Who is the fastest person in the world on cross-country skis? Seems like a straightforward question, but the answer will unquestionably surprise you. An attempt to answer this seemingly easy question might quickly veer straight to the usual suspects. Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo would certainly rise to the top of the list—a Sprinter undefeated for an entire season seems like a good guess. But you would be very wrong. Bjorn Daehlie in his prime would be another good shot in the dark—but it is very far off the mark. Jessie Diggins is well known for her downhill skiing prowess, but even she couldn’t keep up with the world’s fastest person.
The correct answer to this question is both surprising and complicated, and to find the solution you have to stray very far from the world cup, and far from any FIS (International Ski Federation) sanctioned event. To find the world’s fastest cross-country skier you have to dive deep into the world of science and meet a fascinating man by the name of Dr. Sten Fincholm.
For a couple of days every year Dr. Fincholm is the fastest person on cross-country skis. More precisely for about 90 seconds a year there’s no one in the world that’s as fast as Fincholm, and the competition isn’t even close.
So why haven’t you ever heard of him? Well, it’s a story that involves luck, serendipity, curiosity, and like most important things in life, timing.
Fincholm is quite well known in his field—which isn’t cross-country skiing— it’s particle physics. His research has been published dozens of times, and he has postulated groundbreaking theories in quantum physics, and quantum field theory. “When I go to conferences, I never have to pay for my own drinks, someone else always wants to buy,” a laughing Fincholm told me. Fincholm works at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator and is the product of the collaboration of 24 member states. Groundbreaking research happens at the LHC every day. It’s now the center for research into particle physics after the United States bowed out of the game when it yanked funding for the Super Conducting Super Collider which had been scheduled to be built in Texas. After Congress cancelled funding in 1993, Switzerland became the heart of subatomic particle research, and it has remained there ever since. And but for that footnote in research funding, none of this strange tale ever would have happened.
Fincholm grew up in Norway. I met him in the early 1990s when I was in school in Boston, and he was studying at MIT. Fincholm was working on his PhD and was on a mission to be involved in the opening of the Texas Super Collider. But when Congress pulled the plug, he returned to Europe to pursue post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute. It was during his time at Max Planck that the connection with the LHC was developed, and Fincholm eventually received a posting there as a fellow. He now occupies the position of Senior Particle Investigator and Program Coordinator. We rekindled our friendship when we met up on a trip to Switzerland.
Sten is one of those guys who it is impossible not to like. He has a wry wit and is deeply curious about anything anyone else is doing. He always wants to hear what’s going on with you first. If he wasn’t such a nice guy, you would immediately hate him because he is one of those people who has been graced with so much talent that it’s hard to believe. He’s a polymath in the truest sense of the word.
At this point the reader might rightfully ask “what does any of this have to do with Nordic skiing or racing at any level?” Well, that’s where luck, coincidence, and timing, all—well —collide, and this is where Fincholm comes in.
Before pursuing his PhD from MIT, Fincholm was chasing another interest. He was one of the top 75 ranked cross-country skiers in Norway. “One year I finished 32nd in the Norwegian championships in the 20k. I also finished 39th one year in the 50k. My overall ranking in Norway rose at one point to 68th.” Fincholm comes from an athletic family. “I have a great Uncle who anglicized his last name and took a shot at playing major league baseball in America, but it wasn’t for him. Professional sports wasn’t his cup of tea, but nonetheless, I’m told he was an incredible pitcher.”
When you ski next to Fincholm you feel like you’re skiing in slow motion, and that he’s hardly working. He has the elegance and grace of a dancer, and the power of a weightlifter. He’s a great skier, better than almost everyone in the world his age, but in Norway, that’s not good enough. “What most people don’t realize is that in Norway being the 68th ranked skier means you can beat almost anyone in the world,” Fincholm explained. “But it’s kind of on par with being the 100th best quarterback in American football. The few guys at the very top are the only ones really making a living at it, the rest are just really good football players without anywhere to go.”
Fincholm saw the handwriting on the wall and that’s when he decided to abandon professional skiing and journey to MIT. But it was when fate intervened, and he received his job at the LHC that the merging of two wonderful and completely unrelated worlds happened—quantum mechanics and cross-country skiing— and but for the chance cancellation of an American research program in Texas, none of this would have been possible.
Fincholm explained that when he started as a fellow at the LHC, the worst jobs around the collider would often fall to him. “Whenever we needed someone to do grunt work my name was on the top of the list. Checking voltage regulators on the magnets for the fifth time, that was me.” But often he had to do physical labor as well.
“LHC is basically a big donut in the ground. We accelerate particles around in a circle about 27 kilometers in diameter to nearly the speed of light. We use superconducting magnets to accelerate these particles, and we use a tremendous amount of energy; our usage is measured in the hundreds of gigawatts. Whenever you’re using that much energy unusual things can and often do occur.”
One of the things that occurs is that periodically, the thousands of magnets used at LHC require unusual maintenance. Vast amounts of energy are shot through these magnets. And because they are not perfectly efficient, there is some debris created. After each firing of the magnets small amounts of detritus are created inside the magnet’s shielding. “It’s only micrograms, but eventually it has to be cleaned and that’s one of the grunt jobs I had to do. You have to physically scrape the debris off the magnet housing, and it has to be done periodically for each of the over 9,500 magnets. The total amount collected is small. Over the course of a year, it wouldn’t fill a shoebox. We use a special scraping tool made out of carbon fiber and titanium to avoid damaging the housing or the magnets, and of course we can only use material which is not magnetic; that would be bad. Once the material is cleaned off it kind of resembles something like graphite powder mixed with water. We are quite familiar with this material, it’s produced in every collider in the world, we just happen to produce the most because we are the biggest. It’s totally harmless, it’s mostly a combination of nitrogen that’s been bonded to manganese and about 20 other trace elements contained in the atmosphere and cooling mechanisms which the magnetic fields react with. But it’s the prolonged exposure to an intense repeated magnetic field that’s the secret sauce, and that’s the part we don’t completely understand.” As Fincholm described, the stray magnetic field holds all of the elements together in a kind of subatomic magnetic slurry. After the material is scraped from the magnets it begins to revert back into its constituent parts. “It takes about 12 hours for the material to completely break down, and the initial decay begins very quickly.”
“Even as I was promoted through the program, I still worked cleaning the magnets, and do so to this day. I think it helps to keep me in touch with the day to day operations” It was during this process that Fincholm had a eureka moment.
He was cleaning off the housing scraper with a hose and noticed that the water would puddle on the scraper and wouldn’t react with the substance at all. “It became obvious that it was extremely hydrophobic.” That’s when the light bulb went on. “Ever since the fluoro ban everyone’s been looking for something to replace it with, but nothing really is as good. I even spent some time playing around with solutions, but that’s more of a chemistry thing than particle physics. But as soon as I saw the reaction of water with the spatula, I immediately had the idea of putting it on skis to see what would happen.” But there was a problem. Because the substance, known as SPECS (semi-perturbed excited conglomerates) breaks down so quickly it was hard to test. But Fincholm was in the right place at the right time. LHC’s experiment scheduling and cleaning generally took place early December and late March. Perfect time for snow falls in Switzerland. So, one day Fincholm took some of the substance and smeared it on the bottom of skis. “I knew I had very little time to work with. I had all my gear ready to go and was running through LHC in my ski boots with my skis in hand, everyone looking at me like I was crazy. I had asked the maintenance staff if they could use the plowed snow from the parking lot to build me a little ski track. They were very enthusiastic and set up about a half kilometer loop which was totally flat. I jumped on the snow, took a couple of skate pushes and immediately landed flat on my back. The speed was so intense that I wasn’t ready for it and fell backwards!”
After his initial shock, Fincholm completed the half kilometer loop in about 35 seconds. “I couldn’t believe it— it was shocking how fast it was.” Unfortunately, the thrill only lasted for a short time. “After about .2 k, the decay process really accelerated and I could quickly feel the skis returning to normal speed, and by the end of the loop I was again only mortal. It was kind of like that book Flowers for Algernon [in addition to his scientific achievements, advanced degrees, and sports prowess, Fincholm also picked up a bachelor’s in English literature, one of those many talents you could easily hate him for]. It’s the story of a mentally challenged young man who is given a drug that makes him one of the smartest people in the world. The problem was that the drug began to wear off, but the man was now smart enough to realize what was happening and was also smart enough to know that there was no fixing it. It was kind of like that. After the initial near light speed experience, I was quickly returning to normal, and I knew there was nothing to be done. I was once again just a pretty fast guy on skis. But, for almost a minute I was by far the fastest person in the world on skis. I did some calculations and determined that if the substance could last over 10k, my time would be about 12 minutes for a skate race.”
If the collider in Texas had been built as originally proposed, Fincholm would have been in the dusty arid Texas countryside instead of snowy Switzerland and the ski application connection never would have happened. It’s pretty much the definition of serendipity.
But getting the SPECS to last is the problem to make skiing on the material feasible for the masses. “I know it can be solved; I’ve done the math and I’ve proven to myself that it can work, but it would take lots of money. It’s kind of like creating fusion energy. It’s mathematically doable but it is going to take billions of dollars to make it happen. I’m guessing SPECS could be turned into a usable product for $50-$60 million. I have the theoretical underpinnings all worked out, but who’s going to invest that much money into ski wax? It may be more practical for downhill skiing applications since the run times are relatively short. But the terminal speed would be frighteningly fast, and it would require reconfiguration of every competition downhill course in the world. It’s scary to think how fast you could get going on downhill skis. The other problem is that there are only a couple of dozen of people in the world who completely understand the particle physics involved, and to the best of my knowledge none of them are skiers, so it’s unlikely that they would want to devote their time searching for a solution.”
The answer to who is willing to develop the product is probably nobody, but Fincholm isn’t deterred. “There might prove to be some non-ski related use for SPECS where industry will want to spend the money to find a way to stabilize the product, or applications in aerospace or defense departments.” Fincholm has reached out to the United States Department of Defense’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) but can’t talk about those conversations. Though he did volunteer that he went to MIT with a DARPA scientist who is leading their research into quantum computers so he thinks that contact will help move research on the project along.
“So, until a large corporation or wealthy nation steps in, just me and a couple of guys at LHC will be the only ones using it. When you’re in this line of work you have to be patient and willing to accept many failures before success. After all it took decades of trying until the first quantum particle was detected. I’m sure eventually there will be commercial use for SPECS and with it will come the fastest skis the world has ever seen. It will be an incredible day for the skiing world, and every record will fall the next day. But it will be a very sad day for me, because when everyone is skiing on SPECS I will once again be just another very good skier.”
Until that day comes, Dr. Sten Fincholm will continue to be the fastest man on skis; for about 90 seconds a year!
This article was originally published on April 1, 2025
