The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FasterSkier.com.
There’s an old adage in entertainment: “Always leave them wanting more.” At its heart, any sporting event is entertainment, and professional cross-country skiing is no exception. The Tour de Ski (TDS) just concluded one of its more entertaining and compelling editions in years. The 2023 version had everything on display. Plucky underdogs (the U.S. men) made an early bid, and the fight for the podium was fierce and hotly contested. Lots of new faces surfaced to help keep fans’ interest keen. The American women continued to throw down one impressive performance after another, while the rest of the skiing world tried to keep them off the podium. It was all wonderful to watch.
But with the TDS, compelling viewing hasn’t always been the case. In years when the Olympics and World Championships are held, competitors have to prioritize which event to peak for, and many skiers, and sometimes entire country’s’ “A” teams opt out. Very few skiers can give it everything in the TDS and then head into the Olympics, only a couple of weeks later. Usually, World Championships are a little further down the calendar, but it still forces athletes to choose. The TDS history is replete with skiers not racing, or cutting the Tour short, when other championships follow soon after.
One only has to look at the list of athletes withdrawn from the Tour this year due to illness and other factors and you get their concern. On the Tour’s first day, 70 women and 99 men competed. On the last day, only 30 women and 53 men survived. These numbers illustrate just how intense of a grueling, immune response suppressing grind, the Tour is. And, as nice as it is to do well on the Tour, it doesn’t have quite as much cachet as a World Championship medal, and certainly not as much as an Olympic medal.
This puts athletes onto the horns of a dilemma between racing the Tour and risking damage to their chances in other championships, or doing part of the Tour as a tune up and dropping out at some point. This year’s high rate of attrition due to illness flashed a strong warning sign to athletes gearing up for other future championships: do the Tour at your own risk! After such a high dropout rate this year, you can bet that next year with the World Championships on the horizon, more athletes than ever will opt out of even starting the TDS or drop out after only a few races.
Here’s a simple remedy. Hold the TDS only every four years. This isn’t some kind of Nordic blasphemy or heretical thought. It’s a simple remedy for a real problem. Every sport has to balance and adapt to the stress of over-scheduling against the allure of revenue from competitions, and cross-country skiing is no exception. The International Ski Federation (FIS) cannot simply say “everything will be all right.” It’s time to be proactive and get ahead of this problem.
An every four year TDS schedule would be simple, and would look like this:
If that’s not enough to sate everyone’s TDS hunger, then at least modify the schedule so that it isn’t held in Olympic years. The Olympics are just held too early to provide enough time off after the TDS to make it viable for most skiers. So, here’s a free suggestion FIS. Please…Please, do not run the TDS every year. The Olympics manage to maintain fans’ interest even though they are only held once every four years; so will the TDS. Sometimes, less is more, and more is too much.
The TDS is just too good to see it devolve into some kind of watered-down, pasty version of its best self. So FIS, please, give us more of the TDS, by giving us less of it—the ski world will thank you for it.
