ANCHORAGE — Alaskans like to think of their home state as the center of American cross-country skiing.
Minnesotans might quibble. But consider the more than 200 volunteers who turned out to help host the U.S. National Championships in Anchorage this week, and the dozens of local athletes who signed up to race.
There was just one problem: Through five of six of the championship events, athletes from Norway, Sweden, Colorado and Idaho had denied the Alaska crowd the pleasure of seeing one of their own cross the finish line first. (An Alaska man, Luke Jager, had technically claimed a U.S. championship Saturday, but crossed the finish line second to a Norwegian, who was ineligible to claim the title.)
Sunday’s 20-kilometer, classic-technique women’s race was the Alaskans’ last chance.
And Kendall Kramer came to the rescue.
The 22-year-old Fairbanks native won her first-ever national championship fashion in stirring fashion, breaking away from the pack early in the race with one other athlete and slipping away in the final meters before the finish.
“You can feel it in the energy,” said Kikkan Randall, the Olympic gold medalist who heads the Nordic Ski Association of Anchorage, which is co-hosting the event. “We have so many great volunteers out here, we really push to get spectators out here. And so when you see an Alaskan deliver, it’s just that sense of pride.”
Kramer’s final margin of victory was 2.4 seconds over Erica Laven, a Swedish skier competing for the University of Utah. The rest of the women’s pack crossed the finish line a minute-and-a-half later, led by Lauren Jortberg, who races for a Quebec club team.
Montana State University’s Kate Oldham was just behind Jortberg and rounded out the U.S. championship podium; Laven was ineligible due to her Swedish citizenship.
Kramer has been a standout since her years at West Valley High School in Fairbanks, where she won more than a dozen state titles between skiing, cross-country running and track and field. She was first named to the U.S. Ski Team while a junior in high school, then decided to stay in her home city for college, where she’s competed in both cross-country skiing and running.
She won a medal at the Youth Olympic Games in Switzerland in 2020, and has an array of junior national championships to her name. But two second places — including one Thursday to Oldham — were as close as Kramer had come to winning a U.S. title.
From the start of Sunday’s event, Kramer left little doubt about who would stand on the top of the American podium when she and Laven broke away from the pack on the first of four five-kilometer laps. The two skied the rest of the race together, with Kramer — who trains with Anchorage’s Alaska Pacific University club team during the summer — boosted by an energetic home crowd.
“I really felt that — I was like, ‘This must be someone from here,’” Laven said, referring to Kramer. “Because it was a lot of people cheering for her.”
Among the fans at Kincaid were Kramer’s mother, Susan Schwartz, along with her grandmother, an aunt and innumerable teammates. Schwartz, who was working as a volunteer at the start line, described the race between Laven and her daughter as a “nail-biter.”
“They just kept on getting faster and faster and faster,” Schwartz said. “It was amazing to watch.”
Early on, Kramer said she realized that even if she lost the race to Laven, she’d still claim the U.S. title. But, she added, she didn’t necessarily want to settle for that. Laven was skiing stronger on uphills, but if Kramer could keep up in those segments, she said, she could “totally relax in the double pole.”
“She was expending a lot of energy on those. And I knew I had energy by the end,” Kramer said.
The closer Kramer got to the finish line, she said, the more confident she felt about her shot at winning the race outright. And on the home stretch, she pulled away.
“She was really strong in the double pole today,” Laven said. “I really had to push hard.”
Kramer crossed the line without celebrating. But her mother, Schwartz, “could tell she was just thrilled” — particularly after Kramer finished a close second in Thursday’s race.
“I could tell she wanted it bad,” Schwartz said. “She was not going to let it get away from her today — that’s kind of the feeling I got watching her race.”
Kramer is in her last year competing for University of Alaska Fairbanks and expects to race professionally next season.
She said she doesn’t want to miss this spring’s collegiate championships. But she grimaced when a reporter pointed out that the event conflicts with the World Ski Championships in Norway, where finishes at the past week’s races in Anchorage are likely to inform which U.S. athletes are chosen for the team.
“I’m super grateful if I do get the spot, because I know how hard people work for it and how bad people want it,” she said. “But we’ll see.”
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.
