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Gavin Kentch

Gavin Kentch wrote for FasterSkier from 2016–2022. He has a cat named Marit.
Elite Team Preview: Craftsbury Green Racing Project

Team name and location: Craftsbury Green Racing Project (CGRP, or Craftsbury); Craftsbury, Vermont Coaches: Pepa Miloucheva (head coach); Michael Gibson (biathlon coach); Nick Brown (assistant coach and wax tech); Ethan Dreissigacker (assistant biathlon coach) Current roster (skiing and biathlon): Braden Becker, Adam Martin, Akeo Maifeld-Carucci, Caitlin Patterson, Michaela Keller-Miller, Margie Freed, Annika Landis, Alex Lawson (skiing); Jake Brown (Luke’s brother), Raleigh Goessling, Hallie Grossman, Susan Dunklee, Kelsey Dickinson, Tara Geraghty-Moats, Clare Egan, Luke Brown (Jake’s...

Letters to My Younger Self: John Wood and Returning to a Lifelong Sport

Editor’s note: We are thrilled to have John Wood start off our new series here at FasterSkier, “Letters to my younger self.” Lauren Fleshman provided the modern locus classicus for this genre, and John has written a superb, ski-specific first installment for this site. He sets a pretty high bar, but the general theme of this series is clear: If you were writing a letter to your younger self, what would you want to tell...

Elite Team Preview: APU

Team name and location: Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center (APU, or APUNSC); Anchorage, Alaska Coaches: Erik Flora (head coach/director), Jack Novak (assistant coach) Current roster: Penny Smyth, APUNSC Marketing & Communications, writes: “Women’s Team: Rosie Brennan (USSS A Team), Hailey Swirbul (USSS A Team), Hannah Halvorsen (USSS D Team), Rosie Frankowski (World Cup Alternate), Becca Rorabaugh, Anna Darnell, Annie Gonzales, Marit Flora, Lily Pannkuk, Zoe Noble “Men’s Team: Logan Hanneman (USSS B Team), Scott Patterson (USSS B Team), David Norris...

From the Archives: Andy Newell Scores his First World Cup Points, February 2004

The following article was originally published on FasterSkier on February 24, 2004. It was reprinted from press releases from the U.S. Ski Team and Cross Country Canada. Andy Newell, who is now the head coach for the BSF Pro Team, had 220 individual World Cup starts in his career. His first ever start came the weekend before this: Stockholm, February 18, 2004, 1.1-kilometer classic sprint, 43rd in qualifying. That race was won by Norwegian Jens...

Elite Team Preview: Sun Valley XC Gold Team

Team name and location: Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation XC Gold Team (Sun Valley or SVSEF); Ketchum, Idaho Coach: Chris Mallory Current roster: Kevin Bolger, Katie Feldman, Sarah Goble, Sam Wood, Karl Schulz, Johnny Hagenbuch, Peter Holmes, Peter Wolter, Jake Adicoff Who’s new: Peter Wolter and Jake Adicoff Who’s missing: n/a Who’s still on this team, or otherwise involved in American skiing, from when we did this in 2012: No one; Simi Hamilton recently retired, and Patrick...

Elite Team Preview: Team Birkie

Team name and location: Team Birkie; Minneapolis, Minnesota (also Hayward, Wisconsin) Coach: Caitlin Gregg (co-coach), Leo Hipp (co-coach), Jeremy Hecker (technique coach and wax tech) Current roster: For the men: Zak Ketterson, Christian Gostout, Andrew Millan, Tony Mathie, Brian Gregg; Women: Ingrid Thyr, Julie Ensrud, Jordan Schuster, Abbie Drach, Amanda Kautzer (focusing on biathlon) What’s new: “Everything,” Gregg writes. While elite teams have existed in the Midwest in the past, Team Birkie is new this year....

Elite Team Preview: SMS T2

Team name and location: SMS T2 Team; Stratton Mountain, Vermont Coach: Patrick O’Brien Current roster: Jessie Diggins, Julia Kern, Katharine Ogden, Alayna Sonnesyn, Lina Sutro (women); Ian Torchia, Bill Harmeyer, Ben Ogden, Will Koch (men) Who’s new: Lina Sutro, coming from the University of Vermont ski team Who’s moved on: Sophie Caldwell Hamilton and Simi Hamilton, who celebrated their second wedding anniversary earlier this year, retired from pro skiing last spring and are beginning a new life...

Elite Team Preview: Bridger Ski Foundation Pro Team

Team name and location: Bridger Ski Foundation Nordic Pro Team (BSF); Bozeman, Montana Coaches: Andy Newell (Nordic Pro Team), Hannah Cole (Post Grad Team) Current roster: Finn O’Connell, Graham Houtsma, Hannah Rudd, Lauren Jortberg, Leah Lange, Logan Diekmann, Mariah Bredal, Reid Goble, Simon Zink, Erika Flowers Who’s still on this team, or otherwise involved in American skiing, from when we did this in 2012: No one; Torin Koos and Leif Zimmermann haven’t raced in years,...

Schumacher and Brennan Lead the Way in Season-Opening Race to the Outhouse

GOVERNMENT PEAK RECREATION AREA, above Palmer, Alaska — High-end nordic ski racing was last seen in this country in mid-April, when a bevy of national-team members who call Alaska home competed in a pair of FIS races in mid-winter conditions, followed by a more vernal 2,000’ hill climb the following weekend. Less than seven months later, as Alaska kicks off another season of ski racing, little has changed: the country’s deepest domestic fields, single-digit temps,...

Domestic Teams Preview: Introduction

We tend to highlight World Cup races on this website, but those results, and those athletes, don’t happen in a vacuum. Skiers are made in the summer, as the well-worn saying accurately has it, and summer training means time spent with a domestic ski club. So we’re going to be highlighting the athletes on several prominent American ski clubs over the next few weeks, only a small portion of whom will be starting on the...

Season Preview: 21 Athletes in 22 Words for the 2021/2022 Season

FasterSkier often publishes long profiles of athletes. This is not that article. Instead, please enjoy precisely 22 words about each of the 21 athletes currently on the U.S. Ski Team in this extremely brief, but numerically pleasing, preview of the 2021/2022 season. Athletes are presented alphabetically within each team, with age as of this season’s first World Cup race. All photos are screenshots from the current USST roster site. Any evocation of a certain song by...

From the Archives: CXC Lake Placid Training Camp Report, October 2008

The following article was originally published on FasterSkier on October 15, 2008. It was written by CXC (Central Cross Country Skiing) athletes Kristina Owen and Heather Zimmerman. Roughly contemporary photos have been added for this reprinting; the pictures that originally appeared with this article are no longer available. The piece is simultaneously from very much another era, yet also completely timeless. On the one hand, “Caitlin Compton” now has a different last name; Jessie Diggins,...

Speak, Memory: Introducing our New Series, ‘From the Archives’

We’re almost as old as the SNS Pilot binding system: FasterSkier turns 20 years old this season. The site went live on February 1, 2002, a week before the Winter Olympics began in the Salt Lake City backyard of site founders Torbjorn Karlsen and Cory Smith. While the first few months worth of coverage has been lost to the sands of time, or at least to the ravages of our CMS system (2002 Olympics coverage...

Coach Greta Anderson and the USST D-Team Try to Take Over the World

This summer, the U.S. Ski Team announced that it had hired Greta Anderson as the new Development Team Coach. FasterSkier caught up with Anderson on the afternoon of the official announcement to delve deeper into her coaching philosophy, precise job description, and only sort of tongue-in-cheek plans for world domination. Anderson’s hire was widely praised by both current and former athletes. Here’s Luke Jager, who’s known Anderson for nearly a decade starting in Alaska junior...

USSS Announces Fluorinated Wax Policy for 2021/2022 Season

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. In fall 2021, following last-minute revelations that a long-promised fluoro-detecting device did not, actually, work as efficiently as planned, FasterSkier previewed an upcoming domestic race season in which U.S. Ski & Snowboard-sanctioned races would ban the use of fluorocarbon waxes, but anything would be fair game at FIS races. (For an overview of the difference between the sanctioning bodies and the rankings lists they generate, see...

Photo Essay: Anchorage Skiers Stoked Over Sizeable September Snowfall

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — An autumnal survey of who’s got early snow is somewhere between a trope and a cliché in these pages. Consider, for example, “Early Season at Hatcher Pass: A Photo Essay,” “Early-Season Snow: A Photo Roundup,” or “Alaskans Revel in October Skiing at Hatcher Pass, Birch Hill” (with photos). You may sense a theme here. But the earliest on-snow dates in these articles are October 6, October 14, and October 15. How would...

Alaska Junior Camp Wraps Up Summer Regional Elite Group Training

ANCHORAGE — As allegories for skiing development go, the uphill run time trial is tough to beat. It’s hard to start with, it gets harder as you approach your goal, and success requires pushing all the way to the finish. “Paying the tax on the road to the podium,” as Sadie Maubet Bjornsen once wrote of a photo of her on Gasline. Tuesday morning in Anchorage, a group of the state’s top juniors took on...

David Norris Wins Third Mt. Marathon, Canada’s Sam Hendry Second; Rosie Frankowski Fourth

Men’s race Most athletes pay their dues as they work their way up the results list for Mount Marathon, the grueling 5-kilometer, 3,000-foot-gain out-and-back race in Seward, Alaska, that dates to 1915. There is no substitute for experience on the technical course, and most people need to get their rookie run out of the way before they can even think of challenging for the overall victory in subsequent times on the mountain. David Norris is...

Sadie Maubet Bjornsen Retires: Career Highlights and the Final Race (Part II)

Part I of this article examined Sadie Maubet Bjornsen’s childhood, World Cup debut, and the injuries that she overcame along the way. This article, Part II, starts with a frank look at some of the challenges of being an American World Cup skier, then discusses her overall career highlights, her final World Championships earlier this year, and what comes next. In addition to the injuries, there are some challenges to life on the World Cup...

Balanced to the End, Sadie Maubet Bjornsen Retires (Part I)

To classic ski, and to do so well, requires an athlete to perform an almost stupidly large number of tasks at the same time. You have to move two arms, two legs, and two ankles in alternation, in almost infinite variations depending upon the snow, the wax, the course, and your remaining energy. You have to mediate between power and finesse, kick and glide, stimulus and weight transfer. In short, you have to balance a...