift gears really quickly and take openings when you can really emulates in soccer,” she says.

    Freestyle skiing contributed something else entirely: creativity and courage on skis, especially in chaotic or technical downhill sections.

    “At World Juniors last year,” she recalls, “everyone was in the track. I hopped out of the track, went far on the inside, and just double poled… It was a risky move, but it was something I saw.”

    She paused for only a moment before going all-in. It worked.

    The blend—soccer fuel, freestyle instinct, Nordic engine—gives her a uniqueness rarely seen in American skiing.

    U.S. Ski Team head coach Matt Whitcomb sees it clearly.

    “She’s a world-class athlete,” Whitcomb says. “She’s already exhibited the early signs of being a World Cup star.”

    That she is doing this while starting for Stanford’s soccer team? To him, it’s not a contradiction. It’s part of the magic.

    Why Stanford — and Why Now

    Choosing Stanford was not simple. Smith had options—many of them. But a few factors stood out.

    “I really value my education,” she says. “Stanford’s a great school. It’s where my mom went. And my sister is also on the soccer team, so the opportunity to get to play college soccer with her is pretty hard to pass up.”

    Her academic path—Environmental Systems Engineering with an energy concentration—fits a pattern among elite U.S. skiers. Many of the top men (Gus Schumacher, Ben Ogden, et al.) have gravitated toward engineering. Smith sees the overlap, too.

    “You look at a skier and the training that they do,” she says. “They’re very self-motivated, very committed. So I’m sure certain aspects translate pretty well.”

    The challenge, of course, is that Stanford is far from snow. It is not close to ski culture. It is not close to the European World Cup circuit. It is very near, however, to one vital piece of equipment:

    “Fortunately, I have a classic roller-ski treadmill… in a little office space,” she says. “That’s been an irreplaceable part of my training.”

    She uses it for high-quality sessions, often squeezed between classes, labs, or soccer obligations. Running remains a central component, helped by the demands of soccer conditioning.

    But she knows her preparation is different—less volume, more precision. Not ideal. Not textbook. Not expected. And yet:

    “I think I’ve tried to accept that,” she says. “I know that I am not at my best, but skiing is a sport you can do for a very long time. I don’t necessarily need to be the best skier I can be at 20 years old.”

    Again, Whitcomb backs the long view.

    “We’re willing to postpone that timeline,” he says. “We’re just happy for Sammy being happy in her current environment. We’ll take what we can get at this moment, but we want more down the road, and we’re excited for it.”

    This, in many ways, is the crux of the story: the U.S. Ski Team is betting on Sammy Smith not despite her dual identity, but because of it.

    Samantha Smith (USA) racing the World Cup individual sprint in Goms (SUI). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    The Final Four — and Then the Sprint Start Line

    The most astonishing part of Smith’s season is its timing.

    If Stanford beats Duke on Friday in Kansas City, they move directly to the College Cup championship game. The semifinal is December 5th; the final is December 8th, Monday. Smith has already mapped out the days that follow.

    “We’ll get back Tuesday night from Missouri… I have a final at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning,” she says. “I’m going to fly out right after my final, and then I’ll have one day of snow on Thursday in Alaska, and then I’ll be hitting that sprint on Friday.”

    She says this calmly, matter-of-factly, like someone describing a standard weekend trip.

    The Anchorage SuperTour sprint is not just any race—it is her re-entry into skiing, her first day on snow of the season, and a crucial tune-up before U.S. Nationals in Lake Placid, where she hopes to qualify for the Olympic team.

    The Anchorage races, she says, are not performance indicators—they are simply a way to “bust the rust off.”

    “Obviously, a lot of other skiers will have been on snow for well over a month, and I won’t,“ she says. “It’ll just be an opportunity to get on skis, do something fast.”

    Her real focus is the 10-day window between Anchorage and Lake Placid.

    “For me, as more of a sprinter, and the way the criteria is set up, I’ve got to target the qualifiers,“ she says. “So being really deliberate… knowing exactly what I’m going for.”

    The stakes are simple: she must race well at U.S. Nationals to have a shot at Milano-Cortina.

    The stakes are also massive.

    Julia Kern and Sammy Smith paired up for the Team Sprint in Lahti (FIN). (Photo: Nordic Focus)

    The Domestic Gamble

    If Smith had a regular ski season—if she weren’t in the NCAA Tournament—she might have chased World Cup points, fought to crack the top 45, and used international racing to establish selection priority.

    But that route is closed.

    “If you’re only racing a few of the international races, it’s incredibly challenging to get into that top 45,“ she says. “Whereas if you were able to do all of them, it’s a lot more feasible.”

    She knows she has “had some really good World Cup sprints,“ and she wonders—without bitterness—what might be possible in a different academic or athletic setup.

    But this year, it is the domestic route or nothing.

    “That’s what I’m planning on,“ she says. “I need to have some killer races at U.S. Nationals.”

    What sounds like a gamble is, for her, simply the version of the sport she can access this season. And she is okay with that.

    “Just being consistent… being intentional,“ she says. “Doing what I can.”

    Who She Wants to Be

    Ask Smith what success looks like decades from now, and she doesn’t list medals or championships.

    “You look at Jessie’s legacy,“ she says, referencing Jessie Diggins. “The amount of skiers she’s inspired and how much she’s done for the sport… I want people to look back on my career and feel like I’ve done a lot for the sport, inspired the younger generation of skiers, and brought a lot back to my community.“

    It is the kind of answer that feels too mature for her age, but entirely in character.

    She is not racing to avoid mistakes—she is racing toward something: possibility, growth, a long future. Maybe a future on the World Cup. Maybe a future in engineering. Maybe a future doing both.

    But first, she has Duke.

    Samantha Smith (USA) racing the World Cup individual sprint in Minneapolis (USA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
    Samantha Smith (USA) racing the World Cup individual sprint in Minneapolis (USA). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)

    The Athlete You’ll Watch Twice This Month

    When you tune in this Friday—whether you are a Nordic diehard refreshing live timing from Trondheim, or an American fan checking SuperTour results—remember that one of the most important U.S. prospects in cross-country skiing will be competing too. She just happens to be wearing soccer cleats instead of ski boots.

    And next week, she’ll be back on snow, sprinting against the country’s best, staking her claim for a place on the Olympic team.

    The duality is not a distraction for Sammy Smith.

    It is her identity.

    It is what built her.

    And it might be what carries her into the future of American skiing.

    “She’s been playing a ton this year,“ Whitcomb says. “Of course, we want her all to ourselves… but we want more down the road, and we’re excited for it.”

    This weekend, she wants one thing: a berth in the College Cup Final.

    Next weekend, another: a ticket to the Olympics.

    Two worlds.

    Two uniforms.

    One athlete.

    A lot of people will be cheering for Sammy Smith this month. Nordic fans just get to do it twice.

     

    *You can watch #1-ranked Stanford vs. #2-ranked Duke in the women’s College Cup semifinal tomorrow, Friday, December 5, at 8:45 p.m. EST on ESPNU. The game can also be streamed on the ESPN app, Fubo, or Hulu.

     

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    Sammy Smith (USA) in the World Cup individual sprint in Tallinn (EST). (Photo: Modica/NordicFocus)
  • US Ski & Snowboard Announces 2022-23 U.S. Cross Country Team Nominations

    US Ski & Snowboard Announces 2022-23 U.S. Cross Country Team Nominations

    USA I takes the win in Falun’s 4 x 5 k mixed relay. From left to right, Scott Patterson, Rosie Brennan, Zak Ketterson, and Jessie Diggins. (Photo: NordicFocus)
    By Tom Horrocks
    May, 10 2022

    U.S. Ski & Snowboard has announced the 22 athletes nominated to the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team for the 2022-23 season. Nominations include those active athletes who qualified based on the published selection criteria in the prior season.

    In addition to established veterans, including three-time Olympic medalist Jessie Diggins and two-time Olympians Rosie Brennan and Scott Patterson, the 2022-23 Team includes five new members. Moving up to the A Team and joining Diggins, Brennan and JC Schoonmaker for the coming season are 2022 Olympians Julia Kern, Novie McCabe, Ben Ogden and Patterson.

    B Team nominations include 2022 Olympians Hailey Swirbul, Sophia Laukli, Gus Schumacher, Kevin Bolger and Luke Jager. John Steel Hagenbuch and Hunter Wonders move from the D-Team to the B Team, and Zak Ketterson re-joins the national team program as a member of the B Team for the 2022-23 season. Finn O’Connell has been nominated to the B Team for the first time after finishing fourth in the overall SuperTour standings, which included nine individual top-10 results.

    Development Team nominations include returning team athletes Sydney Palmer-Leger – the 2020-21 NCAA Champion – and Zanden McMullen. New Development Team athletes include Sammy Smith, who finished fifth in the freestyle sprint at the 2022 Junior World Championships; and three members of the bronze-medal winning U.S. men’s relay team from the 2022 Junior World Championship – Will Koch, Michael Earnhart, and Walker Hall.

    “This team is the largest in U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s XC history, and it could become our most successful one, too,” noted Head Coach Matt Whitcomb. “There is clear talent, as well as a history of impressive results, but most importantly, these are individuals from many different clubs in the U.S. that are interested in connecting and believing in one another, and pushing hard. Talent and past results don’t get me as excited as a bunch of athletes that are ready to lock in together.”

    Notable retirements following the 2021-22 season include 2022 Olympian Hannah Halvorsen, and Junior World Championships bronze medalist Katharine Odgen.

    The 2022-23 FIS Cross Country World Cup season is scheduled to kick off with races in Ruka, Finland Nov. 25-27. The 2023 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships are scheduled for Feb. 21 through March 5 in Planica, Slovenia.

    A 2022-23 staff announcement will be forthcoming, while an official U.S. Cross Country Ski Team announcement will be made in the fall.

    2022-23 Cross Country Nominations

    (Hometown; Club; Birthdate)

    A TEAM

    Women

    • Rosie Brennan (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Pacific University Ski Nordic Center; 12/21/88)
    • Jessie Diggins (Afton, Minn.; Stratton Mountain School Elite Team; 8/26/91)
    • Julia Kern (Waltham, Mass.; Stratton Mountain School Elite Team; 9/12/97)
    • Novie McCabe (Winthrop, Wash.; Methow Valley Nordic Team/University of Utah; 12/15/01)

    Men

    • Ben Ogden (Landgrove, Vt.; Stratton Mountain School Elite Team/University of Vermont; 2/13/00)
    • Scott Patterson (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center; 1/28/92)
    • JC Schoonmaker (Tahoe City, Calif; University of Alaska Anchorage/Sugar Bowl Ski Team and Academy; 8/12/00)
    Ben Ogden races the quarterfinal of the men’s freestyle sprint during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games. (Photo: NordicFocus)
    B TEAM

    Women

    • Sophia Laukli (Yarmouth, Maine; University of Utah; 6/8/00)
    • Hailey Swirbul (Aspen, Colo.; Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center; 7/10/98)

    Men

    • Kevin Bolger (Minocqua, Wisc.; Sun Valley Gold Team; 4/11/93)
    • John Steel Hagenbuch (Ketchum, Idaho; Sun Valley Gold Team; 10/1/2001)
    • Luke Jager (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center/University of Utah; 1/17/00)
    • Zak Ketterson (Bloomington, Minn; Team Birkie/Northern Michigan University; 4/2/97)
    • Finn O’Connell (Bozeman, Mont.; Bridger Ski Foundation; 6/26/1998)
    • Gus Schumacher (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Winter Stars; 7/25/00)
    • Hunter Wonders (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center; 8/7/98)
    A glittery flag tattooed on her cheek, Hailey Swirbul warms up to lead the American 4 x 5 k Olympic relay team. (Photo: NordicFocus)
    DEVELOPMENT TEAM

    Women

    • Sydney Palmer-Leger (Park City, Utah; Sun Valley Gold Team/University of Utah; 2/4/2002)
    • Sammy Smith (Boise, Idaho; Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation; 9-22-2005)

    Men

    • Michael Earnhart (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center; 8-11-2002)
    • Walker Hall  (Winthrop, Wash.; Methow Valley Nordic Team/University of Utah; 6-11-2002)
    • Will Koch (Peru, Vermont; Stratton Mountain School T2/University of Colorado; 2-21-2002)
    • Zanden McMullen (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center/Montana State University; 5/31/2001)
    Zanden McMullen races a skate pursuit in Ruka, Finland in November, 2021. (Photo: NordicFocus)
    Follow the U.S. Cross Country Team:

    Instagram: @usskiteam
    Facebook: @usskiandsnowboard
    TikTok: @usskiandsnowboard
    Twitter: @usskiteam

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

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

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

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

    ***

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

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

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

    Others are not.

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

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

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

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

    Who knows what, when

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Discretion in the main criteria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    International vs. domestic results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Who gets to the World Cup?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

  • FS Podcast: Grover Talks Budget, Veterans and What Future Success Looks Like

    FS Podcast: Grover Talks Budget, Veterans and What Future Success Looks Like

    U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover supervises a classic-technique drill at an on-snow camp last month at Mt. Bachelor in Bend, Ore.
    U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover supervises a classic-technique drill at an on-snow camp last month at Mt. Bachelor in Bend, Ore.

    Chris Grover has been at it a long time. Since 1993, when he first began coaching cross-country skiing under the tutelage of Sverre Caldwell at the Stratton Mountain School, Grover has migrated from Vermont, to Bend, Ore., and back to his home state of Idaho — all with the goal of fostering the fastest cross-country skiers. Grover caught the attention of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association (USSA) and was brought into the national-team fold as an assistant coach in 1999.

    In 2010, he was named head coach of the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team. Since then, the team has experienced unparalleled success. Skiers like Simi Hamilton, Jessie Diggins, Sadie Bjornsen, Kikkan Randall, and Sophie Caldwell have excelled. But that success also comes at a time when the team’s budget is thin compared to powerhouse nations like Norway.

    U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover (r) discussing classic technique with national-team members Simi Hamilton (c) and Ian Torchia last month at an on-snow camp in Bend, Ore.
    U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover (r) discussing classic technique with national-team members Simi Hamilton (c) and Ian Torchia last month at an on-snow camp in Bend, Ore.

    Despite the wavering budget, the team has made a go of it under Grover’s leadership. Asked about decreasing the stress on B-Team and D-Team athletes that are not fully funded, Grover said the team has created infrastructure to make life easier on the World Cup.

    “We have been able to increase the infrastructure that we build around all athletes on the team, whatever their designation is,” Grover said. “If we go back four or five years ago, we might have only had two to three weeks, maybe four weeks of PT [physiotherapy] coverage on the World Cup during the competition season. And now we are at a point where we have PT coverage continuously on the World Cup season. And that’s because we have been able to use funding to support all athletes all year, to build out the infrastructure.”

    The team is heading into an important two-year cycle with World Championships this coming season followed by the 2018 Olympics. The team is built around a core of skiers that at this point can be called veterans. With that in mind, FasterSkier asked Grover how he attempts to keep skiers from becoming “stale”?

    “Oh gosh. It’s a really good question. It’s one that we are actually we are wrestling with right now, and dealing with right now,” Grover noted.

    Forward thinking and shepherding the skiers to success is foremost on Grover’s mind. Along with his fellow coaches Matt Whitcomb, Jason Cork and Bryan Fish, Grover intends to implement a plan in the next two years he hopes will bring unprecedented success.

    FasterSkier spoke with Grover in Bend on May 19 during the team’s on-snow camp at Mt. Bachelor.

    (To listen to complete interview, click “play” arrow below.)

     

    Ida Sargent (USA), gets encouragement from coach Chris Grover.
    U.S. Ski Team member Ida Sargent gets encouragement from head coach Chris Grover (r) in 2011.