This portion of the interview focuses on an incident that crystalized Dunklee’s resolve to foster cultural change in her chosen sport. Dunklee posted a two-Instagram post back in March in which she documented a transgression in the workplace. 

She posted an image of an HWK Wax calendar featuring a photo of a mostly naked woman. The image in question was taped to a wax cabin window, facing outward, for athletes and staff to see as they walked by.

Dunklee wrote in her Instagram post:

“2 weeks ago the @ibu_biathlonworld launched a new Gender Equality Policy. Why is this so important in a sport that already has gender parity in World Cup athlete participation, prize money, television broadcasting? Here is one example: This calendar was displayed today in the athlete area of the Nove Mesto World Cup. Calenders of scantily clad women are found hanging on the walls of many, perhaps most, nations’ ski waxing cabins. The calendars are often produced and distributed by ski wax companies. This one happens to come from @hwkskiwachs

When I see images like this I feel uncomfortable and objectified. It sends the message that a wax cabin is not a welcome space for me or for other women.

If we want gender equality let’s start with respect.

*clarification: this happens at all World Cup venues and is not unique to this venue*”

 

***

FS: Ok, let’s drill down on gender equity in the sport. There have been some inroads in terms of gender equity in male-dominated sports, you know, in some mainstream sports. For example, there’s a female who is an Asian-American General Manager for a Major League baseball team. There’s Becky Hammond who is a longtime assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs who, you know, living here in Oregon, Hammond was considered for the head coaching job for the Portland Trailblazers –  which made some news here, but she did not get the job. There is clearly more work to be done. But those are two examples in very traditional mainstream sports where some headway is being made. But, let’s speak personally about what you see going on in the U.S. in terms of gender equity in biathlon, and then we can jump to the international arena. Specifically, I would like you to discuss what you feel are the issues for gender equity in biathlon?

SD: In the U.S., we have some female coaches, we certainly don’t have as many as we have male coaches. When I’ve looked at the numbers of participants in team trials over the years, we have often had decent size fields on the Junior men’s side and some years we’ve only had three or four women –  if that – on the women’s side. For some reason, at the youth level, it seems to be a lot more balanced. I’m not certain why, but we tend to lose a lot of women as they age. And I don’t know why, and I don’t know why that’s not also happening on the men’s side.

I think it can be an intimidating sport to get into. I do know my former teammate, a few years back, Emily Dreissigacker started the Girls with Guns program. This was a workshop for girls to try biathlon. Emily had this experience as a kid where she was deterred from the sport early on because of the weight of the rifle and simply skiing around with a rifle. You know, little things like that are our barriers for people. 

Shooting and hunting sports are traditionally more male-dominated spheres. So, the sport can be kind of tricky to get into. It is really nice to know that within our federation we have serious women like Sara Studebaker-Hall, hired to help with our leadership and administration at a really high level. We have Danika Frisbie helping coach and assisting with athlete development. But a few years back, we really didn’t have much of a female presence or leadership either. So we’re getting there, but I would still love to see more girls or programs, specifically for women to develop women coaches and mentor them and give them support.

FS: Off the top of my head, I think Lowell Bailey has been retired for maybe three years now. I’m not sure that is accurate, but he’s retired. Your name and Lowell’s have been associated with the sharp end of the sport now for nearly a decade, you have been the go-tos. And I know Clare has had a really solid run in recent years. But that said, do you feel heard within the U.S. when it comes to your voice for equity?

SD: Oh, yeah, I mean, I would hope I certainly am. I think it can be tougher on the road in the winter because one of the problems with traveling around in a group like ours, is you have a very small group of people that you’re interacting with all the time. And for us, that is the team of athletes, the coaches, our support staff, which includes technicians, physios, sometimes a team doctor. Maybe a press person. And we seldom have any staff on the road that are female. We usually have four female athletes, and then everybody else that we’re traveling around, all winter long, are mostly guys. 

I don’t feel like that’s a challenge that is always totally understood or acknowledged within our federation. I don’t know, sometimes they feel like you’re a little bit of a good old boys club socially, and it’s tough, and a lot of our staff represents a wide variety of nationalities. So the norms can be very different. 

FS: I think it is well understood that gender inequality has been around for thousands of years. In the recent past, since the #MeToo movement began, it just seemed to be a moment in time, culturally, where people are becoming more aware. But that said, to your liking, and more specifically, has the national federation begun equity training for staff?

SD: I don’t think so. I don’t think that has been a thing, I mean I haven’t been part of any staff training, so I don’t know what they actually have trained in, but I feel like that’s kind of become a hot button issue in the past year or two. And I don’t know. That’s a great question.

FS: And I bring that up because I do feel like, you know, a lot of people know a lot of people maybe roll their eyes and, but the bottom line is that training moves the needle a little bit. It informs people. 

You have signed on as an Athlete Ambassador for gender equity at the international federation level. Why did you feel prepared now to take on a leadership role, and then specifically, why gender equity? Although, you have touched upon that already. 

SD: I can go into more detail. First of all, I do not feel prepared. And I think I have a long way to go to learn and educate myself about these topics and feel more articulate about them. But I don’t necessarily think that I have to feel 100% prepared to start working on it. The only way I’m going to learn more about this and become more effective at this is by putting my feet in the water. 

The incident that really sparked my interest in this occurred this past winter. I don’t know if you follow my Instagram account, but I made a post in March, we were in Nove Mesto towards the end of the season. 

And for my entire World Cup career, it has been normal in the wax cabins, of most of the teams I would guess, I don’t know for sure, but I’m assuming, it’s probably most of the teams to have calendars on the walls. Calendars of scantily clad women. And a lot of times these calendars are manufactured and distributed by wax companies. That’s just one of those sorts of things that you just have to accept if you’re going to the World Cup: that this is going to be the culture. You are going to walk into the wax cabin to pick up your race skis or to drop off your skis, and you’re going to see these images all over the wall. 

Coming from the US where that sort of thing just seems so outdated to me, it’s like you don’t see images like that in a professional work environment. I think that’s really common still over in Europe and even talking to some of my friends in Germany, they don’t understand why I feel so upset when I see stuff like that. But that’s always bothered me and it’s just kind of been in the background all these years. 

My teammates have felt the same way when you walk into a room —  you feel objectified when you see shit like that. And we’ve tried some kind of playful and fun ways to bring up the issue. We went to a store and found a male calendar and we put it up on the wax cabin walls. 

That’s a tradition that we do once a year or so, and it usually would get ripped down right away by our wax staff. It was very much just kind of a fun way to say, ‘hey this is a thing and we think it’s kind of ridiculous and this is happening and we’re going to try to make it more equal.’ 

But at the end of the day, I think it’s really better to not have any images at all like that. 

So back to my Instagram post – when I was in Nove Mesto at the biathlon venue, I’m walking through the athlete area and I saw on the window, it’s not our team and the team doesn’t really matter, there’s a calendar, one of those calendars, but it’s facing outwards so you can see it from the athlete area. 

I thought, ‘Ooh this is a perfect opportunity, I’m just going to take a picture of that.’

I posted the photo on Instagram. And I just talked about it on Instagram, like, ‘Hey this is in the athlete area. And this is kind of a norm, the wax companies actually give out these calendars.’

It created this crazy outrage, I’ve never had an Instagram post go so wild before. The first thing that happened was I had a lot of support and Mona Brorsson and Sebastian Samuelson, some of the Swedes, reposted it too. 

The Swedish media picked up on it, absolutely outraged, and I think Sweden is one of the places where gender equality has been thought about for some years now. I think a lot of Swedish media stories actually put some pressure on the wax companies like HWK, which published the particular calendar I had posted a photo of. That response was kind of cool to see. 

But, then about 12 hours later the Czech news agencies picked up on the story, and I just got slammed with all sorts of stuff, really negative and poisonous and toxic comments that were hurtful. I was really glad to have my teammates to talk to about that. 

But it was like, wow, this is a place where something that I thought was so obvious and that should not be there, there should be no room for this sort of image, and more specifically at the professional sports level like this. The fact that this was so controversial was really enlightening. We have a lot of work to do to create an environment that’s welcoming to everybody. 

I think a lot of athletes don’t really feel comfortable speaking up about that stuff and it’s taken me 10 years to speak up about something like the calendar.

FS: Wow, I’m sorry you were exposed to that type of toxicity. And when you began your story, I defaulted to the trope of automobile or auto-part calendars, not ski wax companies. Some of the biggest role models in skiing across the disciplines are women. 

Ok, so you’re talking about the international community with so many different cultural norms. How do you go about it? I’m assuming since you are an IBU Athlete Ambassador, that you have to examine this from an international perspective. If you are thinking of creating solutions, how do you start that discussion or how do you think you should push that discussion to get people in the room who might not necessarily agree with you? 

SD: I think from the outside it really looks like a progressive sport in terms of gender equity, sure. It’s one of the few sports out there where women and men have equal prize money, equal participation at the highest level, equal TV coverage for the most part. We even have formats like the single mixed relay and mixed relay where the woman and men race together in the same race, and they’ve even started experimenting with switching the order up so sometimes the guy goes first, sometimes the girl goes first. 

And when they do that, it changes the race distance, and in a single mixed relay when the woman goes second she actually skis more kilometers than the man in that race, I think that’s really kind of cool. That’s also controversial and not everybody’s happy with it, including a lot of women, but they’re definitely pushing the envelope on that sort of format.

If you were to look around behind the scenes at a World Cup, you would see one wax technician out of about 100 in total, that is female — her name is Stefani and she’s from Bulgaria. She’s a badass. 

You’ll see a couple of coaches perhaps. But, it’s rare to ever see anybody in a technical role, maybe every now and then you might see one woman there, but technical delegates, most international referees, tend to be male.

And I think one of the images that really struck me this spring, I joined an unconscious bias training the IBU was running, and they contracted out with a university in Berlin to run this program. The professor started by showing us a picture of different boards, executive boards from organizations around the world of businesses. Of course, there’s still a lot of businesses that still have a high percentage of older white males on their boards. 

Then she showed us a picture of the IBU Executive Board. And even though I know Clare really well and I hear her talk about her work with the IBU on the Executive Board, I had not processed, just how crazy it was that she’s the one woman in that group of 10 people.

Just that visual, to me, was very powerful and as an ambassador, I am trying to identify things that will be powerful for people to see or hear about, and that will help move the needle a little bit. 

Yes, it’s interesting to try to think through what are the things people are going to respond to, because, I can see that there’s a problem, but if other people don’t see a problem there’s never going to be change.

FS: What comes to mind is when Laura Ingraham, a conservative commentator, said of LeBron James, “Shut up and dribble,” when the athlete discusses being a Black male in the U.S. I know biathlon is not the NBA, especially in the U.S., but it is a major, if not the major winter sport in much of Europe and Russia. I’m just curious, are you preparing yourself psychologically for some major pushback and people demanding that you stay in your lane? 

SD: I did already see a lot on social media. But, I think, going back to where we started in this conversation though, when I view all that corruption in the top leadership, that was really eye-opening to me. And if we didn’t do something as athletes, then nothing was going to change. 

I felt like it is and was our responsibility when you see that sort of stuff happening, but you have to speak out about it. 

If it’s really important to you, you cannot sit there expecting somebody else to take care of the problem. I think I’ve gone from wanting to focus mostly on my sport and my individual performance, to now where I want to be able to have the time and energy to put energy where it is actually needed. 

I think there are times and places where you have to say what matters, what really matters in life, and what type of legacy can I help leave behind. 

Yeah, I can leave some good results and that’s something that I can be proud of and the country can be proud of me. But what actually matters in life? I think gender equality is one of these big things that I would love to see a more lasting change.

FS: The Olympic cycle is coming to a close this winter and will start anew. Is this your last year?

SD: It is my last year. I’m done in the spring. This is one of the things, honestly, this kind of work motivated me to go ahead and to see what I can help accomplish on this front, in addition to my racing.

FS: You know this, but every four years, it’s a big cycle for folks,  that lead-up into the Olympics and the expectations. Athletes need to compartmentalize. There’s the added attention that you get, and the demands on your energy. 

You mentioned this up-front in this conversation, that historically you really just focused on the athlete part, the results-oriented part of the sport. Have you already tried to figure out how you’re going to compartmentalize each of these, the performance side and ambassador side, and make it work? 

SD: I think I can do a lot right now over the summer and to start thinking, or at least I’ve been trying to be more strategic in my social media posts, in general, the past year in terms of having to plan for what sort of content I want to put out there. Maybe have a month where I post on one type of type, and I change it up the following month. Then analyzing what picks up steam or people push back against.

I know in Olympic years we can be overwhelmed with media requests. And you can’t say yes to everything and so you have to be strategic about that too. I look forward to relying on teamwork with some of the other ambassadors, being able to chat over stuff with Kelsey Dickinson, who lives here in Craftsbury, and working with the group to coordinate on which things to push for and which things are the most important to tackle and keeping the focus on that.

I think just like having a training plan, having a goal in mind, and a particular roadmap to get to that goal, you have to just not say things willy nilly or, or do things willy nilly, but have a goal that you want to achieve. Right now, I’m in the process of fleshing that out and figuring that out exactly. 

Born and raised in Vermont, Dunklee finds comfort in familiarity. During the offseason, she is based near Craftsbury and can often be found training with her Green Racing Project teammates or in Lake Placid, at the Olympic Training Center, with her cohort on the National Team.

She prefers the slower pace and quietness of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. As this is her last season of racing, Dunklee will retire after this World Cup season, she plans on settling for good, close to Craftsbury.

During her time on the World Cup, Dunklee said in this two-part interview, that although she had concerns about the culture at the International Biathlon Union and the racing scene, she simply preferred to expend her energy on racing, not pushing reforms. We do know that for North Americans racing World Cup, the emotional and physical tax of racing and training is compounded by living abroad for six months.

However, recently, Dunklee signed on as an Athlete Ambassador for the IBU. Dunklee will serve as an ambassador for gender equity, a cause she is passionate about. Rather than leave the details up to a press release, we connected with Dunklee to explore her new role, and what prompted her now to become more involved with bettering the IBU and biathlon. This is part I of the interview. Part II will be released separately.

***

FasterSkier: I wanted to dig a little deeper than the press release about the Athlete Ambassador initiative and your involvement, but also I’d like to learn about your perceptions of the changing nature of the sport. 

So I’d like to get your ideas about what changes have occurred, and what changes remain when it comes to your ideal vision of the sport and the IBU. The IBU had a come to Jesus moment and they’ve made some positive changes — I’ve spoken to Clare Egan quite a bit about it. And Max Cobb off and on, but just generally, what are your impressions of the sport’s culture? 

Susan Dunklee: Yeah I was gonna say, absolutely there was a turning point. And that was when our president of many years, Anders Besseberg, was arrested by the Austrian police and there was a raid on the headquarters a few years back. And that caused a whole cascade of changes, and changes to the leadership of the IBU, 

They brought in some outside consultants to help the organization identify how to avoid problems of corruption in the future. And they set up the Biathlon Integrity Unit, which is totally separate from the rest of the IBU’s governance that traditionally, I thought, had a lot of authority, and authority over important matters of integrity and doping. 

And I think that turning point was when that leadership group left, and they brought in this new way of doing things. Stakeholders took the initiative and rewrote the Constitution to create more integrity and greater transparency. That really set us on a course for a better direction. 

In the past, I never really felt like my values and the IBU’s values lined up all that well. And now I really feel like there’s an organization behind my sport that shares a lot of the same values I do. There’s a lot of things that still need to be fixed, but I feel good about the direction we’re headed.

FS: I’m glad you mentioned that, because I do feel like as a parent, I feel we talk about values all the time with our kids, and you know, you have to take a stance sometimes, and there are costs to taking some stances. It could be losing friends. It could be alienating whomever, but if you feel like you’re doing the right thing and it doesn’t hurt other people, you know, physically, emotionally, then you need to do it. 

Can you maybe talk a little bit about maybe what your values were or are and how they developed? And in answering that, maybe explain how they contrast with what you perceived as the values of the IBU? I’m qualifying that question within the context of perhaps when you were a younger athlete and you’re kind of looking around and putting your toe in the water and trying to understand what the culture of the sport was and just competing, rather than taking on a leadership role and having that sap some of your energy.

SD: I think for most of my career I wanted to compete and not really distract myself or invest energy in places that weren’t directly related to performance. That’s because it can be exhausting to speak up about some ideas and my values. I really value community and I value honesty. I value having a clean sport. I value making an environment where everybody feels welcome, supported, and valued. 

There were periods early on in my career where I felt like we didn’t have that value system in place. It was really frustrating actually when we found out about the stuff that was happening in Sochi a year or two after the fact. With the doping issue on our minds, as athletes, we got together and we had never really organized before. We started to organize at that point, post-Sochi, with a mixed group of international athletes. 

We discussed all the relevant athletes’ rights issues, and collectively we were like, ‘hey this is not okay what is going on.” We wanted to know how this happened, and how our international federation was going to deal with us, and the issues we raised. 

It became very clear, very fast at most meetings, that the Federation wasn’t really interested in bringing things to light, it was trying to hide things and trying to evade questions. It was trying to not take responsibility for anything. And that was very concerning for me. I definitely started to lose a lot of faith in our Federation at that point. I think a lot of athletes did. 

It was really cathartic to see, in the last couple of years, after the raid, the culture started to change pretty fast. And to go from a Federation that I had absolutely no confidence in, to one that wants to do the right thing —  and obviously, there’s still work to be done —  but I think that being on the right course is important.

FS: Do you have faith in the IBU? There was this seismic moment that everyone can look to in the police raid — that prompted a change. Whereas a lot of other international NGBs are still mired in the typical semi-opaque power and financial hierarchy that dictates policy. Do you think we are in a time now where the IBU can or may serve as a model and these other NGBs won’t need their own take-down before a change is made? I guess, in other words, a horrible event like a police raid or Sochi does not need to occur for change to come about?

SD: I guess it totally depends on the circumstances. Every circumstance is a little bit different. Sometimes you have to gather some momentum to make those acute moments happen and sometimes change happens in a key moment by some smaller gradual incremental moments.  But I feel like those acute moments came about because people were starting to put the pressure on. The IBU athletes were starting to organize for the first time, and there were some great people within the organization, and I believe Max Cobb is one of them who were trying to change our values and draw attention to the problematic pieces. 

I can’t speak for the change in every sense of the word, but I think it’s possible to come about on different paths. It is tough within an organization, I think, organizational culture can be really, really tough to work with sometimes and to change. It is a huge process. We’ve got a bunch of actors and these different norms. If you take gender equality, or gender equity which is my preferred term and you look at the norms of different countries that we’re working with here. It’s a very different landscape from country to country, say in the U.S, for example, than it might be in say in the Czech Republic, or in Italy, 

With all these different cultures, you have to work with different sets of standards and differences in social acceptance. That’s a really interesting puzzle to put together.

FS: I know you are only speaking for yourself, but do you feel like the contingent from the U.S. is perhaps, on the political spectrum, perhaps more liberal than, say, your counterparts from Central Europe, or Eastern Europe, and even Scandinavia?

SD: I certainly cannot speak for every member of my team or my cohort. We do have some voices, I think Clare Egan being on the IBU Executive Board has really pushed them. First of all, she’s on the Athlete’s Committee and that group pushed to get her on the Executive Board for the first time. So that’s a huge progressive change. 

So I have a teammate in that position who is certainly pushing for good changes and helping advance the athlete perspective within the international Federation. And I have a teammate, Kelsey Dickinson from the Green Racing Project who is also joining me on the Athlete Ambassador Program, and she too cares about these things. She’s been involved with the Women’s Ski Coaches Association since its inception. So we certainly have people who want to be activists within our team, more so than some other teams. 

Part II will be published next week and further explores Dunklee’s motivations for becoming a voice for change, while pursuing the podiums on the World Cup and 2022 Olympics. 

FasterSkier covers the winter side of the Olympics, which begin on February 4th, 2022 in Beijing, China. But, we’re here to glance at the Olympics in the news.

The news coming out of Tokyo are the Covid-19 cases popping up here and there amongst foreign nationals entering the country for the Olympics. Those trends are compounded by a steep uptick of cases among Japanese citizens. As of July 19th, total cases in Japan approached levels not seen since January – a month often associated with easier transmission of colds and flu.

The New York Times reports this morning that three positive cases have been detected at the Olympic Village. Over twenty more athletes have tested positive outside those accommodations. The messages projected from stakeholders in Tokyo are mixed. Three days ago, International Olympic Committee chief, Thomas Bach, asked the Japanese Prime Minister to reconsider allowing some spectators if the pandemic improves over the short term. For now, spectators are banned from all competitions. Today, Toshiro Muto, head of the Tokyo Organizing Committee, said in a press conference, that if conditions worsen considerably the 2021 Games could be shuttered, but that the further decisions about the 2021 Games would be discussed in “five-party talks.”

With the persistence of Covid-19, variable access to vaccines, and a choice from some with access to the vaccine to forgo immunization due to safety concerns, the virus will likely be around in February 2022.

China is not Japan. There are many layers to that statement. Media, including the Internet, feels the heavy hand of state control in China. So data coming from China regarding Covid-19 infection rates should at least be viewed with eyes wide open. The Johns Hopkins University dashboard, an excellent resource monitoring global infection and vaccination rates, shows China’s situation contrasts Japan’s. According to the Johns Hopkins Covid-tracker, China reported 65 positive cases on July 19.

The regime in China also wields iron-fist power. It is likely that its ability to regulate the movement of its citizens during the Winter Games, especially if cases begin to spike next winter, is real. Despite China’s vastly larger population and geographic breadth, what is occurring in Japan now does not necessarily equate to a similar situation in Beijing when its time for China to host.

Heat and the Summer Games

For those interested in high performance, you’ve likely monitored stories and research regarding training and racing in high temperatures and high humidity. Tokyo, if trends persist, should offer both conditions in the upper end of the spectrum. Reuters published an excellent infographic exploring the weather conditions athletes are likely to experience during the Olympics.

1964 was the last time Tokyo hosted the Summer Olympics. Back then, October was the chosen month for competitions. October in Japan presents markedly cooler average temperatures than late July and mid-August.

You can find the Reuters infographic here.

The Politics of Sport

As the Summer Olympic quad comes to a close, the corresponding think-pieces about the Olympic movement have sprouted. One of many treatments on the topic, which is titled Let the Games … Be Gone? comes from the NYT’s John Branch. The subtitle, After bidding scandals, human rights outrages, overburdened host cities, rampant cheating, a pandemic — and, sure, thrilling competitions — has the world had enough of the Olympics? speaks to the central thesis of his argument. Branch, known as a deft wordsmith, writes about sports for the Times.

You can find Branch’s piece here.

Branch quotes many of the most outspoken reformers we have heard from before, including former cross-country skier Noah Hoffman, and icon Edwin Moses.

This brings to mind efficient ways to take a deep dive into the politics of international sport, including the murky world of anti-doping.

It’s now been over a month since the release of the Global Athlete podcast, which Hoffman hosts. In full transparency, Hoffman is a friend, and we have covered him widely at FasterSkier.

If you are looking for lighthearted sports banter, look elsewhere. This podcast trends towards policy wonkishness, with just the right amount of detail for the keen fan or observer of the Olympics. So far, the podcast has delivered. A high-point episode for FasterSkier readers should be Episode 3: Current Athlete Representation Models with Beckie Scott and Han Xiao.

Scott is a retired Canadian cross-country skier who won a gold medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics after the top-two finishers were disqualified for doping. Scott went on to work in anti-doping advocacy as Chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency Athlete Committee and was an IOC member after being elected to the organization’s Athlete’s Commission.

It’s a system with a relatively steady influx of skiers at the pipeline’s intake.

One aspect of the product, the potential to advance in the pipeline, can, in many ways, sell itself. If you live in a mountain town or northern latitude city, odds are cross-country skiing is on the menu of outdoor activities for certain demographics. Two American women winning gold in 2018 is also a wonderful sales pitch to aspirants. This healthy lifestyle and medal-winning context afford stakeholders a modicum of breathing room when considering marketing approaches to athlete recruitment and the ability to maintain pre-existing participants. Although the problem of attrition in youth sports is real, and cross-country skiing is no exception, junior-level ski racing remains popular in traditional cross-country ski hotbeds.

The Para side of the sport, however, must take a more active approach when it comes to marketing. Drawing athletes into the Para Nordic disciplines requires a significant time investment with national-level coaches often meeting in small groups with raw beginners to introduce their respective disciplines.

A few weeks back, US Para Nordic hosted a Zoom call for visually impaired (VI) athletes and families interested in learning more about how to become involved.

Two US Para Nordic coaches were on the Zoom call, Kristina Trygstad-Saari, and BethAnn Chamberlain, along with several veteran athletes and a few newcomers. In terms of grassroots, this was the seeding process. A visually impaired participant logged in from Los Angeles, another potential visually impaired athlete, a teenager, logged in from Indiana. Neither had easy access to snow. Neither had skied before.

A basic Q & A ensued. There was nothing extravagant about the presentation. Lots of nuts and bolts. Let’s call it pithy. Yet, the level of engagement was high. The meeting, which could have trended towards perfunctory, was not. By the end of the call, maybe 45 minutes later, the hook was sunk.

My intent for listening in was to learn how US Para Nordic pitches their sport and attracts prospects to their respective pipeline, and then write up a brief story. I became sidetracked.

***

Fifty-two-year-old VI biathlete Michael Stone, who spoke during the Zoom call, was my hook setter. Stone resides in Boulder, Colorado. According to Stone, his first race of any kind was the Bolder Boulder — an iconic 10-kilometer road running race that snakes through Boulder’s neighborhoods and finishes in a packed Folsom Field on the University of Colorado campus.

“That was probably one of the most spectacular days of my life. And since then, over 21 years, I’ve done over 230 races,” said Stone.

In 2003, Stone completed his first Ironman. That race, in contrast to Stone’s first Bolder Boulder experience, was inauspicious. The race was in New Zealand, and at one point Stone inadvertently took a wrong turn. “I remember one of the course marshals yelled, ‘What are you blind?’ At that moment, I actually wondered if I was,” recalled Stone. “I mean, I remember feeling very, you know, dejected.”

There’s a backstory here worth telling. Post-New Zealand, Stone returned to his childhood home in Chicago to seek advice from his family physician.

The abridged version of Stone’s adolescence, which the doctor took notes on, goes something like this. A caring family that exposed Stone and his siblings to sports and the arts. There were eventual vacations to Aspen for downhill skiing which Stone began to dread. “Everybody else would be exhilarated and I’d be miserable,” said Stone. “We’d be skiing in the trees and I’d fall, and not even know why. I was screwed, even in good light. And it should have been a good indicator that something wasn’t adding up.”

There were attempts at ball sports where Stone often could not see the ball thrown his way. There were laughs, and the “he sucks” microaggressions.

“At some point, you just stay away from sports because it’s intimidating, it just eats away at your soul,” said Stone. “For a young person struggling, with their vision of something undiagnosed like dyslexia, every aspect of life is going to be very hard.”

Stone withdrew. He folded himself into music where he learned to play the guitar and other instruments. “That’s where I hid from the world,” he said.

But if you thrive on moving your body, as Stone does, the draw of sports can be irresistible. Stone eventually found martial arts, and then rock climbing – which initially brought him out to Boulder. According to Stone, hearing his climbing partners constantly tell him where to place his hands and feet pushed him out, saying it became too exhausting emotionally. He purchased a bike and he began to run.

Then there was that goose-bump Bolder Boulder where Stone came running into that packed stadium. “It was just such a spectacular feeling that I forgot all about anything related to my vision or whatever,” said Stone. “It was simply that I ran six miles and that was huge.” Then came the Ironmans and the demeaning “What are you blind?” comment from the course marshall.

***

Back in Chicago, Stone visited his physician and then a specialist who sent him to another specialist. The MD-PhD diagnosed Stone with a genetic degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa. The disease affects the retina’s photoreceptors.

“The doctor was just beside himself,” said Stone. “He asked, ‘How have you gotten through life like this?’ It was like he knew everything, and he quickly told me what my life was like because obviously, it was a familiar story to him with sports and with school and family life, everything, he just sort of knew it. He had been diagnosing these things for probably 40 years. He was shocked that I had gone through life undiagnosed.”

Stone said he had most likely been legally blind since he was five. His youngest brother was also diagnosed with the disease. Eventually, they traced the gene back in the family’s genealogical tree.

The diagnosis helped Stone define his life trajectory. But as a successful hotel and spa developer, Stone has not defined himself solely as an endurance athlete. He is, like many role models among us, capable of compensating, adapting, thriving, and finding community. Stone understands his predicament but moves forward. He knows he’ll occasionally miss his toothbrush with the toothpaste, have issues making a simple cup of coffee, or have difficulty finding a public bathroom. Stone navigates a physical and emotional culture set up for the able-bodied. He’s still out there riding, running, swimming, skiing, and running a business — all at a high level.

During some background reading about life as a visually impaired person, I came across this excellent story in the New York Times: Is There a Right Way to Act Blind by Andrew Leland. In short, Leland, who himself is blind, keenly explores how some people experience blindness, but also how sighted actors portray blind characters.

This passage from Leland’s piece caught my attention: “I recently spent a weekend with a friend who has been blind since childhood. I watched him pat and fumble for objects, but he did so in a way that struck me as utterly assured, and entirely unembarrassed — his fingers scanned the table just as your eyes might: quickly, casually, without apology. I aspire to this kind of blindness. The only way to get there, I suspect, is through rehearsal — practicing until my blind presence becomes convincing, if not to the world then at least to myself.”

Leland’s words, for me, resonated. It was a reminder that we travel the world on a gradient. We are constantly aspiring to be “utterly assured, and entirely unembarrassed.” I’m still trying to let that all sink in and imagine what that might be like for someone experiencing a disability and hailing a cab, or simply bathing. Let alone performing an endurance sport like biathlon at a high level.

***

Stone discovered cross-country skiing over a decade ago and ultimately found an interest in biathlon. Para biathletes use an audio rifle with no live rounds. As the biathlete aims closer to the target, remember, this is the visually impaired class, the noise projected from the rifle becomes higher pitched. The VI athlete pulls the trigger when they sense via the rifle’s audio signal the shot is on target. Like able-bodied biathlon, keeping range time to a minimum is part of the challenge.

Stone admits, although he is an accomplished triathlete, that he desires more independence. He rides on a tandem bike, and in some situations remains tethered to a sighted guide when running. Stone equates freedom with cross-country skiing. The closest he feels to being able-bodied is when he is skiing and then shooting on the biathlon range, explained Stone.

“Cross-country skiing is one of the most spectacular sensations because it’s the closest thing I get to freedom and independence out of any sport I do,” said Stone. “I’m not tethered cross-country skiing, as I would be for running or swimming like we do in triathlon, I’m not on the back of a tandem. We’re on our own skis, on our own snow, and we have our own mistakes to make. We do get lefts and we get rights and a few whoops as verbal cues from a sighted guide, just to keep straight. And once we drop down in the shooting range, as we always shoot prone, it is pure freedom.”

In the Para Nordic biathlon world, VI athletes are relatively scarce. That makes sense considering the logistics of transport, arranging a sighted guide if needed, and having access to a rifle and shooting range, let alone snow. Stone, for his part, has become an unassuming ambassador who wants to give back to a community of coaches and peers who have refeinforced his self-assurance. He is, as I came to realize, the perfect salesperson for any athlete hoping to get motivated and seize any opportunity.

“I’m not a young guy, and so when there are younger people, say in their teens and 20s and 30s, I don’t want them to miss out on this opportunity to experience biathlon — not to mention, just to be able to experience the love we get from the coaches,” said Stone. “I really don’t know why it’s there, they’re like higher beings to me. Nobody should face the world alone. And the fact that there are people that are willing and capable to at least try to walk in your shoes and create an opportunity for you when there are really few opportunities in this world that will be generated like this. I live by only a couple really important codes and one of them is you owe your best to the people who love you most.”

My impression from Stone is that he could do most anything he wanted with his life. It’s a good thing he found cross-country skiing and biathlon. We’re better for it.

For information about becoming a sighted guide, or becoming involved as an athlete, here’s a link to US Para Nordic’s recruiting survey.

To learn more about how a VI biathlete shoots on the range, watch the video below. The on-range segment begins at approximately 2:55.

There’s a poignant anecdote in Alex Hutchinson’s book Endure where he describes the race in which he drastically reduces his 1500 meter running times as a collegiate runner. He had, for some time, been on an unsuccessful journey to break a four-minute mile. Spoiler alert, Hutchinson goes on a stretch to run several PRs in the 1500, but eventually plateaus.

“Reaching the ‘limits of endurance’ is a concept that seems yawningly obvious until you actually try to explain it,” Hutchinson writes in Endure. “Had you asked me in 1996 what was holding me back from sub-four, I would have mumbled something about maximal heart rate, lung capacity, slow-twitch muscle fibers, lactic acid accumulation, and various other buzzwords I’d picked up from the running magazines I devoured. On closer examination, though, none of those explanations hold up. You can hit the wall with a heart rate well below max, modest lactate levels, and muscles that still twitch on demand. To their frustration, physiologists have found that the will to endure can’t be reliably tied to any single physiological variable.”

Hutchinson adds, “part of the challenge is that endurance is a conceptual Swiss Army knife.”

All this is to assert that the science of human performance is tough to reduce to discrete how-tos and whys. Certainly, there remain best practices and firm tenets, for example, regarding a reasonable ratio of “easy” to “hard” training efforts. But the secret sauce, the concrete recipe or technique adjustment that unlocks performance potential remains unobtainable for many. And as Hutchinson expresses, the frustrating conundrum remains: oftentimes one realizes their performance potential but struggles to distill how A led to B and led to C.

Then there is cross-country skiing. Sticking with Hutchinson’s Swiss Army Knife comparison, cross-country skiing might as well be the Wenger Giant of Swiss Army knives: it boasts 141 functions. Although running has multiple variables too, sliding on snow brings a seemingly infinite number of interconnected variables into play.

Cross-country ski-specific science literature is not as prolific as the catalog of running or cycling studies. Yet high standards are high standards. But the question remains, in controlling for and discussing variables specific to cross-country skiing – in the lab and in the field – what are the norms?

“Methodological Guidelines Designed to Improve the Quality of Research on Cross‐Country Skiing”, a research paper in the Journal of Science in Sport and Exercise was published online on June 29.

As the title suggests, the paper attempts to create a template for accepted standards regarding research exploring human performance while cross-country skiing. “Research in this area, both in the laboratory and field, encounters certain difficulties that may reduce the reliability and validity of the data obtained, as well as complicate comparisons between studies,” state the authors in the paper’s abstract. An exhaustive array of variables are discussed in the paper – both biomechanical and physiological. The end game, the researchers claim, is to facilitate more valid, accurate, and reliable data when it comes to designing studies and presenting findings related to cross-country skiing.

At its most basic, the paper spells out that scientists must catalog information regarding study participants (athletes) noting their sex and age, their performance level via FIS or national federation points, and the level of competition each athlete has achieved – regional versus international. Further, information should be gathered regarding each athlete’s nutrition, hydration, and training load on the specified day of testing.

The authors also standardize the sub-techniques of skate and classic while describing the specific nomenclature, description of the sub-technique, and its utilization (the terrain in which the sub-technique is used). For example, here’s how they break down the double pole kick.

Double pole with a kick

• Suggested abbreviation DPK
• Description – The arms are used symmetrically and in parallel together with one leg kick performed simultaneously with the arm swing. Arm and leg propulsion are used
• Utilization – Primarily on slight and moderate uphill terrain, sometimes as a transition from DS and DP

All this may sound rudimentary. But it ensures all researchers, coaches, and athletes are speaking the same language.

The paper goes on to include best methods for collecting data from technologies like high-resolution video, global navigation satellite systems (your sports watch/HRM likely uses a GNSS/GPS system), and power meters incorporated into ski poles.

The paper is not a “how-to” for aspiring human performance researchers. It is, however, a detailed menu of sorts, categorizing many if not all the variables scientists might encounter when designing cross-country ski-specific experiments and testing a hypothesis. Certainly, the money for this type of research is thin compared to the pool of run-specific human performance experimentation. Just think of the budget for Eliud Kipchoge’s Nike financed Breaking2 project. We can imagine that project spawned an industry of its own regarding running and human performance.

But within the niche nordic sport family where cross-country skiing plays a huge part (think nordic combined and biathlon), it’s wise to spend scarce research dollars on high-quality human performance investigations. As long as snow falls (which if you live in the Pacific Northwest right now where it is quite literally hot as hell and the prospect of sub-100 degree temps seems farcical) improving human performance on the ski tracks will remain. That means the community needs solid research. The work of the 13 scientists listed as authors on the paper is a reminder that the job of generating accurate, sound, useful, and repeatable experiments exploring any aspect of cross-country skiing is no easy task.

Last season, due to the closure of international borders and pandemic precautions, much of the Worldloppet series became virtual. The Worldloppet offered an official “Virtual Racing League”. Athletes participating in seven races from seven different countries earned a “Virtual Racer” title. Perhaps not as illustrious as the older school passport system for those ticking off the global race series, the virtual series kept many skiers motivated. The virtual race series will be in play for the upcoming season. The Worldloppet will release more information as it becomes available. However, many organizers able to hold in-person events also plan on doubling up and offering a virtual event for those unable to travel.

The first Worldloppet race scheduled this year with the possibility of in-person racing for some is Australia’s Kangaroo Hoppet, on August 28. However, unless you are already down under, or travel restrictions change, traveling to the Kangaroo Hoppet from abroad looks dicey. Currently, according to Australia’s Department of Health and the Department of Home Affairs, entering Australia for non-essential activities seems nearly impossible beyond hopping over to Australia from New Zealand. The race organizers in Australia, however, are offering a virtual event. The virtual Hoppet includes several different classes and distances. Registration opens July 1st.

It appears to be a similar situation for New Zealand’s Merino Muster: the border is open to Australians. Otherwise, entering New Zealand is difficult from abroad. (We will update this article if a virtual Merino Muster is scheduled.)

The real Worldloppet draw remains in-person mass start racing. For now, that dream vacation to Europe or Scandinavia for a ski race might be on hold for a bit longer. Again, the situation regarding border openings and international travel, even when vaccinated, remains dynamic. Yet, the possibility for in-person racing remains. In this case, it might pay off to be patient. The Worldloppet’s calendar is loaded with potential in-person racing.

For now, for example, a link is live for Switzerland’s Engadin, while the famed Norwegian Birkebeinerrennet set to run in March, has not opened up registration. Last year, Norway’s Birken was canceled. According to their website, skiers registered for last year’s race are auto-registered for the 2022 version.

Lastly, the glass half full perspective brings news that Argentina’s Ushuaialoppet- Marchablanca survives the pandemic as a virtual event for this August. According to a Worldloppet press release, the race organizers in Tierra del Fuego announced a cancellation of the in-person event during the most recent Worldloppet general meeting. The press release also stated the Ushuaialoppet organizers were under financial duress due to two consecutive years of race cancellations. Several Worldloppet member organizations successfully spearheaded an effort to galvanize financial support for the Ushuaialoppet. The Ushuaialoppet is currently working on a virtual event with details to be posted at a later date.

The International Biathlon Union (IBU) remains committed to improving its online and mobile products according to a recent announcement. The IBU, along with the global app and web developer Vincit, claims the new products, “will allow fans to follow competitions in real-time, as well as provide a second-screen experience with user-friendly statistics and insights into competitions, personalized user experience, and top-notch content with images and video.”

More on this in a bit.

Live event streaming or on-demand replays or race highlights play a key role for entities like the International Ski Federation (FIS) and the International Biathlon Union (IBU) to retain and expand their fanbase. Unless you are attending a race, this remains the easiest way for fans to access the elite tier of the sport. It’s the gateway by which many of us become addicted to following biathlon or cross-country skiing.

Over the last decade, watching televised or streamed biathlon compared to cross-country skiing has been far easier. The IBU’s website, biathlonworld.com, once provided unblocked live and full replays of World Cup racing. With the growth of boutique cable and online subscription services, over time, watching these sports has become more restrictive. Today, the landscape in which the IBU announced the future launch of its revamped website and app, for the time being, remains a desert in North America.

This past season, watching the biathlon and cross-country live in the U.S. market required a modest subscription to NBC’s Peacock.tv (online) or a subscription to a cable provider offering the Olympic Channel, or Peacock Premium. NBC pulled live coverage of the cross-country World Cup in mid-December from the Olympic Channel, after which only a live feed with no commentary was available on the Peacock.tv website.

During the offseason, without a VPN, watching full replays, highlights, and press conferences from the IBU World Cup is simple – head to biathlonworld.com, click on live broadcasting, and you’ll be redirected to eurovisionsports.tv. The race coverage includes commentary from the stable of excellent British Eurosport commentators. You can also log into a Peacock.tv account for full race replays without commentary.

On the other hand, in the U.S. at least, the cross-country World Cup, absent commentary and featuring the basic live feed, is the available go-to for watching replays without a VPN or working YouTube for an archived race with Norweigan or Swedish commentary.

Both the IBU and FIS present digital platforms, that with some light lifting, allow fans to mine information regarding a race in real-time or parse out post-race data. The FIS digital environment provides real-time splits during races via their “live timing” platform. You can identify specific athletes to follow. Otherwise, it’s nothing elegant, but it serves basic live timing needs. FIS has upped its game in the last two years with higher production value video shorts featuring race highlights, comments from athletes, and lifestyle pieces to enhance the fan experience. The IBU has also offered a similar initiative regarding live splits, and a menu of videos offering a behind-the-scenes look at the sport. For the deep dive into real-time data, absent race video, you must head over to the IBU’s biathlonresults.com.

Both the FIS site and biathlonresults.com allow for searching an array of stats. The IBU’s stats are primarily text and numbers-based. The FIS stats are a mix of graphics, charts, and basic spreadsheets. (Here’s a link to the main FIS general stats menu.) There, you can search and analyze an individual athlete’s stats, or cross-reference up to 10 athletes and compare several categories like victories and top-10s. All this is to say, whether it’s biathlon or cross-country skiing, that it takes a bit of legwork to find useful information regarding a specific race (beyond elapsed time and time back), or an athlete.

Coming off an unsettled Covid plagued race season, who knows what the future holds for production values.

For their part, the IBU claims it is attempting to make the online/smartphone experience better for fans. Part of the IBU’s motivation is codified in what it calls Target 26 – a set of guidelines to improve biathlon’s viability by 2026. In the case of the new app, Target 26 guidelines set forth a deadline for developing a brand-specific app by 2022.

The new app being developed by Vincit provides what the IBU calls a “second screen experience”. This means fans watching a race live on one screen can use their phone – the second screen – for a more personalized user experience. In the event you’re busy and unable to watch the race live, the new IBU app will feature a more dynamic interface allowing users to view a real-time leaderboard featuring elapsed time and that ever-important metric – hits and misses on the shooting range. (Users will also be able to follow their favorite athletes in real-time.) In the case of biathlon, which often proves to be a more unpredictable sport than cross-country skiing, the app should enhance the experience for those on the go or needing that dual-screen experience while watching live.

According to our email correspondence with the IBU, they claim 80% of respondents to their fan surveys in 2020 and 2021 stated they would use an IBU app. The new app, however, will not provide access to a live stream.“The first version of the app won’t provide live video stream of events,” emailed Christian Winkler, the IBU’s Communications Director. “The provision of a live stream depends on the media rights situation in each market. The IBU and its media rights partner Eurovision Sport are currently working on a digital distribution strategy across platforms, especially for markets without a rights holder.”

Along with the real-time enhanced functionality of the proposed stand-alone IBU app, the IBU said the app will provide more detailed information and notifications regarding their competitions. The IBU plans to release an updated version of biathlonworld.com concurrent with the release of the app this fall. This is good news for those looking for more when it comes to nordic sport.

It’s safe to assume the viewing landscape in Europe is driving the IBU’s digital initiative. A February 2021 European Broadcast Union (EBU) report claimed a 7% increase in total hours viewed for the 2021 IBU World Championships. The report attributed that significant jump to increased viewing of the women’s events. The growth in biathlon viewership, in general, mirrors the findings from the most recently concluded 2021 World Championships, as far as winter sports go, biathlon remains popular with viewers. (The IBU and the EBU share an agreement for “free-to-air coverage” of the IBU World Cup – which means viewers within Europe do not need a subscription service to watch events.)

Although not a thorough analysis, FasterSkier glanced at a Nielsen report titled “COOP FIS Cross Country World Cup 2019/20 – TV Media Evaluation Event Summary“. One trend evident after the 2018-2019 season, according to the data above, is the decreased cumulative American viewing audience in 2019/2020. Despite a significant increase in total broadcast time of cross-country events in 2019/2020 within the U.S. compared to the previous year, the cumulative audience decreased markedly.

Here in North America, a daunting issue remains. While the digital environment makes access to highly produced live events and replays easier, we have had setbacks in North America. App or no app, it’s harder to watch live nordic sport without a VPN.

Nominated for the position by GB Snowsport, Eliasch brings a long history of business acumen as the CEO of Head Sport to FIS. Eliasch is credited with leading HEAD Sport into a period of growth and profitability. Eliasch has since resigned from his position at Head.

In a message posted on the FIS website, Eliasch wrote, “after any election generally there are winners and losers. I don’t see any losers in this election. This was all about FIS starting on a new journey. All candidates saw a bright and growing future, and that collective vision is something I want to build upon during my tenure as President. In thanking those who supported me, I thank also everyone who played their part in making this election one which brought out the best of the FIS family – a passion for snowsport and taking it to the next level.”

Along with the message from Eliasch, a video highlights his proposed vision for FIS. In the highly produced video, Eliasch likens his mission at FIS to mountain climbing. “To succeed in any great endeavor, as like conquering a mountain, you must be prepared,” Eliasch said.

Eliasch’s wide-ranging resume should position him for making an impact at FIS. He cites his military service, academic studies, experience with corporate turnarounds and private equity, his work with the British Olympic Association, and attempts to impact climate change policy, as qualifying him to lead the institution. (Eliasch co-founded Cool Earth to curb the deforestation of the rainforest).

The bread and butter for FIS is alpine racing. And Eliasch, from his tenure at Head, knows that game well. Early on as Head skis rebounded in the marketplace, they hitched a sweet ride as they sponsored several notable alpine skiers. Head often wins or is near the top of the FIS alpine brand rankings. In a room mixing with business leaders and elite alpine athletes, Eliasch can mingle.

What Eliasch’s messaging appears to recognize is the need to package the FIS product across generations, not simply the demographic still planted in front of the television each weekend.

“We must grow and appeal to a wider and younger audience to get access to the large and lucrative and growing market out there,” Eliasch says in the video. “But to do this we need a more integrated approach to selling our sponsorship and television rights to give us more leverage to extract better value for everyone.”

Here in North America, and more specifically thinking about the nordic disciplines, streaming and televised events have become increasingly more difficult to access since the 2018 Olympics. FIS does have an opportunity in cross-country skiing, for example, to experiment with its live feed and generate a more palatable product for a wider audience. FIS, unlike the International Biathlon Union (IBU), sells off its broadcast rights in their respective markets. In the U.S., NBC Sports, or an affiliate like Peacock or the Olympic Channel, traditionally produces the programming on race day. This past season, despite securing those rights, NBC chose to cease televised broadcasts of the cross-country World Cup after the sprints in Dresden, Germany in mid-December.

Admittedly, this was a funky season for all the stakeholders. However, who would have imagined three seasons out from the Diggins-Randall Olympic gold that fans of the sport in North America would struggle to access highly produced cross-country broadcasts in English.

Pulling the plug after Dresden left a vacuum for fans here in the U.S. Consider that a massive missed opportunity for FIS as American Jessie Diggins eventually won the overall this past season.

Without using a VPN, which we are aware many American fans of the sport use, U.S.-based viewers were left with races streamed on Peacock with no commentary. Online, Peacock’s cross-country coverage featured a raw television feed. That type of product might work for those of us covering the sport, or die-hard fans. In terms of growing the sport in the U.S. and expanding its reach during a time when silent outdoor sports are booming, that type of product is a dead end.

In the video posted on the FIS site, Eliasch seems to speak to these broader possibilities. “I am fully committed to bringing a more diverse, engaging, and entertaining experience for all skiing and snowboarding enthusiasts,” he says. “Finding this balance between the fundamental values of our sport and entertainment can only be accomplished in close cooperation with all of our stakeholders, especially our athletes and sponsors.”

“I believe in change,” flashes on the video at the 9:00 minute mark. After a lengthy Kasper reign, FIS is possibly positioned to generate an exciting product under Eliasch. FIS, like many sport governing bodies, has been accused of poor leadership and insularity. In his public statements so far, Eliasch hits many of the right notes. Let’s hope it is time for FIS to sing.

As far as teams go on the cross-country World Cup, Great Britain arrives at the show with perhaps the smallest team roster and staff. Somehow, they often roar when considering the results. We know British Nordic from the sharp end skiing of Andrew Musgrave, and sprinters Andrew Young and James Clugnet. 

Like all teams on the circuit, the human capital behind the Lycra-clad skiers make the travel, training, and race grind happen. In this episode of Nordic Nation we speak with the two coaches leading the British team – Hans Kristian Stadheim and Jostein Vinjerui. The two coaches are Norwegian and are based in Norway full-time. Which makes things easy considering the three thoroughbreds of the British team – Musgrave, Young, and Clugnet – live in Norway as well.

The organizational model premised on elite athletes living abroad, in this case Norway, outside their home country might not be for every team. In the case of Britain, so far, it appears to have worked. The athletes and coaches are able to capitalize on their personal and professional relationships to tap into Norway’s cross-country ski know-how and arguably overreach when it comes to the expectations of a non-traditional ski nation like Britain.

We should note that Vinjerui and Stadheim, as well as their skiers, host a podcast that’s a fun and informative listen. You can find their podcast, Inside Cross-Country Skiing, wherever you get your podcasts. 

Thanks for listening and we hope your spring is going well.

“Looking at the critical year ahead, and the expectations placed on our Paralympic athletes to not only repeat our success from 2018, but to also ensure the tradition of excellence with this program continues well into the future, I believe it is important for me to shift and fully commit my time to ensuring this group has the leadership and resources required to deliver podium performances,” said Boyd to Nordiq Canada.

Before the recent announcement, Boyd had been the high-performance director for both the national cross-country team and the para squad. Boyd was part of a successful group that helped lead Canada’s para-nordic program in the recent past. Robin McKeever remains Canada’s national team coach for para-nordic.

“The scope of responsibility for the high-performance director leading both the Olympic and Paralympic streams is significant,” said Boyd. “With the new season just around the corner, I believe I can have the most impact by focusing my efforts on leading the Para-Nordic group to Beijing and laying the foundation for success in 2026 and beyond.”

The high-performance void on the cross-country side will be filled by Chris Jeffries. Jeffries is currently the head coach of the Alberta World Cup Academy. He will continue in that role while adding part-time duties for the 2021-2022 Olympic season as the national cross-country team’s high-performance director.

Jeffries will be part of a management team that includes Joel Jaques as the high-performance manager. According to Nordiq Canada, Jaques will handle the team’s logistics among other duties. Also on the cross-country side of the equation, Cindy Chetley will continue as the team’s high-performance coordinator.

Nordiq Canada also noted that Jeffries and Julie Beaulieu will work to build a sustainable pipeline of athletes, coaches, and stakeholders to fulfill Nordiq Canada’s mission of winning championship medals.

Back in April, Nordiq Canada announced two job vacancies, one for a National Team NextGen Coach, the other for a National Team World Cup Coach. The NextGen Coach, responsible for the national junior/U23 team, remains unfilled.

Norway’s Erik Bråten had been the team’s World Cup coach for the past three seasons. He resigned from the job after the conclusion of the race season. However, Nordiq Canada noted Bråten will return as the team’s World Cup competition coach. “Erik will lead the majority of the National Ski Team racing trips and assist with supporting the program remotely for the remainder of the year while working from Europe,” stated Nordiq Canada. “With respect to the delivery of the National Ski Team training program, athletes’ daily training environment coaches across the country will work together to support all national team athletes by taking turns leading camps and supporting at competitions.”

Bråten has returned to Norway after residing in Canmore during his previous stint with the team. It did not take long for Norway’s ski talent to gravitate towards Bråten. Reigning Olympic 10 skate champion, Haga Ragnhild, has decided to work with Bråten as she attempts to earn World Cup starts and an Olympic birth. Ragnhild was not renominated to Norway’s national team for the 2021-2022 season. Along with her individual 2018 Olympic gold, she was part of Norway’s winning 4 x 5 k relay team at the 2018 Olympics.

The decade of the aughts witnessed the decimation of wide swaths of forest in Colorado due to a pine beetle infestation. This was no slow drip affair. What was a tree-to-tree process eventually swallowed whole green mountainsides morphing them into a desiccated dead-tree blight. Those dead trees, unable to hold moisture, were hundred-foot matchsticks during wildfire season.

Over the past few decades, an ominous cycle prevailed. Warming temperatures due to climate change made life easier on pine beetles. Drought made for more combustible forests and extreme wildfire danger. Across the West, cross-country ski areas rely on trees for shade to prevent premature snowmelt on trails. They also serve as wind blocks in mountain-scapes prone to winds. Trees are a skier’s friend when considering trail design, maintenance, and longer ski seasons. Some die-hard skiers might know the climate data suggests winters are becoming noticeably shorter.

Skiers in Colorado’s Winter Park-Fraser Valley were witness to the pine beetle kill and its inexorable apocalyptic roll. If you skied at Snow Mountain Ranch or Devil’s Thumb during this era, in a few winters, much of the forests constituting those ski areas died off.

According to Devil’s Thumb Ranch, the kill became apparent in 2005. A larger outbreak in 2007 impacted much of their lodgepole pine. The same was true for Snow Mountain Ranch. The two areas are separated by eight miles or so, as the bird flies.

Forest conditions across much of Colorado, and certainly in the Fraser Valley, were ripe for wholesale die-offs due to the beetle – it was a perfect storm. Leading up to 2005, Colorado had suffered several drier than normal years. Warmer winters also allowed the beetle to persist: beetles are often killed off by long-duration cold spells of below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Beetles survived the winter, as they continued their life cycle. Trees were stressed, making them more susceptible to contagion.

Compounding these variables were fire mitigation practices that promoted unnaturally dense forest. The forests, like much of the timbered land in the West, were managed in a way that suppressed any fire that might potentially rip through and naturally thin it. Dense forest made it easier for beetles to do their thing, and with the now browned forest, the threat of wildfire intensified.

What ensued was wholesale landscape change. Rust-orange trees, not green lush forest, became the backdrop for skiers. Both Devil’s Thumb and Snow Mountain Ranch had to act. Their assets, trails, buildings, and a back-to-nature experience were threatened by the possibility of tree blowdown and fires.

Both areas logged heavily to remove potential fuel sources. Devil’s Thumb used some of their beetle-kill timber as they built new outbuildings and housing.

“We did have industrial level logging that we had to do around 2006 to around 2010,” said Mary Ann Degginger, the Program Director at Snow Mountain Ranch. “We started first with the front of our property just to take out the dead trees and leave the younger healthy ones because there was some research out at the time that said, pine beetles were driven towards trees that were four inches or diameter or bigger – so we left the little trees. They didn’t bother them. And what we found is that because of the nature of pine trees and how they grow, they have very shallow root systems, that they just blew over naturally when we logged around them. The trees we tried to leave ended up dying anyway or falling over.”

Massive piles of logs built up around the outbuildings at both ski areas. It resembled a full-scale timber operation. Saving trails and ski terrain remained paramount, but bigger issues remained – creating a resort environment where physical assets were not threatened by fire.

“We had to prioritize from a fire mitigation standpoint — our whole property and operation,” said Degginger. “We determined where we needed to log first. For us, that meant protecting buildings and common areas. Once we felt that we had done that, we moved on to mitigation and cutting trees along our trails.”

Degginger explained that Snow Mountain Ranch created a buffer along their ski trails as the next step in their risk mitigation plan.

A decade later, forests in the region have renewed. Areas of new tree growth have allowed the return of a natural windbreak. And in some places, Snow Mountain Ranch has begun grooming trail sections once lost at the onset of the infestation.

“We’ve learned a lot since 2005, starting with the process of thinning, removing, and harvesting dead beetle kill,” emailed a representative from Devil’s Thumb. “We also cut some of the green timber to allow sunlight for the growth of healthy trees and to prevent greater damage/falls during windstorms.”

The past few summers in the intermountain West have witnessed a conflagration. In June 2007, hundreds were evacuated from Snow Mountain Ranch due to an encroaching wildfire. In 2020, the area witnessed two historic fires. Snow Mountain Ranch ultimately served as a camp for firefighters battling those blazes. The point remains, fires remain a risk as they burn hotter and bigger than in the past.

All this leaves ski area managers broadening their scope of expertise. There’s still the marketing and soft goods to order pre-season. But there’s also the responsibility of understanding fire risk, holistic forest health, and planning long-term for cyclic variability that might impact a ski area’s bottom line.

Resources have been allocated across the West for forest thinning projects. Here in Bend, Oregon a multi-year thinning project has transformed the overly dense Ponderosa pine forest. To new eyes, the change was stark. Yet after only a few months, with ground fuels reduced through controlled burns and selective tree thinning, more appropriate spacing between trees was re-established and native grasses returned. Locally, there was no wholesale beetle kill or wildfire that decimated the city’s nearby forests — but that was only a matter of time. Stakeholders got ahead of the inevitable firestorm. The recreation economy in places like Bend and Grand County, Colorado where Snow Mountain Ranch and Devil’s Thumb reside, rely on healthy and intact forests. The overriding philosophy now is to be proactive with forest management.

That’s the case at Snow Mountain Ranch and Devil’s Thumb. These two iconic Rocky Mountain cross-country ski areas are better positioned to weather environmental changes with buildings and ski trails intact. Snow Mountain Ranch’s Degginger understands that as the new forests surrounding the Snow Mountain Ranch complex matures, new, but smaller-scale thinning will take place. The eyes are on the future in the Fraser Valley.

“We need to manage this forest better and not be in the same position,” said Degginger. “So that’s certainly something we are taking expert advice on. We’re not quite to the point where we’re thinning yet, but that’s on our radar, that’s something that’s going to need to happen for the forest that receded naturally and came back super thick and super. We don’t want to be in the same boat 100 years from now.”

The letter opens with a strong message: “In this time of unparalleled social change and reflection, we request that this Committee take an important step forward for equity and inclusion by creating domestic race schedules that offer equal race distances for women and men.” Letter signatories include several head NCAA coaches like Becky Woods of Bates and Tracy Cotes of Colby, as well as U.S. legend Bill Koch, and current World Cup overall winner Jessie Diggins. 

In speaking with Peters, she emphasizes the desire to equalize the race experience.

“We used to hear that we’re trying to equalize the time on course and we want people to have the same race experience – which is based around time,” said Peters. “The current model of racing, where women generally race 5 k less than men, offers completely different race experiences for men and women. When you look at the data we provide in the letter, race times get closer when you analyze the longer distances. In those longer distances, race times are much closer when men and women are doing the same distance, not women racing 5 k shorter.”

The data provided to The Ski Equal Team by Lily Koffman, a Harvard biostatistician and former collegiate skier, tells a simple story. Of the four classic races analyzed by Koffman, finish times were more similar when men and women both raced 10 k rather than 5 k and 10 k respectively, or 10 k and 15 k, respectively. 

The same trend holds for the skate racing data. The finish times for men and women overlapped more when both genders raced the same distance. In this case, equal distance skate races of 15 k and 13.2 k, respectively. Conversely, skate race data show little overlap in times comparing unequal race distances. What appears to hold true is that if stakeholders want roughly equal time racing for men and women, at least according to this sample, all skiers should race longer distances and of equal length.  

“The difference in time on course for men and women competing in separate distance races show a significant gap and virtually no overlap of time,” asserts the Ski Equal Team letter to U.S. Ski & Snowboard. “By contrast, equal distance races show a significant overlap in finish times and consequently a similar race experience for the men’s and women’s fields. This is not an isolated example – we see similar patterns in other collegiate and junior races. There is no compelling reason to require women and men at any level to race different distances.”

The latter also claims female athletes benefit well beyond sport when equal distances are raced.  The Ski Equal Team claims equal racing distances prepare female skiers to expect equal treatment in other aspects of life. (This is, of course, a time when female athletes are empowered to call out entities like the NCAA for unequal treatment.)

“By providing equality of opportunity in sport, the Nordic ski community will prepare women to expect equality of opportunity in areas beyond sport, such as employment and compensation,” reads the Ski Equal Team letter.   

The equal distance initiative has set its eyes on the NCAA ski championships too. The Ski Equal Team’s proposal to the NCAA’s Ski Committee includes several scenarios including sprints, mass starts, and individual start races — all equal distance. 

Below are the potential formats proposed by the Ski Equal Team:

o   Year 1 – 5k & 20k mass; Year 2 – 10k & 15k mass

o   Year 1 – Sprint & 10k; Year 2 – 5k & 15k

o   Year 1 – Sprint & 20k; Year 2 – 10k & 15k

University of Colorado Head Nordic Coach Jana Weinberger expressed she does not have strong feelings about the equal distance debate. Weinberger raced at CU as a student-athlete and has coached at the school for many years. “When I was a competitive athlete, I was happy women skied shorter distances, and it never crossed my mind that we should, or that I wanted to, ski the same distance. I was solely focused on competing against the women I raced, as opposed to racing the same distance as men. I never felt that racing a shorter distance was a sexist decision.”

According to Weinberger, many of her female athletes are focused on performing their best at the predetermined distances, which in this case are 5 k shorter than the men’s distance. “Additionally, I had this discussion with many of the women on my team in the past, and the strong majority did not want to race the men’s distances,” Weinberger added. “For them, it was not a matter of; I can’t race that far, or, the men race farther because they are stronger, but more from the standpoint that I like racing the distances we currently have and am focused on racing women.”

Weinberger also has the distinction of serving on the NCAA’s Ski Committee. One glaring absence from collegiate racing, well represented at seemingly all other levels of cross-country ski racing, are sprints. The CU coach said she considers adding sprints to the NCAA Championship calendar a more important short-term goal. 

“As a member of the NCAA committee, I feel it is more important to add a sprint race to the Championship weekend than to spend our time and resources in having equal distances for men and women,” wrote Weinberger.

A 2016 FasterSkier article featuring the different distances raced at the NCAA level for men and women reflected an antiquated notion, or myth, regarding a woman’s ability to endure. Former ski racer Annie Pokorny, quoted in that piece, said, “that conception turned into tradition, one that still thrives today in the form of shortened distances for female endurance athletes.”

During this inflection point in history when equity and inclusion have become keystones for many evolving institutions, modifying race distances by making them equal in length, has gained traction.  

There is talk of equal distance racing for next season. With the racing calendars at the national level to be formalized at the upcoming U.S. Ski & Snowboard Congress from May 17-21, the topic of equal distance racing is expected to be discussed. On a regional level, Justin Beckwith, the Competitive Program Director for NENSA, expects some experimentation with equal distance formats to take place next year.     

“The underlying sentiment from most parties is that decisions of race distances should be made on the basis of development/speed development,” Beckwith emailed. “There are complicating factors in all of these discussions, like NCAA, Junior World Ski Championships and World Cup distances — those training for these specific events feel compelled to do just that.” 

Those examples of unequal distance racing cited by Beckwith remain for the time being. It’s true, women race shorter distances than men in the distance events at Junior Worlds, U23 Worlds, Senior World Championships, Olympics, and the World Cup. That might be another debate altogether: is cross-country ski racing a means to train up the pin-prick of light at the sharp end of the pipeline, and prepare those athletes for specific distance races, like a 5 k for women and 10 k for men? Or should it function as a completely different competitive enterprise?   

This strange ski racing season, Beckwith explained, allowed for some experimentation with organizing events where equal distance racing came into play. 

“Through our pandemic 2021 season we had some latitude to try equal distance in a few more events than we normally would — it seemed to be well received minus some feedback from college athletes,” said Beckwith. “As we are planning for 2022 we are looking at the opportunity to shake up distances to make exciting events for competitors, venues, and spectators alike. Specifically, if Eastern SuperTours are approved for Period 3 we have a proposal that would have not just equal distances, but also unique formats.”

Back at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, Peters knows change starts somewhere. The two most common approaches are from the top down, or at the more local level, from the bottom up. Peters’ family owns and operates Vermont’s Sleepy Hollow Nordic Center. Peters has helped develop a statement called the Sleepy Hollow Ski Equal Pledge. If you are racing at Sleepy Hollow, everyone races the same distance.

It might make sense before you grind out training for specific distances to check out the set-in-stone race schedules, when they become available, and plan accordingly. They might just be equal. 

Last fall, one thing was certain — the pandemic would worsen. And it did. Rosie Brennan, summed up her feelings about traveling to Finland for the first round of World Cups by jumping in head first, masked, of course.

“I don’t believe anyone knows the answer [to if we should or should not have a World Cup] as we are all experiencing this pandemic for the first time and still don’t have a full grasp of what is safe and what isn’t,” Brennan wrote in early December. “At this point, I made the big journey to get over here so I am going to stay and continue to race as long as it feels safe enough. There is obviously no such thing as zero risk so it’s all a balancing act and weighing the risks versus rewards daily.”

Brenna’s big journey paid off. She finished that first weekend in Ruka, a three-race series, fifth overall. Norway’s Therese Johaug won, followed by Tatiana Sorina of Russia, and Sweden’s Ebba Andersson and Frida Karlsson, respectively. Outside of Jessie Diggins, Brennan’s U.S. teammate, no other North Americans placed in the top-30. (Canada, due to Covid related issues, would not arrive on the scene until much later in the season.)

At 32-years-old, fifth place was then a career-best result. That high water mark would soon fall. Shattered might be a better way to describe it.

For a time, the World Cup seemed like it was teetering on collapse. Shortly after Ruka, Norway, Finland, and Sweden pulled from World Cup competition. Sweden and Finland returned for the Tour de Ski. If you have followed the sport closely, grit is an adjective to describe both Diggins and Brennan. Diggins’ grit shines on race day. She’s never to be counted out. Brennan’s grit, on the other hand, is the kind we tell our kids to possess when life doesn’t quite go their way. On and off, and on again, it was for Brennan and her U.S. Ski Team status. She hung in there. That’s been a boon for Brennan and the national team.

Brennan cashed in her chips in Davos, Switzerland. She won back-to-back races, a skate sprint, and the storied 10 k interval start skate. According to the data-crunching over at @StatSkier, Brennan was the oldest first-time winner of a sprint since the 2009-2010 season.

Brennan became the third American woman along with Sadie Bjornsen and Diggins to wear the yellow bib as the World Cup’s overall leader. She earned five podiums during the season. After five stages of eight during the Tour de Ski, she was second overall behind eventual winner Diggins. With performance bumps in stage six and seven, Brennan placed sixth overall.

With her electric start to Period I and Period II, Brennan was in the conversation among the World’s best. By her own admission, the voltage eventually waned. She missed out on some goals later in the season. No matter, it was a breakthrough. She finished fourth in the overall standings, fourth in distance, and ninth in the sprint standings.

The capstone is that Brennan is relatively late in her career. The grit, which has sustained her for more than a decade, paid off with a signature 2021-2022 season. The interview with Brenna that follows has been lightly edited for clarity. We spoke with Brennan on April 23.

***

FasterSkier: You’ve had some time to reflect on your season. There was a lot to it. Some wins, a yellow bib, and traveling amidst a pandemic. Now that it is in the rearview mirror, what resonates the most?

Rosie Brennan: Honestly, I think just kind of making it through the season. Most of the summer and fall I didn’t know anything about what their schedule might look like. I mean no one did. And so I am definitely proud of myself for making the most of that. And I guess dealing with the adversity we all dealt with as best as I could.

I think that’s something that I will always remember, and hopefully, it will serve me well in my next life. Of course, those were my first podiums on the World Cup. You know it’s not something I ever take for granted…ever. That’s been the goal for a while. So it felt like one of those life goals that are out there that you’re never really sure if you’re going to get or not. So to get that kind of feeling, and to achieve some of the other goals that I set for myself, that was big for me.

FS: Our ears in the ground in Alaska tells us you had a speedy running time trial on Anchorage’s gas line TT course. I think you broke the record. And we are talking about a long legacy of very fit people who have time trialed that run. I’m guessing when you broke the record, you have a good idea that you were coming into some historic fitness for yourself. 

RB: Gosh, that must have been in July of last summer. I definitely felt good. We do that time trial multiple times a summer, so I’ve done it at least once, if not twice a summer, for quite some time now, and I’ve been somewhere between one and five seconds off the record for the past two or three years now. So yeah it’s been a big goal, I’ll just put it that way.

And every time I had done it the past couple of years, I would just be a few seconds off the record. So I knew I was working with seconds, I just needed to figure out how to make up a second or two out there, Like it’s only a 10 and a half minute race so that shouldn’t be that hard to come up with a second. And when I broke the record, I actually broke it by quite a bit. That felt good, just thinking about my ability to break the record. But I didn’t think that I could break it by as much as I did. So after that, I knew that I was in the best shape I had ever been in.

Then we had some other rollerski time trials and other kinds of events that aligned with that. So it wasn’t just really good running shape, it was just good shape in general. So I did have a good sense of my fitness throughout the summer.

I would say, you know, that’s, to me that’s one of the things about Flora, is that he has always believed that I’ve been capable of that. So I wouldn’t say it was anything new, I continued to believe for sure and the excitement definitely but yeah I would say that he has made me believe that I was capable of a World Cup podium for quite a few years now so we were just chipping away at that and it took some time but we got there.

FasterSkier: Last season was unique, as we mentioned, for everyone. In particular, the APU training group normally is on snow at least once a month at the Eagle Glacier. Due to the pandemic, restrictions on travel, and group size, you were unable to get on snow until I think late fall on some of the higher elevation snow around Anchorage. You had a great season from a stats point of view. Does last summer’s training, and the lack of on snow time, make you think more about how to modify your training coming into this new training cycle?

RB: I would not say not being on snow was helpful, but I would say COVID was extremely helpful for me in some ways. I am somebody that works really well off of consistency, and I’m really lucky that we have such a strong group in Alaska, so I wasn’t missing people pushing me or having different challenges, or people to learn from. I had that every day still, but not traveling and not adding additional stresses into my schedule was hugely beneficial. I think I just simply had the most consistent trading I’ve ever had in my life — it was just everyday training twice a day, day in day out for forever.

There were no distractions, no, no nothing. And that might be hard for some people but for me, particularly, I think as an older athlete that’s pretty attuned to training like that it was really enjoyable. Honestly, it worked really well for me. I’ve always had a feeling that would be the case for me but I’ve never gone so extreme, and I don’t know that I want to go that extreme this year. It is nice to see some different places, see some other teammates and family and stuff every once in a while, but I’m hoping to minimize my travel, and just have a consistent training schedule with my team in Alaska.

FasterSkier: Let’s circle back to reflecting on the race season. You arrived in shape. Two wins in Period 1. A fantastic Tour de Ski. But the energy, as the season progressed, waned a bit if we are speaking strictly of results. How would you describe this season?

RB: I would definitely call it a breakthrough season for myself as a whole. Any season, and fortunately this one was long enough that there were high points and low points, and goals exceeded as well as goals not met. Period I was a huge high point for me. And, you know, I think I’m far enough away from the Tour de Ski to call it a microcosm of the season.

It was a really big learning experience for me. Some real positives came out of it and also some tough days. I was really happy with how I handled the racing after the Tour. I think I had a good plan working through all that, but World Champs was a big disappointment for me. And I’m not sure I have all the answers to why I guess that’s just sport. I have some ideas, some takeaways, to try and adjust for next year.

FasterSkier: All things considered with travel, you did have a dense race schedule. You race most of the World Cups. You skipped the sprint weekend in Dresden, as well as the sprint weekend in Ulricehamn. With next season an Olympic year, do you look at your intense race schedule and think maybe in the run-up to the Olympics, you might try something different, like not doing the Tour, or racing more selectively when it comes to distance races too?

RB: It’s funny, because yeah, I did race more or less everything. But we did have a few race cancellations in there so it still felt like less racing than I’ve done in past years. So I felt relatively comfortable with the amount I raced. I think that’s kind of, I guess what I found to be the sustainable amount, right around what I did this year. But, you know, the interesting part was World Champs are always later than the Olympics. So, it’s always more of a little bit of a puzzle to figure out how the Tour fits into that racing. It was just really hard to travel, so the risk of coming home and going back over was exponentially higher than it is in other years. In a normal year, it’s worth the risk of travel to go home for me. I like that kind of mental break from the road. But this year was just a little much. You just never knew if a race was going to get canceled the next weekend, so I felt like I just had to keep throwing my hat in the ring until the season was over.

Just because we didn’t know what was coming. That also makes it hard to plan for the Olympics just solely based on this year because there were just enough unknowns that the plan was always a bit of a moving target. But I’ve done enough championships now at this point in my career that I have more data points than just this year to go off of. So, I will be looking at, you know, kind of all the championship years to figure out what schedule will work best for me. But one of my goals is to come into the Olympics with a little more energy. Maybe, I don’t know, we’d call it an excitement that I had out here definitely kind of hitting the low energy stores at that point.

FS: Would you consider skipping the Tour de Ski next year? It is not uncommon for some top World Cup skiers to pass on that race series in a World Champs or Olympic year. 

RB: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I did that in 2019 before Seefeld. I raced Period I, and then I skipped the Tour. I felt that was a positive thing for me, I think it gave me a little more energy and motivation heading into those Championships. The hard part is I love doing the Tour. It’s a really fun event. So it’s always kind of a battle of what my personal goals are. But obviously, the Olympics are a big one so that’s something I’m considering and, you know the other thing is that the Olympic venue is almost the same altitude as Soldier Hollow and so the fact that Park City is, is another place I call home, makes it so the benefit of training here is that much greater. So I definitely would like to try to incorporate a trip back home to Park City at some point, to do an altitude camp and prepare for the Olympics. Both, during the summer and then also during the season.

FasterSkier: How do you see your role on the U.S. Team now that some heavy hitters have retired? You have had a more than simple relationship with the national team with the main idea being that you’ve been on the team, off the team, on the team again, and now finding success on the World Cup. How important is it for you to be part of shepherding this younger crew along to fill some of the voids that have been created with recent retirements?

RB: That’s important to me. I don’t know how many years I have remaining in my career but that has been one of my biggest motivators to keep racing — just to make sure that we don’t lose momentum on our team, and that I’m leaving the young girls in a place where they’re ready to have success. To make sure it is a seamless transition. That’s been a huge motivator for me to keep going. I’m lucky that a lot of those girls and boys are on APU and so I’ve worked with them every day, and they challenge me as much as I challenge them and we learn a lot from each other. I do like that energy…I used to get embarrassed by my age, but I feel that I’ve grown and embraced it a bit, and I enjoy working with this group. It’s an incredible group. It’s fun to be a part of so it’s not a burden. I enjoy working with them and I hope that is helpful. I want to be a good leader, that’s a goal.

It’s hugely satisfying to know that you can be as good as you thought you could. And, you know, more than anything for me, it’s so satisfying because of all the ups and downs I’ve had, and the perseverance I found to stick it out. It gives me that much more satisfying to meet some of those goals. I have some unfinished business with the Olympics. So I’m hugely motivated for this coming season.

Press Release

USA NORDIC ANNOUNCES TEAM NOMINATIONS
Group of 45 nordic combined and ski jumping athletes earn spots

USA Nordic has nominated 45 American athletes to its 2021-22 national and junior nordic combined and ski jumping teams. Athletes achieved the nominations based on selection criteria. They will have the option of being a part of the 2021-22 U.S. Nordic Combined or U.S. Ski Jumping Team.

The nominations were made after the conclusion of the 2021 competition season. Athletes are now in training for the upcoming summer and winter seasons.

“Our team nominations include a wide range of veterans across our national teams, but some great up-and-coming athletes on the junior teams,” said USA Nordic Sport Director Jed Hinkley. “It was especially challenging this year with ever-changing schedule changes and cancelations.”

Athletes will have the option of accepting nominations prior to the 2021-22 season. The final teams for the season will be named this fall. With the Olympics coming up next winter in Beijing, athletes will be striving to earn positions on Team USA. Those nominations and team naming will be announced just prior to the Olympics.

2021-22 U.S. NORDIC COMBINED SKI TEAM
Men’s National Team
Grant Andrews, 23, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Taylor Fletcher, 30, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Jasper Good, 24, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Ben Loomis, 22, Eau Claire, Wis., Flying Eagles Ski Club
Niklas Malacinski, 17, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Evan Nichols, 17, Lyme, N.H., Ford K. Sayre Memorial Ski Council
Jared Shumate, 22, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Stephen Schumann, 21, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard

Women’s National Team
Tess Arnone, 18, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Alexa Brabec, 16, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Annika Malacinski, 19, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Tara Geraghty-Moats, 28, W. Fairlee, Vt., Craftsbury Nordic Ski Club

2021-22 U.S. SKI JUMPING TEAM
Men’s National Team
Erik Belshaw, 16, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Kevin Bickner, 24 Wauconda, Ill., Norge Ski Club
Decker Dean, 20, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Patrick Gasienica, 22, Spring Grove, Ill., Norge Ski Club
Casey Larson, 22, Barrington, Ill., Norge Ski Club
Andrew Urlaub, 20, Eau Claire, Wis., Flying Eagles Ski Club

Canadian Athletes Training with USA Nordic
Mackenzie Boyd-Clowes
Matthew Soukup

Women’s National Team
Annika Belshaw, 18, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Jillian Highfill, 17, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Anna Hoffmann, 20, Madison, Wis., Blackhawk Ski Club
Paige Jones, 18, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Cara Larson, 20, Barrington, Ill., Norge Ski Club
Nina Lussi, 27, Lake Placid, N.Y., New York Ski Education Foundation
Samantha Macuga, 20, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Logan Sankey, 22, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club

2021-22 U.S. NORDIC COMBINED SKI TEAM – JUNIOR TEAM
Men’s Junior Team
Carter Brubaker, 17, Anchorage, Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage
Tate Frantz, 16, Lake Placid, New York Ski Education Foundation
Gunnar Gilbertson, 18, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Henry Johnstone, 20, Concord, Mass. Andover Outing Club
Aidan Ripp, 20, Cloquet, Minn., Cloquet Ski Club
Zach Selzman, 16, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Caleb Zuckerman, 15, Norwich, Vt., Ford K. Sayre Memorial Ski Council

Women’s Junior Team
Aspen Bennett-Manke, 15, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Charlotte Ripp, 16, Cloquet, Minn., Cloquet Ski Club

2021-22 U.S. SKI JUMPING TEAM – JUNIOR TEAM
Men’s Junior Team
Jason Colby, 15, Steamboat Springs, Colo., Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club
Hunter Gibson, 20, Woodstock, Ill., Norge Ski Club
Stewart Gundry, 15, Eau Claire, Wis., Flying Eagles Ski Club
Shane Kocher, 17, Algonquin, Ill., Norge Ski Club
Landon Lee, 18, Eau Claire, Wis., Flying Eagles Ski Club

Women’s Junior Team
Rachael Haerter, 16, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Josie Johnson, 14, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Elise Loescher, 18, Burlington, Vt., New York Ski Education Foundation
Macey Olden, 16, Park City, Utah, Park City Ski & Snowboard
Adeline Swanson, 15, Woodbury, Minn., St. Paul Ski Club

About USA Nordic
USA Nordic is the national leadership organization for nordic combined and ski jumping in the United States, providing support and guidance to the nations’ clubs and coaches while overseeing the national elite teams. To stay connected, visit www.usanordic.org.

Let’s start with some basic gender equality facts in skiing.

The first women’s downhill at the Olympics was in1948. Women were awarded Olympic medals in combined (one downhill run and two of slalom) beginning eight years earlier in 1936. FIS has awarded a women’s World Championship in downhill since 1931. The FIS database marks 1967 as the first year for an official FIS World Cup downhill race for both men or women.

It’s a different narrative in ski jumping. FIS sanctioned ski jumping began for men during the 1979-1980 season. It took three more decades for women’s ski jumping to be recognized by FIS. The first women’s FIS World Cup ski jumping competition for women was held in 2011. American Sarah Hendrickson won. The first World Championships in ski jumping for women was awarded to another American, Lindsey Van, in 2009. Men, on the other hand, have been ski jumping in the Winter Olympics since their inception in 1924. The IOC welcomed women’s ski jumping at the Olympics in 2014.

This story though is about Ski Flying. But we’ll tie it back into alpine skiing later on.

Ski Flying is a close relative of ski jumping. Essentially, they are the same beyond the size of the jump. Ski Flying jumps are larger. Athletes soar farther on these jumps. Ski Flying is not an Olympic sport, however, FIS has sanctioned a World Championships in the discipline since 1972 – but only for men.

“Anybody who knows ski jumping even a little bit, you have a small hill and a big hill, and those are usually around a K90 and a K95 or K125. Ski Flying is jumping off anything that is above a K155,” said Jessica Jerome, a former U.S. ski jumper and Olympian. “There are six of these hills in the world, and only five of them are usable. It’s not a set K point or jump size. Basically, it’s ski jumping but just more of everything — it’s more speed it’s more flight time.”

Recently, if you’ve been following Jerome on Twitter, her Tweets about Ski Flying may have caught your attention. Here’s one poignant tweet: “Safety is not, and will NEVER be a valid argument @FISskijumping. I have seen some trash ski flying from forejumpers and other small nations. I think what you guys are afraid to say is you must have a penis to fly?”

Jerome was responding to an April 19 FIS press release and the decision made by the FIS Ski Jumping Calendar Planning Committee to not schedule the first-ever women’s Ski Flying competition next season. “No Ski Flying yet for the women next winter,” claimed the press release. The two reasons given by FIS for not allowing women to participate in Ski Flying were safety and issues with calendering an event.

One of the five operable Ski Flying hill towers in the world sits above Vikersund, Norway. The local Vikersund organizing committee recently proposed to host a FIS women’s Ski Flying event concurrent with a men’s jump next season. The proposal was voted down 9-7 by the FIS Ski Jumping Calendar Planning Committee.

“I can not believe that this comes from adults,” said Norwegian National team ski jumping coach, Christian Meyer, in a translated Dagbladat article. “We have jumped a big hill for a long time. Also in Granåsen in Trondheim, you can jump 145 meters. We have been doing this since 2013. For the history-less, I can also inform you that a lady jumped 200 meters in Kulm in 2003. At that time, Daniela Iraschko-Stolz was a test jumper. At that time, both equipment and technology were inferior. Still, it was zero problem to jump 200 meters for a girl.”

Maren Lundby, a twenty-six-year-old two-time Olympic ski jumping champion, and the 2019 and 2021 ski jumping World Champion, has been an outspoken critic of the decision. Active on Instagram, Lundby released a terse video with a singular message: The Girls Want to Fly.

The April 19 FIS statement on women’s Ski Flying claimed women would be introduced to Ski Flying incrementally. “The next step will be the women’s World Cup on the HS 147 hill in Willingen in the 2021/22 winter season,” read the statement. “The Muehlenkopf-hill in Willingen, [Germany] is considered a small flying hill, the perfect introduction to Ski Flying hills.”

That specific jump will be the largest yet used in an official women’s FIS ski jump competition. FIS goes on to claim, “The experts want to have these competitions first and then make a decision concerning Ski Flying events next winter.” FIS does not clarify who the “experts” are.

The U.S. representative to the Ski Jumping Calendar Committee is Park City based, Alissa Johnson. A now-retired ski jumper, Johnson is a former world top-10 ranked jumper and is a certified international technical delegate (TD). She voted to approve women’s Ski Flying in the 9 to 7 vote.

“I think there have been safety concerns, like if you have a full World Cup field,” said Johnson of the sub-committee’s discussion on the issue. “So their safety concern was not so much for the top tier athletes, I think probably it’s safe to say they were referring to the top 10 or 15 depending on their age and World Rank. I think the safety concern is more directed at the back end of the field.”

The step up to Ski Flying should not be understated. The speeds achieved, and the distances jumped are greater than those on Ski Flying hills. The fact exists that ski jumping has been accessible to men far longer than women. It renders down to simply more opportunities for men and a greater number of male athletes perceived to be capable of Ski Flying.

With fewer opportunities to Ski Fly, the progression some women need to make technically and mentally to handle much larger hills is restricted. Johnson explained that to her knowledge, only seven women internationally have been allowed to Ski Fly – all as forerunners or test jumpers at men’s events.

According to Johnson, during the sub-committee meeting, some voting members were against approving the Vikersuznd round of Ski Flying because the field of women jumpers able to competently Ski Fly would be too small.

“I think women, in general, need advancements, but I also feel like the top-tier women can jump, and can jump safely,” said Johnson. “But I think a lot of the discussion came down to this: can we justify calling a World Cup a World Cup if it has less than 30 athletes?”

One solution to cull the women’s field for a potential Ski Flying event was to evaluate the women’s field mid-season after they had jumped on the large hill in Willingen, Germany.

Sarah Hendrickson, a twenty-six-year-old now-retired U.S. Olympian, and World Champion serves as one of two athlete reps to the FIS Ski Jumping Committee — a role she has served in for five years. Hendrickson explained that Norway’s Vikersund Ski Flying proposal, presented to the FIS Ski Jumping Calendar Planning Committee by Norway’s representative Clas Brede Bråthen, was both supported by Norway’s government and framed as an opportunity to raise the market value for women’s jumping.

“So Bråthen is stating it from a very business-money point of view, which I think is fantastic because marketing and sponsorship are important factors for FIS,” said Hendrickson. “They’re complaining during this meeting that they need to raise the viewership. Bråthen clearly explained here’s one way to increase the viewership and gain popularity in ski jumping, and some listening in were simply like ‘yeah no’.”

Hendrickson was further disheartened by the step-by-step approach suggested for women to gain experience on incrementally larger ski jumping hills. Absent from the discussion, according to Hendrickson, was what precise objective criteria the decision-makers were looking for to determine if a woman was capable of Ski Flying. Hendrickson recalls Bråthen trying to clarify what specific criteria the women had to meet to be certified to Ski Fly. Despite Bråthen’s questions, Hendrickson said no answer regarding a more structured method for assessing able-to-Ski-Fly women was forthcoming.

How Safe is Safe?

The notion that safety remains a concern falls flat for many athletes and observers of the sport. “I’m female, I didn’t get into the sport because I knew it was the safest sport,” said Hendrickson. “We love ski jumping because there’s a risk of danger, there’s a risk of challenge. We know there’s a risk, there’s just as much a risk jumping off a small hill as a big hill.”

Johnson, the voting member for the U.S. on the Ski Jumping Calendar Committee, expressed that individual athletes were the real experts in terms of determining Ski Flying readiness.

“At the end of the day, I think safety concerns should come down to the technical delegates that are appointed to those competitions on any given weekend,” reasoned Johnson. “It should come down to the coaches, but ultimately, it should come down to the athletes. Because regardless of whatever my coaches are saying, if I don’t feel safe, I won’t be safe. I think the safety argument has to come down to those individuals jumping. It’s so individualized. In the broad scheme of things, FIS and our TDs can host a fair and safe event for all athletes.”

The obvious long-term opportunity cost for limited Ski Flying opportunities for women is clear: fewer women might be ready to Ski Fly. If it is desired to increase the size of an experienced, and therefore “safe”, women’s Ski Flying field, then more women need the chance to Ski Fly.

“Safety is a non-issue, it’s not a thing,” said Jerome about a women’s ability to Ski Fly. “Because if safety were an issue, then first of all, why are you letting anybody participate if safety is an issue? It doesn’t matter whether it’s a male or a female or whatever. It’s a human being and it’s either going to be safe or it’s not. So if you’ve decided it’s safe for men, then it should be safe for certain women as well.”

Jerome went on to clarify that women who have demonstrated high technical proficiency and have the appropriate mental calmness to fly off large jumps should be allowed to Ski Fly. “It’s not one of those things where they’re going to fill quota spots for Ski Flying because you have to take it a little more seriously,” said Jerome.

Let’s circle back to the historical information mentioned at the top. Women have participated in downhill at the FIS World Championships since 1931. Beyond alpine skiing, of which downhill is a sub-discipline, FIS is responsible for sanctioning several winter sports considered to be potentially unsafe. Among them are snowboarding, freestyle, and freeskiing.

Perhaps FIS has data unavailable to the public regarding the inherent fragility of women compared to men that were rectified for downhill in 1931 but remain current for Ski Flying in 2021? Considering safety, the downhill is still among the diciest of the FIS disciplines. As noted, FIS does not discriminate by gender in that event. Women race downhill. And they race on courses at extreme speeds, over sometimes water injected snow.

However, between the 2014/15 and 2016/17 race seasons, data from the FIS Injury Surveillance Ssyetem 2006-2018, found women were more likely than men to suffer time-loss injuries on the alpine World Cup. Ask American stars Lindsey Vonn (retired) and Mikaela Shiffrin, the women played through and they played on. Women were not kept from competing due to safety concerns.

Over the same period, 2014-2018, FIS concluded men and women suffered about the same number of injuries ski jumping at the World Ski Championships and Olympics.

Of the total number of injuries through 12 seasons of the FIS disciplines (with ski jumping data from four seasons), 7.8% of all injuries suffered on the alpine World Cup were nervous system or concussion injuries. The same category accounted for 6.8% of injuries in ski jumping. Fractured bone/stress injuries comprised 22.3% of all injuries on the alpine World Cup. 14.9% of injuries in ski jumping were fractured bones/stress injuries.

On the surface, alpine skiing, at this elite level, appears more dangerous than ski jumping. Broadcast contracts for alpine skiing are much larger than those for ski jumping. Considering safety data, or the potential for yard sale crashes, the scheduling of FIS alpine events for men or women has not been deterred.

Across the spectrum of elite sport, the ceiling remains opaque for female athletes. Considering ski jumping, at the 2018 Winter Games, men had three unique events, the women one — an individual event on the normal hill. The legacy of discrimination extends to the first modern Olympics in 1896. The Games’ founder, Pierre de Coubertin is quoted as saying, “No matter how toughened a sportswoman may be, her organism is not cut out to sustain certain shocks”.

Again, according to FIS and their World Championships, those “shocks” somehow disappeared in the downhill for women in 1931 but persist for women in 2021 when it comes to FIS sanctioned Ski Flying competitions. FasterSkier requested an interview with a FIS representative. This story will be updated when we receive a reply.

When it comes to prize money on the ski jumping World Cup, a woman’s jump is worth less than a man’s jump. FIS rules provide at least 10,000 Swiss Francs to be awarded to the men’s winner of a ski jumping World Cup. The winner of a women’s FIS World Cup ski jumping event earns at least 3,800 Swiss Francs. Women, who sometimes fly further than men, earn 62% less for their winning efforts.

On the men’s side of World Cup ski jumping, the top-30 earn prize money; the top-20 earn a paycheck for women. A quick check of the field size at a joint men’s and women’s competition in Râșnov, Romania in mid-February had 39 women in the field and 48 men, respectively.

Pay equity and safety aside, which are important issues, women have been allowed to chase the FIS dream in the alpine skiing realm for 90 years. (Although Lindsey Vonn was never granted the right to compete against men.) Women ski jumpers, for the time being, have to wait through at least another winter for the chance to Ski Fly in a FIS competition.

The wait, no matter how short or long is difficult, said Hendrickson. She explained that during the most recent Ski Jumping Calendar meeting she unmuted her audio and challenged the committee chair when they insisted there was “no rush” to get women Ski Flying.

“I explained that the Olympics are next year and a lot of women are going to retire after next year and they’ll never get a chance to Ski Fly,” said Hendrickson. “So it might not be a rush to you, but for someone who’s an athlete, that is looking to retire and now could not have this lifelong dream because they’re a girl is pretty devastating.”

*The latest information posted on the FIS site lists numerous nations as comprising the FIS SKI Jumping Calendar Planning Committee. They include Austria, Russia, Norway, Slovenia, Poland, Japan, USA, Sweden, Korea, Italy, Canada, France, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Turkey.

Some skiers have tossed them, some have squandered them, some have disposed of them according to specific guidelines for toxins at their local landfill. Some have donated their speed-goods to the U.S. Ski Team as it burns through its supply of high-quality fluoros. Some have simply stored them in a wax cabinet, a symbol of what was. We’re talking fluorinated wax, powders, gels, liquids, and yes, small-batch slurries. U.S. Ski and Snowboard has banned fluoros while the International Ski Federation (FIS) banned them, postponed the ban, and now orbits in a will-they won’t-they quagmire. The move to ban fluoros has gained momentum.

Several years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pursued Swix for several violations of the TSCA, or Toxic Substances Control Act. Swix was fined a substantial monetary sum. It was also tasked, as part of the penalty, to develop a “responsible waxing project” (RWP). 

According to the EPA’s ruling, SWIX was to address two main issues with its program:

• Educating the ski racing community about PFAS chemicals (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in racing waxes and their impact on the environment
• Promoting the use of wax alternatives with lower environmental impact, including but not limited to racing waxes that are PFAS-free

Swix fulfilled its obligation. The course is open as part of Swix’s learning center. Access to the course requires registration with an email and password. The RWP takes roughly 30 minutes to complete. 

Swix does not provide a master class on PFAS chemistry and the adverse environmental effects associated with their use. Think of the RWP as a basic intro-level course discussing how perfluorinated compounds are bad and using non-fluorinated waxes are good. You’ll learn about C8 and C6 compounds and the concept of a “forever chemical”. There’s no discussion of more complex terms like bioaccumulation. This is not a Silent Spring treatment of PFAS, although that was not expected. 

The course provides simple and sound advice to keep the ski bench area clean and well-ventilated. If you do not have access to a World Cup wax bus and their HVAC systems, the RWP will likely improve your waxing hygiene. In other words, you’ll be encouraged to wax in a well-ventilated area, wear gloves, a long-sleeved shirt, pants, an apron, hat, and HEPA-certified mask when waxing and prepping skis. “The filter should be a minimum of A1P3. Don’t forget that particles can be retained in the air for hours so wear your mask at all times while in a waxing facility,” states one of the slides in the RWP. You’ll be reminded to swap out those waxing clothes as soon as possible before contaminating other spaces — even if working with non-fluorinated products.

There’s advice on cleaning brushes and choosing an appropriate roto-brush (preferably one with a “suction cover”). The RWP also urges waxers to clean the workspace with a HEPA filter vacuum.

If you are a family getting into the game, and you’d like to be self-reliant and safe with the waxing, none of this comes cheap. Gone, or at least they should be, are the days of cranking the iron, melting the wax, smoke be damned, and brushing the wax out in a windowless side room.     

The visuals alone in the RWP provide a simple model for maintaining a cleaner and safer waxing workspace, and how to clean up that space afterward. That is of value.  

This brings us to the next point which FasterSkier raised with the EPA when discussing the penalty phase for Swix. The online video-intensive platform is an unsubtle piece of Swix branding. Does this provide Swix with a competitive advantage as the ski scene evolves to a fluoro-free future? It certainly cannot hurt. Back in August 2020, FasterSkier asked the EPA how it would ensure the RWP was not a Swix branding opportunity, as this was considered a penalty for an EPA violation. The EPA, at the time, seemed less concerned with the marketing potential, or outsourcing production of the RWP to an independent party, and more focused on the deliverables.

If you’ve not been following the move to fluoro-free waxing, none of this might matter. The RWP comes off like much of Swix’s video branding: solid information, polished and simple syntax, a whitewashed background highlighted with a catalog’s worth of red Swix product. The only piece of clothing or product that resonated non-Swix, was the presenter’s earthy-green flannel. Even the ground tarp under the wax bench was a Swix-specific tarp. One slide, though, features a block of yellow Toko wax, a brand also owned by Brav, the parent company of both Swix and Toko.

Beyond the branding and the well presented best practices, there’s some corporate moralizing too. “True competitors ski on skill,” is one verbal plug in the RWP to dissuade users from partaking in the game of speed enhancement through fluoro chemistry. 

The RWP also mentions that U.S. Ski & Snowboard and Nordiq Canada have banned fluoros. And FIS intends to enforce a ban… maybe next year. It remains true, using fluoros at some races in the U.S., for example, is cheating.

The RWP also includes this statement in the learning module’s opening video:

“By complying with these new rules and choosing to ski fluoro-free, we can further protect our precious environment and be sure we are all competing on an even playing field. Conditioning, technique, and mental toughness will set you apart from the competition. So let’s all ski on skill and commit to doing our part to keep our environment safe and clean.”

Ski racers, coaches, and pretty much anybody who has skied on poor skis knows this: pick the right ski for the conditions, add a gem of a fluoro wax job in warming or dirty snow, and you’ve likely got skis in the mix. 

Beyond a true competitor’s “skill” and willingness to “ski fluoro-free”, there’s the ski fleet and the ski service to consider. That’s just for starters. There’s also easy access to snow that can set an athlete apart. The  5k to 10k (even more for a ski academy) a year it might take to pay to play. Good coaches matter. Hard work matters. So too does The Sports Gene. 

I think we are all in agreement with doing our part to be safer. And the Swix RWP is a step in the right direction. But the platitudes on training, technique, and fortitude? The playing field has other variables to consider beyond skill to even it out, even in a fluoro-free world. 

Wax safely out there. 

A group involved with developing the Fluoro Tracker (FT) as the testing device is known, released a paper last month titled “Detection of fluorine in skibases and skiwaxes.” The paper details the evolution of refining the FT’s ability to accurately detect fluoros. According to the paper, the FT now possesses a refined “evaluation algorithm”. Matthias Scherge, one of the lead developers of the FT, wrote in Snowstorm-Gliding the field tests to evaluate and refine the evaluation algorithm were conducted in Falun, Östersund, and Lenzerheide. Falun, the site of a cross-country World Cup where testing occurred on skis prepared by several national teams, served as the first of the three real-world field tests of the FT. 

The news reported back in March regarding the FT’s inaccuracy cited test results from Falun. The information in Snowstorm-Gliding claims those tests were used to further modify the FT’s evaluation algorithm. 

“The tests served to optimize the evaluation algorithm,” states the paper in Snowstorm-Gliding. “During the first tests in Falun, a non-optimized version was used, which still unsatisfactorily reflected the condition of the skis. Based on the information provided by the ski technicians, the algorithm was refined and a much improved version was used in Östersund and Lenzerheide. The quality of fluorine detection is thus dependent on the quality of the information provided by the ski technicians. Laboratory tests were performed in parallel to improve the correlation between preparation condition and FT measurement results.”

The paper also discusses how the FT functions. For now, the International Ski Federation has not made a public statement regarding the viability of the 2021-2022 fluoro ban. 

You can find the full Snowstorm-Gliding paper titled “Detection of fluorine in skibases and skiwaxes,” here.

There will be many ways in which we remember the past 12 months— March to March — as a relative void when it comes to normalcy. You don’t need to hear that from us. For the most part, this was a year with a lack of national championships at the senior or junior level. U.S. Ski & Snowboard made the decision early on to cancel Senior Nationals and Junior Nationals. The same was true for Canada. Up north, formal racing at the elite level, for both cross-country and biathlon — was tabled as a Covid-19 precaution. The Canadians did hold a modified Frozen Thunder in Canmore — yet contact tracing after the event linked numerous cases to staff and/or athletes that had traveled to Alberta from the eastern part of Canada.

In late March, West Yellowstone became the GPS pin-drop for domestic biathlon normalcy. Able to piggyback on safety procedures already in use by the International Biathlon Union and International Ski Federation since late November, US Biathlon and the local organizing committee in West Yellowstone laid out a plan that, in practice, minimized personal exposure. Between March 26-28, a packed schedule of racing included junior, senior, and IPC athletes. According to Chief of Competition, Marc Sheppard, 140 athletes registered for the series.

Gallatin County, in which West Yellowstone presides, is large. Bozeman is the county seat and is 90 miles away from West Yellowstone by car. On March 23, the county counted 42 new cases of Covid-19. On March 28, 28 new cases were registered. The closest ICU beds are available in Bozeman. On March 19, healtygallatin.org reported 35% of critical care beds as open, with an additional 49% of non-critical care beds open between the two main health care facilities in Bozeman. (Hospital bed occupancy is one method to gauge the severity of community spread.) And according to The World Health Organization positivity rates from testing should be below 5% to consider re-opening businesses. On March 16th, the seven day rolling average for percent-positive tests in Gallatin County was 4.6%.

Further, West Yellowstone’s portal to Yellowstone National Park was closed to car traffic at the time of the events. The influx of visitors associated with the town was at a seasonal lull.

“We had fairly strict Covid-19 protocols in the stadium and range (including changing the access and egress to the stadium to limit congestion and face to face encounters) and USBA also mandated a negative Covid-19 test within 72 hours of the first competition for all athletes and coaches,” Sheppard emailed.

Eileen Carey, director of U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing, found the race organization both safe and efficient for her team. “USBA and WYSEF did a great job organizing and implementing the event,” Carey wrote in an email. “COVID protocols were really clear and well researched. The race crew in West Yellowstone is always so keyed into providing a great event for athletes and they were committed to the protocols so the experience for athletes and teams could be top notch. Testing, daily symptom checks, cleaning processes, and mask protocols were all instituted and from what I saw everyone was on board to do their part.”

Most often, biathlon nationals for able bodied and para athletes are not co-mingled. This year, according to Carey, offered an opportunity for all athletes to race at the same event.

“It is the first time we have integrated in my time with the Team at least,” explained Carey. “West Yellowstone has always been a great supporter of para athletes. They have integrated athletes into other events, both cross-country and biathlon for several years. When I saw that they were hosting USBA Nationals (initially scheduled for last year), I worked with Marc Sheppard to add a para division to the event. When the event was moved to this March, there were some extra scheduling challenges due to COVID protocols, but Marc and his crew made it happen and put on a great event for all athletes. We hope this can be the start of a tradition!”

You can find full results from the three days of racing here.

On April 14, the International Ski Federation (FIS) announced former Estonian cross-country skier Andrus Veerpalu was found guilty by the CAS Anti-Doping Division. Veerpalu was involved with “Operation Aderlass”, a blood doping scheme run by Dr. Marc Schmidt in Germany. Veerpalu’s penalty is a two-year ban from FIS sanctioned events ending on March 17, 2023.

Now retired from skiing, the fifty-year-old Veerpalu in recent years has served as a coach for team “Haanja” in Estonia. According to FIS, the ruling states Veerpalu violated Article 2.9 of the 2016 FIS Anti-Doping Rules which is defined as, “Assisting, encouraging, aiding, abetting, conspiring, covering up or any other type of intentional complicity involving an anti-doping rule violation, Attempted anti-doping rule violation or violation of Article 10.12.1 by another person.”

(No official CAS ruling regarding the current Veerpalu case is available on the CAS website. We will link to the ruling when it becomes available.)

In light of the FIS announcement, ERR news in Estonian reported today that Veerpalu has been stripped of two prestigious national awards. Since his 2002 Olympic gold in the 15 k classic, Veerpalu has been revered as a national hero.

Veerpalu is a two-time Olympic champion. Along with his 2002 Olymoic win, he won another gold in 2006. He also won a silver medal in the 2002 Olympic 50 k and two World Championship gold medals. Kris Freeman, an American cross-country skier, lost out on a medal in the 2009 championship 15 k classic, a race won by Veerpalu.

This is not the first time Veerpalu’s name has been associated with doping. In 2013, he was acquitted on a technicality after an adverse analytical finding (AAF) in both his A and B samples for recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) back in 2011.

Team “Hannja” athletes also serving doping penalties for their involvement in “Operation Aderlass” include Karel Tammjärv, Algo Kärp, Kazakhstan’s Alexey Poltoranin, coach Mati Alaver, and Veerpalu’s son, Andreas Veerpalu.

The medical mastermind of “Operation Aderlass”, Dr. Schmidt is currently serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after being found guilty of breaking Germany’s strict anti-doping laws.

“Operation Aderlass” made international news back when at the 2019 Seefeld, Austria World Championships several athletes, including Austria’s Dominik Baldauf and Maz Hauke, were arrested for “blood doping”.

We are linking two articles from the FasterSkier archives. One explores Estonian cross-country skiing, the other examines the elder Veerpalu’s first doping case from a 2011 perspective.

According to the FIS database, sprints on the cross-country World Cup began during the 1996-1997 season. That year, American Simi Hamilton was nine years old. And if you listen to any of the Hamilton-lore floating around adventure circles, the Aspen, Colorado native was already eyeing deep-country adventure. We’ll touch upon this often here, but Hamilton moves in the mountains as few can. He’s capable of pushing at near race pace in technical terrain with a masterstroke of whimsy. According to writer Bill McKibbon, a longtime friend and mentor to Hamilton, his mother once pointed to the mountainscape beyond Aspen noting a steep slope Hamilton had wended to and skied for his ninth birthday. 

World Cup sprinting has evolved for nearly a quarter-century since Hamilton began feeding the rat near his hometown mountains.

Hamilton, now thirty-three, remains the only American male to win a World Cup sprint. Andy Newell first broke the sprint podium barrier for the U.S. in 2006 with a third place in Changchun, China. Torin Koos followed with a third-place sprint in 2007. Newell took a step up when he placed second in 2008. The high-reach to sprint success on the World Cup for those that follow stand on Hamilton’s shoulders.

Hamilton’s win came in 2013 in Lenzerheide, Switzerland. During his career, he earned two second places, one in 2015 and another in 2017, both in Toblach, Italy. He also landed third in Gatineau’s 2016 sprint. All were in skate technique.

He popped 10 top-fives on the World Cup, which include four fourth places, one a fourth fastest time of day in a 15 k skate pursuit in 2019, and a single fifth place this season in Dresden. He raced into the top-10 on 27 occasions when aggregating team and individual results.  

In 2016 and 2017, respectively, he was ranked 10th and ninth overall in the sprint standings. He finished this season, his last, ranked 14th. In 2017, he was 30th on the distance list, his best career distance ranking. His top distance result was 12th in a 15 k mass start skate in 2018 in Seefeld, Austria. Side note here, we are ruminating on World Cup results. The fastest/fittest cross-country skiers period. In a post-race conversation this winter, U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Matt Whitcomb commented that Hamilton was as proud of his 32nd in Falun’s 15 k individual start skate as any race he’d done. At the 2021 World Championships Hamilton paced himself to 31st, the third fastest North American, in the 15 k indivudual skate. Again, Hamilton was thirlled. It speaks to the notion that Hamilton understood perfectly well the best-in-class competition he faced with each race opportunity. 

Stating it outright, Hamilton is the most successful U.S. sprinter to race the World Cup. To couple all the results pressure, and the desire for the U.S. men’s team to cultivate a regular podium threat, he also carried a heavy karmic burden when in 2014 Outside Magazine declared “This Man Will Make Nordic Skiing Cool”. 

With 2020 in the rearview mirror and the masses flocking to cross-country skiing, there’s no doubt it’s cool. Even more, this much is clear: it’s necessary. And it seemed that way for Hamilton too. 

Back to the buzz about Hamilton. There’s the “have you seen him climb?” There’s “Have you seen him kayak?” Mountain biking savant? That he is. Ski mountaineering? We alluded to that up top in this piece. I’m sure if endurance tap dancing were a thing and required a flow-state of mind and big lungs, he would kill.

“Simi is someone, I think, whose heart is mostly in the high mountains and the backcountry but his body was just so designed for going fast on skis that it would have been a shame not to do it,” McKibben said on our podcast.

Hamilton raced at three Olympic Games and six World Championships. 

His U.S. Ski Team tenure overlapped with a mix of skiers populating the men’s team. From Kris Freeman to Gus Schumacher, Hamilton has navigated a period often overshadowed by the women’s team. The men’s team, for its part, had a core, of which Hamilton was part of its nucleus. The men’s team was small some years, larger on others. Discretion came into play in nominating teams, sometimes rosters filled out with those meeting objective criteria. The men’s side wasn’t exactly a revolving door, however, it lacked the three to four hallmark skiers who would routinely race into the top-20 in sprint or distance events.

We know Matt Whitcomb had the official title of women’s coach for years. Yet the U.S. rarely named an official men’s coach during Hamilton’s time on the national team. This is not so much a comment on a possible lack of commitment towards the U.S. men as a reflection on the environment in which Hamilton matured as an athlete. Cohesion was often not a trait used to describe the men’s team.

This season marked a turning point. Younger skiers emerged on the team, several of them more than a decade younger than Hamilton. Schumacher set the bar in distance racing, he’s twenty years old. JC Schoonmaker proved to be a reliable sprint qualifier and heat skier. He too is twenty. Ben Ogden, a teammate of Hamilton’s on the SMST2 Team, raced in his first World Championships at 21 years old. Ogden was a U.S. best 11th in the classic sprint qualifier and 17th overall. Hamilton, however, was noticeably absent as a starter in the 2021 World Championship individual sprint. Known more for his skate prowess, Hamilton, according to Whitcomb, had the right to refuse the start. Hamilton did so with the understanding that Ogden just might be able to capitalize.     

Ogden did.

Here’s what Hamilton expressed on Instagram after the race. 

“People have been messaging me asking why I didn’t race yesterday… valid question and I take it as a compliment that so many have faith in my classic sprinting! I’m not sick or injured. The reality is that after 11 years of trying to crack the code on classic sprinting at this level, I didn’t really think I was going to figure it out in what is most likely the last few weeks of my career, and I wanted to put all my focus into my skate racing, especially with the chance to partner up with one of my role models @gus.schumacher for the team sprint. I knew my decision was a good one yesterday when @ben.0gden was given my start and made the statement that he did, qualifying in 11th from bib 61 and finishing the day in 17th. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: this team of American boys coming up is going to do some extraordinary things, and I’m just humbled and grateful to do what I can to contribute to that. But first it’s time to get this old, creaky body in gear and do some skating!”

At those same championships, Hamilton and Schumacher, a hotly anticipated pairing in the skate team sprint, did not advance out of their semifinal. Schumacher, in his first career World Championship start, left early in the tag zone without the tag from Hamilton. Schumacher reversed his progress for a redo, yet by then the time-loss damage was done. Hamilton could have been the prima donna and castigated Schumacher. Certainly, Hamilton’s disappointment was palpable. Schumacher felt he had let an opportunity slip away from Hamilton. The two processed the snafu and moved on. 

It doesn’t take a colorful imagination to conjure up a messier scenario unfolding had someone more self-centered been in Hamilton’s place. Elite sport is rife with the self-absorbed. As I have heard Hamilton note on several occasions, he understood the real gravity of the situation —  “It’s just a ski race.” 

One can also imagine all those younger skiers either on the team or on the cusp took note of Hamilton’s class and humility as he ceded his start to Ogden and comforted Schumacher. Many skiers likely think they are invincible at 20. Their time to retire will come too. Hamilton set a high bar for the men’s team in terms of how and when to acknowledge another skier’s emergence and deal gracefully with race-day disappointment.

“At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t that aware of Simi’s leadership efforts; I knew our team was actively trying to cultivate a group of strong athletes and leaders, but didn’t know the role Simi played in it,” Schumacher wrote to FasterSkier. “Fast forward to the end of the year and I understand Simi’s role in our team culture so much more clearly. He held off his retirement for another year in part to ski fast and support Sophie, but a major goal of his was to facilitate an incredibly tight and positive team, as well as helping us younger guys get acquainted with the whole scene. I learned a lot of this after the team sprint when I was feeling very disappointed in myself. He opened up about how little he cared about the result, and how much he valued our relationship and the experiences of everyone else on the team. He truly wanted to be there for his teammates all year, and when I realized this, so many things he did this season came into perspective. He’s been so quick to help the team and be a friend, sometimes at the expense of his own training and convenience, and I think that has made so much difference for our team culture. This is one of the strongest and most supportive men’s teams in a long time, and I think a lot of that is due to Simi’s efforts as an amazing team leader and friend. I hope we can continue to use what we learned from him in the future, and keep the good momentum going!!”

Schoonmaker had similar sentiments when it came to a “hero” in his midst and Hamilton’s willingness to foster a welcoming environment. 

“When I was younger and first started paying attention to the World Cup, Simi was our best men’s American skier so he was the guy I looked up to and aspired to be like,” explained Schoonmaker. “I knew he was an awesome skier and I could tell from listening to his interviews and hearing him talk that he was also an amazing person. It was an incredible experience this season being able to ski with and learn from one of my heroes.

“The men’s team on the World Cup was an incredible and fun group to be around this season and I think Simi deserves a lot of credit for that. He could’ve easily swept Gus and me under the rug but instead, he went out of his way to make us feel comfortable as newcomers on the circuit. He always gave his thoughts on tactics or the course the night before a race and showed that he was invested in each person on the team and had our backs.”

Hamilton also forged a deep friendship with now retired skier Erik Bjorsen. He and Hamilton paired together in the team sprint at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics, where they placed sixth on both occassions.

“Good results don’t always make up an unforgettable day, there are so many other factors that contributed to a dream race day,” Bjornsen said. “I’ll always remember the other shenanigans Simi and I got up to on those days in Sochi and in PeyongChang. We shard everything together; nerves, excitement, and celebration. He’s an amazing friend and the most supportive teammate I’ve ever had. There is no doubt why I had my best performances alongside him.”

***

Beyond his wife Sophie Caldwell Hamilton, who also retired this season, Whitcomb is perhaps Hamilton’s closest confidant on the team. We sent Whitcomb a series of questions, the same for Caldwell Hamilton if you are keeping tabs. Below we are including his responses.       

FasterSkier: Nugget of wisdom from Hamilton that you have learned and now apply in coaching/life:

Matt Whitcomb: Unlocking the strength of the mind is more important than physical talent and hard training. Simi made career-high gains in the last two months of the season with regards to his distance racing (Falun and Oberstdorf), even though they weren’t rewarded with big results. We made this a project, and it worked. Look for distance-racing potential in people who consider themselves sprint specialists. Often, sprinters just assume they will explode in distance races if they redline because they have before. Instead, make the warm-up harder, perfect pacing, and toughen up. Pain is only real if you’re soft.

FS: Most difficult aspect about Hamilton in terms of priming him for peak racing, and how did you navigate that issue?

MW:  For Simi, everything is about motivation. The day he won a World Cup in Switzerland, I vividly recall his arrival at the wax room that morning. He was psyched and it was clear he was ready. Just the same, whenever we missed the mark on motivation for a race, he never performed well. But don’t mistake this for motivation as it’s often viewed; I’m talking about ready-to-make-a-kill motivation, rather than watch-TV-or-workout motivation. Getting Simi out the door to train hard or long was never an issue. Most people don’t know that he was a 900-hour athlete.

FS: Easiest part of coaching Simi?

MW: For me, the most important skill a coach can have is the ability to connect with others. Simi and Sophie are great friends, so that connection—that two-way flow of concern—makes coaching them easy. A hard part of coaching is not knowing the unspoken stresses of an athlete. This stuff needs to be tackled first before any training can take.

FS: Non-competition personality trait that made the “team” more of a team. 

MW: Simi connects easily with, and inspires developing athletes. They idolize him. He figured out how to be an effective, consistent leader later in his career, and because of it, our men’s team is now a world-class, cohesive environment. I think he’s going to have a lot of fun watching this team succeed, and he’ll know he made a difference.

FS: Simi’s side of the room, by Sophie’s assessment, is fastidious: folded and tucked in everything. How might that trait manifest as an xc skier in Simi’s case?

MW: Well, the side of the room that has the folded clothes and the portable steamer, also has the athlete that needs more structure and tidiness to his plan and goals. The race plan and strategy are more important. The one whose clothes singe on the lamps, and carpet the floors, and whose passport gets lost in the couch cushions, and who might race a semi-final at World Championships on Jessie Diggins’ poles even though they are five centimeters shorter, and who…okay I’ll stop…well, she just needs to be fit and happy on race day. She’s better at adapting in the moment.

FS: Proudest moment as Simi’s coach?

MW: I don’t hang my hat on results, so nothing really jumps out there. That they raced into their 30’s is my proudest accomplishment for them. Many good athletes in the U.S. quit in their early 20’s before they had a chance to bloom. I’m also feeling proud of the way they handled their quarantine during their intended last World Cup races, which should’ve been a week-long celebration of their ski careers. (As I write, they successfully boarded and are on a plane home.)

FS: I know Simi considers you a close friend. How did you balance that when coaching him? How did that enrich the experience?

MW: I don’t subscribe to the you-can’t-be-friends-with-athletes rule when it’s adults coaching adults, but that only works if you can maintain your ability to get tough from time to time. We’ve been through some hard personal times together, and it hasn’t always been just me supporting them. I ski coach because I like to ski and because I like to connect with people. Sophie and Simi are two of the people I credit for me still loving my job after so many years.

FS:  Simi’s lasting legacy for each athlete when it comes to team culture?

MW: For Simi, a big goal of his and mine was to stop fucking around with men’s skiing, and finally build a team that works together. This happened this year, and Simi was consistent in his leadership from Ruka, all the way to the team meetings in St. Moritz last week, where he continued to offer thoughts from quarantine. This will last for the team, and for him in his next career.

***

What follows is an interview conducted with Hamilton in mid-March. At the time, he was quarantined in Switzerland and awaiting permission to return to the U.S.

FasterSkier: The way it was described to us by Sophie, you are fastidious when living on the road: Tidy and folded t-shirts. Maybe socks nested together. Just pretty much tidiness to contrast her mayhem. Where does that come from?

Simi Hamilton: Honestly, I don’t know where it comes from. My mom, she’s super organized and neat. And I wouldn’t say any of us have OCD, but for sure, I’m more towards that side of the spectrum than many others. You know, I really like to be clean. I don’t feel comfortable if I’m spending time in a room or something and things are just temporarily tidy. Honestly, I think that’s been one of the ways that I’ve been able to cope with, living on the road for so long. I’m in a new hotel room every weekend, living out of a duffle bag. I feel like if I kind of make it my little organized space, it feels a little bit more like home. At least that is what I tell myself. 

First of all, on this team, I can say this is a bit of a generalization, but you walk into any one of the women’s rooms and it’s just like a freaking bomb. There’s just stuff everywhere. There are clothes, there’s shit hanging off of everything like you just dumped it everywhere and then you walk into basically anyone of the guys’ rooms and clothes are put away. It’s just funny. 

FS: How did you find purpose on the team this year outside the racing? Can you give us a little bit of insight, like, what was your role on the team this year? And if you found purpose, what was that purpose?

SH: I think coming into the season, I didn’t know exactly what my role was. I didn’t know that there was an opportunity to step up. As someone who has been doing this for a long time, and has learned a lot about training and racing and being on the road and being part of a really good organic functioning family team, I didn’t know exactly how it would be. I did sense that there would be an opportunity to step into a leadership role in some way. 

I think I did a good job of coming in and, and not trying to force these young men to do certain things or fit a certain kind of mold, or act like a certain type of team. I think a lot of people outside of this team, look at the women’s team and they see what they’ve done. And they try to apply that model or that template to other teams or other situations. It’s the kind of thing where if you want a group of people to function well, you simply have to prop each other up. If you want to build something like that in a positive direction, you have to let it do its own thing. 

I don’t think you can ever force the team dynamic to be a certain way. The women’s team has certainly become dominant and successful. But I wanted to allow this entity to morph into its own type of team, and function with its own identity. I simply came into the season just trying to foster that amongst all of us. And I think it worked well. 

You know, it was awesome having Gus and JC for the first half of racing and in the second part of the season, we had more of these young men joining us from World Juniors and U23s. It became a really awesome crew and I think you saw them bring out the best in me and Kevin Bolger, Scott Patterson, and David Norris — all these guys who’ve been doing this for a long time. It was rejuvenating and it gave us a spark. 

But to be more direct in answering your question, I didn’t do anything beyond trying to be present. I tried to be positive and I tried to lead by example with these young guys. 

I always felt like that was something that I never really experienced during my younger years. And that isn’t to say that there weren’t strong leaders on the team. That isn’t to say that they didn’t learn things from people like Kris Freeman, Andy Newell, Torin Koos, and even some of my peers like Noah Hoffman. I learned so much from those guys and I am grateful for that. But I think, for whatever reason, there was never really that cohesive bond amongst every single person on the men’s team. I wanted to encourage us to find that this year, and I think we did.

I honestly think the most important thing that we all did this year to make that happen was we just encouraged everyone to bring what they had to the table without expecting anyone to be someone or act a certain way or be someone they didn’t want to be. 

As that became the standard we could simply be ourselves every day and buy into this team. It was cool. It made all the difference. Obviously, I wanted success for myself this year, I wanted some good results. I wanted to feel proud of what I was accomplishing and go out on a good note. 

But absolutely, it was more important to feel like we were coming together as a team and doing something organic and positive. It was a huge success.

FS: Just refreshing your FIS profile…you are 33 years old. You’ve been with many different groups as you raced the World Cup. What have you learned about being in close quarters with many different teammates and how to navigate situations where the dynamic is not ideal? 

SH: Our ultimate goal with that is creating an environment where, you know, if somebody is doing something, or seeing something, or acting a certain way, that is either detrimental to themselves or detrimental to the team or detrimental to the community that we’re in at that time, that we can soeak up. I’ve learned that it is important to create an atmosphere where someone feels comfortable speaking out and saying something constructive. Sating something like, “Hey, you know, that’s offensive to me, or I don’t think what you are doing is making us ski faster.”

So I think just being able to create that team environment, that team energy, where we all feel comfortable enough with each other that we can change things and have everything be constructive. That’s the work of a high-functioning team. I think that’s valuable and we did that this year. 

FS: I know in the past, whether officially or not, it was year to year for you in terms of ski racing. I understand that you as a person do not need the validation of another Olympics to bolster your self-worth. That said, the Olympics are not that far away and that’s a big carrot for a lot of elite athletes. You are forgoing another Olympic experience. What was your calculus in thinking this was the time to step away? 

SH: That’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard that. I think honestly, I think both Sophie and I were pretty ready to be done last year. And then I had the season I had last year and I just felt so unfulfilled with what I was capable of doing. And not only individually. It was tough for me just because I was injured and sick for much of the season, even when I was on the road, I felt like I couldn’t be very present, I couldn’t be the leader that I wanted to be on the team. I was just feeling like I wasn’t checking those boxes that I wanted to be checking. 

As soon as I said I was going to ski one more year, I felt really good about that. So I knew then basically people would immediately start saying if you’re gonna go through with next year, then why would you just not go one more year to the next Olympics?

 I won’t say it’s never been about that kind of thing for me, obviously, there’s something awesome about doing things like going to the Olympics and World Championships, making a certain team, or something like that. But I think, at this point, we’re such dynamic people, we’re well educated, we have some awesome hobbies outside that allow us to experience these amazing communities in Vermont and all these awesome families — We have all these things tugging at us. And I think for both of us, they’re finally really touching hard enough that we want to respond to those things out there. 

I also think we’re wanting to start a family soon and start building this house. We want to start writing all the things in the textbook if that makes sense. So it never really felt like we were giving up on the team, or the Olympic movement. I don’t think need those things in our lives anymore to progress.

FS: In talking about you, Bill McKibben mentioned an anecdote about you skiing off some peak near Aspen for your ninth birthday. And some of the stories are legends. I know you like moving fast, be it on skis in the mountains, climbing, biking, whatever. You probably could have been a lot of things when considering the pro-athlete realm. Can you provide some insight into your path as an athlete?

SH: Certainly growing up in a place like where I grew up, I always had a huge draw to getting outside and doing things other than just cross-country skiing. I plan on doing a lot more of that now. But I have come to realize in the last few years of my career that it’s so much more important to find something that is simply fun. I also need to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile. What I started appreciating about cross-country skiing was just the amount of hard work to be good at it. I think especially as a US cross country skier doing that, dedicating your entire life, to doing something like that for 10 years, and not getting a ton of recognition for it — and I say that with a grain of salt because obviously we have this amazing community of supporters and we do get a lot of recognition for what we do, but when you compare the amount of praise and financial earnings between like what we’re doing and between what freeskiers are doing or maybe some things that I could have potentially seen myself doing if I hadn’t have gone down this path, they are incomparable. 

But doing this for the last 10 years has taught me how incredibly valuable humility is. And just like I said, sheer hard work, and commitment, and dedication. And I think that those things that I’ve learned are going to be the most valuable things that I can use going forward in life. And those things are the things that I want to pass down to my children and have them pass down to their children. 

FS: The concept of humility is interesting when thinking of elite athletics. You have a reputation as an amazing all-around athlete let alone a cross-country skier. But if you can think back over the decade, and racing on the World Cup, that is a tough scene. Some weekends it works out, others someone might get their ass-kicked. Can you reflect on your humility and how that evolved?

SH: I don’t think there’s anybody who comes on to the World Cup scene, from any country, who isn’t somewhat confident. But, I think a lot of people say that they’re ready for this level of racing, and then when they’re experiencing it, it’s like they don’t have any idea of what hit them or what is coming. 

It certainly took me a long time to figure out how to be good. And it still boggles my mind to see how consistently good someone like Klæbo or Pellegrino. Basically, weekend after weekend after weekend after weekend they are one of the top five or on the podium. That is such a ridiculously high-level sport. 

It certainly took me some time to figure that out. As I progressed I started to appreciate the lesson in patience more and more. Knowing that maybe I would go two periods on the World Cup without really having a truly awesome race. But you know, maybe in that third period or something I would have a top-10 or podium or a final. That is worth waiting for and working hard for. It took me a long time to learn that lesson. Especially coming from a pretty successful career as a junior skier in the US. I certainly was expecting it to be hard as it was and take as long as it did, but again, as I said with your previous question, that’s just the part of this sport that is pretty cool: You just have to keep your head down for a long time. And be doing it for the right reasons. Because if you’re not, then you’re not going to be able to grind away. 

FS: The usual question, what are you most proud of in terms of race results?

SH: Obviously, my win in Lenzerheide, my third place in Canada, were all very special. They were awesome days. But I think, you know, I would say my three best moments in my career on the World Cup at least, and I’m not ranking these because they’re all a little bit different. But three experiences stand out to me as incredibly special. 

The first was watching Sophie win her first World Cup in Oberstdorf. It sucked because I was sick. I had gotten sick the night before, during the Tour. I wasn’t even at the venue. But the coaches gave me the OK to go and pick her up in one of the vans. I had some great alone time with her. I was just so happy for her knowing how hard she worked and knowing how much that meant to her, to get to that point was pretty special. 

The other two were the 2017 Lahti World Championship classic team sprint and the 2014 Sochi Olympic team sprint and those were both with Eric Bjornsen. They were races where we both skied well. But more important than that, everything just kind of clicked. And I felt on both of those days that Erik and I were racing for each other. And that felt cool to do. I have felt that in some distance relay teams and some other races throughout my career, but, I think those two days stand out to me as just being so connected with somebody else, that we will race until your heart explodes for that other person. It’s a cool feeling to have. And I’ll for sure reflect on those days. 

FS: Is that perhaps because you had a personal connection specifically with Erik?

SH: I definitely wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t have had that same experience with anybody else. But, Erik and I always had a close, really special relationship with each other. And I think we both understood each other. We understood what motivated the other person. We understood what bummed the other person out. 

I think we were doing it for the right reasons. Just being able to share an experience like that with someone who really gets you and who you get is pretty cool. I’m sure it’s like when you’re on a team, playing a team sport, whether it’s hockey or soccer or baseball, whatever it is, just being able to share a huge success like that with your whole team, it’s got to be a very similar feeling. 

I have enormous pride for what Jessie did this season or our girls are on a podium, we always feel a lot of that. But, I think to be in the team sprint with one other person who is one of your best friends in life, there’s not a lot of substitution for that. 

FS: That brings up the experience this year at the World Championships with Gus. Maybe give us some insight. You are paired with an exceptional skier in Gus who is more than ten years your junior. This was his first senior World Championship race and I am sure he was nervous. What was that emotional trajectory like for you?

SH: I definitely won’t say that that day was not heartbreaking. But, I will also say, with 100%, truthfulness and accuracy is that it wasn’t heartbreaking because of Gus. It was just heartbreaking because of the situation. It wasn’t that we got unlucky, but we didn’t get lucky that’s for sure.

Gus would have done anything for me that day. He knew how important that day was for me, but I think he thought the result was way more important for me than it was. And the result was absolutely important. We both went into that day wanting to get on the podium, and we knew that we could but it had to take the perfect race from both of us – and probably perfect conditions for both of us, which, you know, it wasn’t. 

It was never is never about the result for that day, that was our goal and it would have been a perk, but there was so much more about that day that was important. A lot of what happened was, I think, it can mostly be attributed to Gus just not having that much World Cup experience yet and team sprint experience, and being able to adapt as you’re racing especially on a day when conditions are changing that much. 

And, you know things were so different from even a couple of minutes before. What happened that day was we were in the second semi-final which was an unlucky thing in the first place, just because those springtime championship races in the middle of the day the conditions are changing so quickly. The course is slowing down like 10 seconds per lap — that’s how much it was breaking down as it was getting softer and slower. So the first couple of tags we did, the snow was decently fast, but you could tell it was starting to slow down. But towards the end of that semi where you’d come into the tag zone, it was just everything you could do to try to sprint through slush.

I think on that last tag, when I was tagging Gus, he just thought the tag zone was way faster than it was, and he started going with the guys who were around him. And that was just a little bit too early, and we missed the tag. I made the split-second decision to not try to hide that and actually go back into the zone with him and get the tag off because I just figured, you never really know what’s going to happen in that lead pack, there could be a crash, you something could happen. I figured it was worth doing it right because I also knew the jury always sees if you tag or not and I knew we had not tagged. 

So I made that call to tag. We skied our asses off but it wasn’t enough. 

He was devastated. I think that he finally understood that that is just part of racing — shit happens and it sucks when it happens on a day like that in a race like that. That’s one of the lessons he’s gonna have to learn, and I mean he has learned, I guess that’s kind of a rude awakening for your first World Champs. But this season, as I said, it’s been so much more about getting those results and what I could do in my last World Championships. 

All of those things would have been awesome and they were goals that I had, but it was about way more than that, and I think at the end of the day we both recognize that and appreciate that.

I’m just psyched to see what he can do in the future and I’m sure he’ll start doing team sprints with one of those other young guys. I’m sure that in six years or 10 years, however long, they will be winning medals and it’ll be pretty cool to see.

FS: To close out, let’s talk about risk-taking. As someone who loves adventuring in the mountains, and I mean real-deal adventures, you’ve got to be constantly assessing risk. You are married. Thinking about kids. Renovating a house back in Colorado. Those things make people reassess. Skiing off North Maroon last spring, for example, that brings a certain spice level and some real risks to mitigate. All things considered, how do you consider risk-taking now knowing you will be lured into those amazing Aspen hills soon? 

SH: I will be the first to tell you that compared to 10 years ago, I have no desire to really push the limits too much. Obviously like by doing anything even getting in a car or whatever there’s risk involved. And there’s a lot of things that we do, we do them because there is some amount of risk. It’s cliché to say, but that’s what makes you feel alive, like if you’re not doing anything that isn’t sometimes a little bit dangerous, then you’re not appreciating life, I think, to its fullest extent. But, at the same time, I don’t need to be out there like filming all these gnarly things and jumping off shit on my skis or my bike. I don’t think I need to be doing that to feel a sense of self-worth and value to society. I feel that in the last few years, I’ve started to recognize some individuals out there who are doing an unbelievable job with kind of telling the story versus posting the sickest photo or skiing the gnarliest line. And to me, that’s so much cooler, and a more admirable way of going about your life, people figuring out a way to tell this really interesting story and cool interesting experiences and connecting with people that aren’t exactly like you. 

So that’s what I’m most looking forward to.