Time to Make the Donuts

Here on the other side of winter—snow not yet fully melted, grass not yet fully green—I’ve spent the week sleeping in. It’s been kind of awesome: lolling happily under a fluffy comforter, flipping the pillow to the cool side again and again, dozing luxuriantly, secure in the knowledge that I’m not missing a race, not late on a deadline, not overlooking details that might make a story better or more informative. These spring mornings are for sleeping in. It’s a luxury I won’t possess much longer, but for now, I have time to blissfully ignore time. The FIS World Cup season is over . . .

People used to watch TV. It was what we did in the days before streaming and scrolling and scrolling and streaming. Now, we all watch what we want, when we want, and on whichever device we want. It’s convenient, and gratifying, and individually satisfying . . . but it also means that society no longer shares certain moments, certain memories, certain touchstones. Fred the Baker knows what I mean . . . he was the Dunkin’ Donuts  TV pitchman who once trudged bleary-eyed across 1980’s commercial interruptions droning “Time to make the donuts.” Up waaaay too early, nearly sleep-walking toward his responsibility to make a thing that the world would soon be waiting for, Fred the Baker coined a phrase that’s still in use, even though many of us are too young to remember its origins.

For FasterSkier, winter’s early weekend mornings have been all about “Time to Make the Donuts.” European ski racing takes place during normal morning hours (for the most part) in Sweden, in Norway, in Finland, in Italy, in Switzerland. But a normal morning in Lillehammer is the middle of the night here in Montana (where this writer resides). My alarm goes off at 1am, or 2 am, or 3am; I shuffle toward the coffee maker mumbling “Time to Make the Donuts.” Don’t get me wrong, I love donuts . . . but I don’t always love being that somebody who wakes up in the middle of the night in order to make them.

While FasterSkier reporters are on-location at truly major events like World Championships and Olympic Winter Games, we don’t claim to offer boots-on-the-ground reporting at World Cup events. The week-after-week World Cup circus just moves too far, too fast, and too often for our small team of reporters to follow along in person . . . but the stories still need to be told. We think of ourselves as providing pertinent information for those ski fans who are not up with us in the middle of the night, for those who don’t have the time to watch an entire three hour Sprint race broadcasting live from the streets of Talinn, Estonia, or the extended-play, on-screen, blow-by-blow of a 50 k Mass Start race from Holmenkollen. We also provide background and context for what viewers might be seeing when they tune in to stream race replays. It’s a journalistic service provided by a staff of reporters who are avid ski fans, themselves. That team of writers, editors, publishers, and contributors work under bylines that may be familiar to FasterSkier readers: Matt Voisin, Ken Roth, Kennedy Lange, Luke Dykjowski, Clare Egan, Keely Levins, John Teaford. We watch every race, so we understand the context and the progress of the entire race season. If a skier is missing, we’re likely to know why. If a skier is on the rise, we’re likely to have some background information on why their strategy may be working. We’re ski fans: we watch the races, and report on what we see. It’s a satisfying way to spend the winter, and we get to make the donuts.

There’s a system we follow in order to understand the racing we’ve seen, and to construct a story that explains it best:

The Day Before

Check the FIS points standings. See where the ongoing competition is close, see who’s protecting a lead, see who’s hoping to eat into one. The dynamic of the year-long race to the Crystal Globes will drive much of the action we see. Without that information, we might make improper assumptions about who is fit, who is cagey, who is ambitious.

The Evening Before

Check the FIS start list for the next day’s event. Find out who’s in and who’s out. Then try to figure out (by researching Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish ski media for stories on athlete situations and conditions that North American media would not normally pursue) why significant players have been omitted, and attempt to imagine how those absences and roster dynamics may affect the outcome of today’s racing.

Race Morning

FasterSkier taps into World Cup racing via live broadcast. Usually, that live-edited footage is transmitted via skiandsnowboardlive.com channeling European-provided live-feed to North American-based hosts (sometimes Chad Salmela and Kikkan Randall, at other times Andrew Kastning) who offer live commentary during the events. North American broadcasters have no control over the images delivered to our screens, and must be nimble in responding to whatever scenes, situations, athletes, or actions arrive via the airwaves. It’s quite a balancing act, one made even more difficult by changes and challenges inherent in a system that receives its media from the other side of the world. Start times may be fluid; the printed schedule can be wrong; broadcast schedules can be incorrect.

Write It Up

FasterSkier’s writers draft their stories in real time, typing furiously while the broadcast unfolds. By the time the race concludes, the article should be almost written. Hopefully, something interesting and memorable has happened. Hopefully, what happened coincides with the premise we developed before racing even began. Some adding and editing, some re-arranging and improving, the creation of an enticing headline, and we move on to lay out and illustration.

Photos

These we get (mostly) from a media library that hires on-site photographers at Word Cup events. They post images to their website very quickly after the conclusion of events (it’s kind of amazing), and we scroll rapidly through, searching for images that match the action we’ve seen and reported. Select a photo, download, reformat, resize, position within the story, center the image, enlarge the image, erase the photographer’s caption and replace with one of our own. We know our audience is primarily North American, so we hope for images of skiers on the teams our readers root for. But we also have an obligation to report the racing, so the majority of the photos and headlines are devoted to the brightest stars in the Scandinavian ski-heavens.

Quotes

When it’s a big race (World Championships and/or Olympics) our FasterSkier reporters will be in the media pen just past the finish line, able to pepper skiers and coaches with questions about the day’s racing. On most World Cup weekends, we contact skiers directly, submitting questions for them to answer—sometimes in writing, sometimes as audio files, sometimes in person. The skiers we contact are typically quite generous with their time and their comments, but if they manage to slip past the media phalanx then we’re unlikely to receive comments from them in time for publication. After Sunday races, the whole circus is hurriedly packing up, dashing to airports, catching flights to the next destination. It can be tough to get good quotes and comments on Sundays . . .

Publish

It’s always a nervous moment to click the “Publish” button, knowing we should hurry to spread the word while also being nervous that every comma is in place, every name spelled correctly, every nationality attributed properly, every placing reported accurately. Readers get in touch with us all the time to point out our errors, mistakes, shortcomings. Luckily, it’s possible to go back to make changes even after an article has been published. We do it all the time . . .

Timing

Racing is over, and the morning coffee is kicking in. I usually hope to have a story composed, illustrated, communicated, and published within an hour after the race has concluded. That way, any early-rising ski fans will have a way to check the headlines to see what happened during the North American night. Delays in publication can come from unexpected sources. Usually, the source I’m waiting longest for is the International Ski Federation (FIS), itself. They’re agonizingly slow about updating their results page, and any FasterSklier article would be incomplete without those results for readers to reference. Once those results are available (finally!), placed in the article, and properly hyperlinked for magical transport back to the FIS results page, then things are pretty much ready. I’ll drop a line to FasterSkier’s Publisher letting him know that the story is published, that the morning’s work is done, that the donuts are made.

Early, early, early in the morning . . . that’s when racing happens for the staff at FasterSkier. We do our work in the dark while the rest of the North American ski world sleeps. And next year’s 2025-2026 season will involve the work and contributions of even more voices and eyes, even more keyboards coffee cups. For now, it’s April; the staff at FasterSkier finally sleeps in. But even in the sunny warmth of this new spring, the effects of a long race season still linger. Alarms no longer jangle in the middle of the night; still, we may find ourselves awake in the dark, worried that we’ve overslept, panicked that we might’ve missed a race-start. April is an unsettling shoulder-season of disorienting late-night moments when we’re forced to remind ourselves that Jessie is already at home with her Crystal Globes safely poised on the mantle. Johannes no longer needs to worry over whether he will thrill or disappoint his hometown fans. Skiing venues are closed up for the season as the last of a long winter’s snows melts slowly into the grass of the trails. The urgency of the race season has ended. The donuts have all been made. Finally, Jessie gets to sleep in . . . and so does FasterSkier.