Full Bellies for Fast Skiers: Inside Megan Chacosky’s Olympic Kitchen

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Megan Chacosky had just finished cleaning up from dinner when she hopped on the Zoom from the US Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team’s pre-Olympic training camp in Livigno, Italy.

“Yeah, that’s okay,” she said. “I appreciate you waiting for me to reply while I cook dinner.”

When Chacosky isn’t back in Vermont at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, she’s often doing the unseen work that keeps elite endurance athletes moving: shopping, planning, cooking, adapting — and doing it in places where the grocery store might have four chicken breasts and a cart that doesn’t want to go straight.

“Especially with the Euro grocery carts,” she said, “because they, like, Tokyo, drift in each direction. So once you weigh them down at all, you’re just bumping into everything.”

Chacosky’s path to this role didn’t start with a lifelong plan to work in skiing. It started with kitchens — and with the realization that restaurant hours and athletic training don’t always coexist.

“I really liked it,” she said of her early restaurant experience, “but I recognized really early I was a two-sport athlete in college at the time that it was really difficult to be cooking for a full day, and then still try to be an athlete and move my body.”

She went back to school for nutrition, initially without much sense that sports nutrition was its own lane. “Thinking that sports nutrition didn’t even exist yet at that point,” she said. But at the University of Utah, she found herself in the right place at the right time: volunteering with the ski team, then stepping into a hybrid chef-dietitian role. “That was 2013, my first year with the team,” she said.

Chacosky stayed on full-time through the PyeongChang quadrennial, then spent four years at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, overseeing sport nutrition for winter athletes. But she kept circling back toward cross-country skiing.

“Always throughout that time, I’ve tried to maintain a connection with cross-country and with this team in particular,” she said, adding that the athletes “really value nutrition and they value the staff who come in to support them in these contractor roles.”

She also didn’t romanticize what she saw when she first arrived at the highest level of sport.

“It’s easy to overclaim, maybe the Olympics, or what it looks like and feels like at the professional level,” she said. “And then you kind of see all these athletes who are footing their own bill for most of the season, or they are, you know, they’re really working to get more financial support, to get more resource support in general.”

When Chacosky talks about fueling athletes, she doesn’t talk like someone selling a single perfect plan. Her starting point is simpler, and harder: build meals that can work for many different athletes, training loads, preferences, and moods — even if she isn’t the primary dietitian guiding each athlete day to day.

“I have to assume that every individual from this team is going to walk into this room with a different goal for what they want, their nutrition, or their kind of fueling experience to look and feel like,” she said.

In those situations, she aims for variety and flexibility. “Really try to make it kind of as, you know, choose your own adventure as it can be,” she said. “So I try to make it feel like everybody walks in and they think, ‘Oh, this meal was made for me,’ even if there’s 20 people walking into the room.”

The job is equal parts logistics and psychology. Chacosky will ask athletes what they miss, then shape menus around those answers. It could be a “food from home that [they] really want to see, like, a specific hot sauce that I’m going to bring,” she said.

She’s found patterns. “Any Mexican food and Asian food is usually popular with anybody in the group,” she said, because in much of Europe those flavors can be hard to find — especially in the team hotels athletes rotate through during the winter. “Those are really difficult flavors to find,” she said.

She also tries to keep herself learning. “It’s been a goal of mine on every trip to try to pick a new meal that I haven’t made before,” she said. In Italy, that might mean leaning into where she is. “Maybe I’m going to try making fresh pasta or making gnocchi,” she said.

All of it, however, depends on what she can actually buy — and that’s where the day-to-day grind starts.

“I go to the grocery store at least once a day, every day, since I’ve been here,” she said.

The reason is scale. At altitude, with athletes stacking long training sessions, food disappears quickly. “It’s just a mental exception, like, I just need to accept I’m going to go to the store every day,” she said.

In Livigno, she’s had help. “[Coach] Jason [Cork] has been driving me to the store,” she said. “Very, very appreciative of his help.” When someone can share the errand, it changes the rhythm. “To be able to hand him a list, and just know he can go through the store and get some of those things and help me,” she said.

Even with help, the optics are what you’d expect: foreigners filling carts, locals watching. “And then we just fill up two carts, and we go online, and we get laughs and sneers from a lot of the people who are there,” she said. “It’s like, what are you doing?”

Sometimes it backfires. “Russia was probably the most,” she said, remembering an incident from years ago. “I accidentally dropped a container of blueberries… and they kicked us out of the store because I dropped the blueberries.”

Sometimes it works better if she can communicate ahead of time. “We can talk to the grocer and tell them, ‘Hey, we’re staying here for two weeks. I’m going to be buying this amount of food every single day,’” she said. “So… we can actually communicate and just let them know, ‘like I’m going to be eating all of the eggs that you have. So if you can get more from your supplier… that might help you out.’”

In Livigno, the constraints can be more basic, as in what the shelves can actually hold. Chacosky described walking into small Italian shops and finding limited quantities of meat. “There’s, you know, like four chicken breasts that are there,” she said. “Because that’s just what the butcher brought in. That’s what the farm was able to provide that day.”

That scarcity has an upside: the quality. “Just the quality of… the meat and dairy products here have been really, really good,” she said.

Then there are the unexpected windfalls — the strange currency of a long European winter: podium prizes and leftovers.

The U.S. team arrived with a trio of cheese blocks from recent success; Chacosky said she’d used Gruyère “at almost every single meal so far.” Athletes, she explained, treat it as a snack as much as an ingredient. “They’ve gone through almost a wheel… just in snacking,” she said. But she’s cooked with it too: “I did a bunch of the grilled paninis the other day… We did some pasta and meatballs.”

She’s also dealing with another inheritance: “There was, like, 20 bags of trail mix from Oberhof,” she said. Rather than let it sit, she’s been breaking it down. “I’ve been sorting the dried fruit and nuts from the trail mix to use for different things throughout the week.”

Her approach is shaped by her work back home. “My full-time role is with Craftsbury and the Green Racing Project,” she said, “and I think part of that too, I really like to bring this kind of degree of sustainability and resourcefulness when I go on the road.” The goal isn’t just abundance; it’s abundance without waste. “Trying to… get down to as little food waste as possible at the end [of a trip], has become kind of another project of mine,” she said.

That kind of planning gets more complicated when you add medical constraints — the things that can’t be solved by enthusiasm and another shopping trip.

“So we have one celiac allergy with us right now,” she said. “And celiac has such an easy cross-contamination zone.” Her response is immediate and practical. “I will travel with painters’ tape and Sharpie,” she said, “and I will just immediately… label them. Like, ‘this is gluten-free only.’”

There’s another allergy on the coaching staff side that changes everything. “Chris Grover (US Cross-Country Ski Team program director) is probably the weirdest,” she said. “He has a poultry allergy.” She described the implications plainly: “chicken is, like, only one of the best proteins that you can serve… and he can’t.” At a previous championship, she took extreme measures. “In Trondheim for World Champs,” she said, “I would cook chicken in the sports Med Room.”

These are details athletes sometimes mention in passing, but they define Chacosky’s work: building a kitchen that is fast, safe, flexible, and — somehow — comforting.

When asked what meals get the biggest reaction, she didn’t point to anything trendy. She pointed to the things that feel almost too easy.

“It’s probably ‘Brinner’,” she said, explaining: “the breakfast for dinner.” She laughed at herself a little. “I could make it every single day, and I don’t think anybody would complain.”

Then she offered another surprise: “the soup and sandwich day.” For her, it can feel like she’s cutting corners. For athletes, it can feel like exactly what they needed.

“It’s all of the meals to me that feel like I’m not doing my job,” she said. “Like I’ve just made a tomato soup and put some grilled cheese together with ham and a fruit and veggie tray. And I was like, ‘this is like, cheating.’” But then: “They just are out of their minds excited about it.”

The team’s appetite isn’t only for comfort. It’s also for familiarity — the branded products and specific flavors they’ve trained with for years, the stuff they don’t want to gamble on when the stakes rise. Chacosky is involved in that, too: the long process of shipping a slice of home across an ocean.

“I actually get to be a part of the process too, for all of the food that we ship over from the US to the games,” she said. This year, because Italy’s venues are spread out, cross-country skiing got something rare. “Cross-country, got to pick, we got our own budget to kind of pick our own pallet of food to send for just these athletes,” she said. “Which is such a huge benefit.”

The list is partly performance, partly preference. “We send a survey out to athletes,” she said. If someone needs a very specific bar flavor, she can put it on the pallet. “Jesse loves peppermint Luna bars,” she said. “I want two cases of those, and we’re going to put them on the pallet.”

The freight itself is a slow-moving, months-long commitment. “They… put them on a pallet, typically at the end of October,” she said. “To be shipped over.”

Some places require an absurd amount of paperwork. For Beijing, she remembered, “every product, including different flavors… had to have four pieces of paperwork.” Italy, she said, has been easier on packaged goods, though anything involving meat or dairy still brings extra scrutiny.

Her description of what they shipped this time sounded like a team trying to control the controllables: hydration mixes they already use, recovery drinks in familiar flavors, and enough real food for the staff who may be away from the hotel all day.

“We added a bunch of Maurten products,” she said. “We got a lot of Skratch product as well for hydration support.” And for the technicians: “We’ve got some ramen or like Annie’s mac and cheese cups going to them.”

She paused on that point — the staff. “Some of our focus, too, was very intentionally for the tech staff as well,” she said, because on race days they may be at the venue “from the morning till the night.”

On television, the sport is skiers, split times, a leaderboard, and a finish line. In the background, there are also shopping carts that won’t roll straight, a roll of painter’s tape, a curated pallet of food from home, and the daily decision to go back to the store again.

 

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