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 has been preserved thanks to the Wayback Machine and will be revisited later this winter), news reporting preserved in our modern WordPress platform picks up in December 2002. There is, for example, this article about a NorAm race in Rossland, British Columbia (Dec. 14, 2002), or this article about a World Cup race in Cogne, Italy (Dec. 17, 2002), dating from a prehistoric era in which a sprint final had just four athletes. And the rest, as they say, is history, poignantly so now that SkiTrax and Master Skier are no more and FasterSkier stands alone among online sources for English-language nordic ski features.
In general social science terms, 20 years is roughly one generation. In pro skier terms, it’s probably at least two generations, maybe three.
Take a look at some of the names in the Continental Cup article linked above: Carl Swenson, Kristina Trygstad-Saari, Kris Freeman, David Chamberlain. Okay, Freeman (who at the time was 22 years old) is an outlier of extreme longevity in American skiing, appearing on a national championship podium as recently as 2019, but most of those names seem to date from another era.
Swenson retired in 2007, and by 2011 had already been out of skiing for long enough to be the subject of a “where are they now” article. Chamberlain is now 45 years old. That 2002 article says of Trygstad-Saari that she “has been a top junior skier for a few years now, and today she proved she could ski with the best in North America. In the process, she beat out Jeannie Wall, the 2002 Birkie Champion and also from Bozeman, by five seconds … .” Trygstad-Saari’s last FIS race was in 2010; Wall’s, in 2003. That’s a long time ago!
All of which is to say, we’ve built up some history on this website, and now it’s time to share some of it. This month inaugurates our new series, “From the Archives,” in which we feature one article a month from our extensive holdings. We will provide a brief introduction for some historical context, then reprint the entire article as it originally appeared, subject to mild editing for typos or style.
