CANMORE, ALBERTA — The World Cup circuit, cross-country skiing’s top level of racing, has officially finished its visit to Canmore, and now heads to Minneapolis for the first events in the U.S. in more than two decades. A number of teams are on a direct, early morning flight Wednesday from Calgary to Minneapolis, while others are taking an extra day in Canmore and waiting to travel until Thursday.
The events in Minneapolis are sure to provide many more storylines, with thousands of fans in attendance and race formats that favor hometown hero Jessie Diggins. FasterSkier will have multiple staff members on site, and we’re hosting a live taping of an episode of the Devon Kershaw Show, with an audience, at Utepils Brewery near the venue after Sunday’s race. Stay tuned for more details.
For now, here’s a collection of some of the last few stories from Canmore.
Houtsma gets a wake-up call
Matt Whitcomb, the U.S. Ski Team coach, thought he was finally going to get a good night of sleep Monday, before the last day of World Cup cross-country ski racing Tuesday in Canmore.
The lights in his hotel room were out just before 11 p.m. Then, the phone rang: It was a feverish, achy Ben Ogden, the star American sprinter.
Ogden, 24, had to drop out of Tuesday’s World Cup sprint race in Canmore, on his birthday, no less. Which meant that a spot opened up for another American team member, Graham Houtsma—less than 12 hours later.
Whitcomb couldn’t get ahold of Houtsma by text.
“So I went up, pounded on the door,” he said. Houtsma was still awake, but barely. After the wakeup, he said, he tossed and turned for another hour before he finally fell asleep.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m racing tomorrow—I’m racing a sprint. That’s unreal,’” he said.
Cross-country skiers typically have a pre-race routine they’ll follow the day before an event; instead, Houtsma, 26, went for an easy ski Monday and spent the evening “screwing around” with his teammates.
“I did nothing to prepare for it,” he said.
Houtsma, who lives and trains in Montana, set his alarm for 6 a.m. and “tried to treat it like a normal race day,” he said. The sprint, he added, was tough; he finished 58th out of 62 starters.
Was it worth it?
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s always worth it.”
Athlete bibs were Canmore’s hottest commodity
In most cross-country ski races, competitors are issued either a paper number that’s thrown away after the finish, or a fabric bib that has to be returned the organizers.
On the World Cup, bibs are specially made with numbers and sponsor logos for each race, and athletes get to keep them as souvenirs.
In Canmore, those World Cup bibs became coveted prizes for fans, as a number of Scandinavian stars dispensed them like t-shirts at a hockey game.
“I’ve given most of them away,” Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, the Norwegian superstar, told reporters after Tuesday’s sprint race. “It’s cool to give back to the spectators.”
The winners of Canmore’s bib sweepstakes had to be Alex and Roman Kolesov, father-son superfans who are part of the Calgary-based Foothills Nordic Ski Club.
The duo came away from four days of racing in Canmore with three signed bibs: One from Klæbo, a special yellow one from Harald Østberg Amundsen, who leads the overall men’s World Cup standings, and a third from Frida Karlsson, the Swedish super-talent who won Sunday’s women’s race.
Roman, 11, said he caught two bibs that were thrown to groups of children by the two Norwegians, “even though I’m the shortest out of my friends,” he added.
Alex, 37, has long been a fan of Karlsson and is a dedicated cross-country skier who fits training sessions around his construction job.
He said he simply walked up to her and asked for her bib.
“Some people like Taylor Swift—I like Frida,” Alex said. “I’m not asking anything super special.”
(Reporter’s note: Alex’s admiration for Karlsson comes across as entirely sincere and non-creepy, and he said that his wife Oxana, who cheerfully participated in a phone interview with her husband and son, “understands my passion.”)
Klæbo spent several minutes signing autographs for local children after his win Tuesday. His mother, Elisabeth Høsflot Klæbo, watched from behind a fence and said she was impressed to see that the number of signature seekers was not much smaller than the crowds that gather around her son in cross-country skiing-crazed Norway.
“He is always the last one to leave,” she said.
Need a ticket to the Minneapolis World Cup? Good luck.
Forget Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl.
Tickets to this weekend’s two races in Minneapolis—the first World Cups in the United States in more than 20 years—have become a hot commodity, with one athlete resorting to an international exchange and desperate fans turning to a lively Facebook group.
The “Minneapolis Loppet Cup: FIS Cross Country World Cup Ticket Exchange” on Facebook had more than 450 members and more than 20 posts from ticket-seekers on Tuesday alone.
General admission tickets for the two events are sold out, with a $500-a-day “VIP spectator experience” the only option remaining. (If you’re considering it: The package comes with access to a heated tent, food and drink service including beer and mulled wine, and an outdoor social area with lounge seating, fire pits and lawn games. [The organizers did not pay me to write this!])
As of last week, organizers said they’d distributed nearly 30,000 tickets between the two days of racing.
American athletes interviewed in Canmore mostly said they had secured tickets for the many family members and friends expected to be in Minneapolis to watch.
But Gus Schumacher, a 23-year-old Alaskan, said there was a moment of anxiety when his mom missed a first offering of tickets from organizers.
“She got up like an hour late—she was not expecting them to be gone within, like, 10 minutes,” Schumacher said. “There was a little, like, ‘uh oh, we told all these people to come to Minneapolis, and now they can’t.’”
Organizers eventually made more tickets available and Schumacher’s mom got some.
Participating athletes get two apiece, said Luke Jager, another Alaskan, who scored an extra pair from a friend from Switzerland who races on the World Cup, Cyril Faehndrich. Cyril’s sister, Nadine, who also races on the World Cup, chipped in two more.
Zak Ketterson, another American who lives and trains in Minneapolis, said his parents and fiancée got tickets when they were made available online; he’s also got his two extra through the organizers, and “we’ll see who wants those the most,” he added.
“Sounds like tickets are hard to come by these days,” he said. “I just really hope everybody who wants to go can go.”
Nathaniel Herz
Nat Herz is an Alaska-based journalist who moonlights for FasterSkier as an occasional reporter and podcast host. He was FasterSkier's full-time reporter in 2010 and 2011.
