Tim Baucom and the Art of Making Hand-Structured Skis

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After a historic day like yesterday, there are so many possible stories, some big, some smaller, but all important. It is easy to get lost in the moment, the history, and the meaning, but we also cannot forget about how it happened. Not just on the race course, but bigger than that, how did the team make it happen, specifically the service team?

A lot of credit should be given to Eli Brown, who is the tech for both Ben Ogden and Julia Kern. Clearly, Brown, a self-proclaimed golf caddy for his athletes, provided some special magic, as did Oleg Ragilo, who leads the kick team, and Chris Hecker, who leads the glide team, but what makes the US Cross-Country Ski Team service team special is that they know they work best when all of their pistons are firing in sync.

One of those pistons is their head of hand structure, Tim Baucom. His route to the wax truck bench was less predictable than you might expect.

Just a Kid Who Loved Sports

Like many who stay in coaching and the industry, Baucom loved all sports growing up.

“Sports were definitely my biggest focus when I was young. As soon as I started playing Little League baseball, soccer, and stuff, it was definitely all I thought about, in school too. Gym class and recess.”

For a long time, Baucom played all the sports he could, but he was definitely into soccer, which was probably his favorite, and he played through high school.

Baucom grew up in Walpole, a small town in southwest New Hampshire, but cross-country skiing wasn’t on his radar as a child. Though he tried it in fifth grade and continued through high school, he did not approach it with the passion one might expect from a story about someone at his current level.

“I didn’t really have much of a community for it where I grew up. It’s funny because New England’s so small.”

Little did Baucom know he was just across the Connecticut River from the epicenter of American Nordic skiing.

“I was 15 or 20 minutes away from Putney… but the communities in New England are so removed from one another. My dad even worked in Putney, and I didn’t really know those kids or race against any of them, or know the coaches.”

While he loved soccer and other ball sports, skiing seemed to fit best.

“Once I started skiing, I realized it was probably my best sport, at least the one I was more naturally adapted to.”

But that didn’t mean he was fully committed to training like the top juniors in the region.

“The first time I roller skied was my freshman year at UNH… There were three or four of us who had grown up in the New Hampshire high school skiing world and played other sports and never thought about roller skiing.”

And while that might sound surprising to some people, it is not something Baucom regrets at all.

“In most ways, I’m super thankful that I had a very diverse sports background… competent at ball sports, and alpine skiing—I alpine skied a ton—and telemark skied and ice climbed, and rock climbed. I’m definitely thankful for that.”

Moving West and Almost Choosing a Different Path

After high school, Baucom chose to stay in-state and attend the University of New Hampshire, where he majored in anthropology and had minors in history and music. Skiing became a big part of his life through connections and friendships, but he admits he probably wasn’t fast enough to make the team now.

After graduation, he spent the summer helping build houses up in North Conway, but as fall approached, he left Durham, North Conway, and southwest New Hampshire behind.

“I moved out to Bozeman the year after graduating… planning on being a ski bum for a little bit and then probably going back to grad school. I was very interested in public health, and medical anthropology really interested me.”

But Baucom needed to find a way to support his ski bum lifestyle:

“I started coaching that winter for Bridger Ski Foundation because it was an easy job. I could go ice climb or ski all day, and then at 4:00 show up at Lindley Park and ski around with some kids for a little bit and get paid a little money.”

He figured that, between the money he had saved that summer and what he was making as a coach, he would be able to make his lifestyle work financially, but he didn’t expect to enjoy coaching so much.

“I started dryland training… working with younger kids who were just starting to roller ski and just starting to learn how to bound and ski walk. We played soccer and speedball, mostly, which [was] awesome.”

First Real Exposure to Waxing

At BSF, Baucom found mentors to guide him in waxing.

“We had a few coaches and techs who were quite experienced… Floyd Rieshus… he was probably in his 70s when I was working with him, and he was so dialed.”

But it wasn’t just the technical side of waxing that was appealing; there is something about the physical labor of being a cross-country ski coach that draws in a certain type of person.

“We’d show up in West Yellowstone, and he’d have his big sled that he’d hauled his elk out of the woods with—still covered in blood—and we’d throw all the waxing tables and gear into that, and the generator, and he would slowly trudge from town all the way out to the stadium.”

In addition to Rice, Bjorn Bakken was heavily involved in BSF, and Baucom was willing to take on whatever they suggested.

Baucom must have been doing something right because when the opportunity presented itself, the head coaches threw him into the deep end of the pool to see if he could swim.

“[U.S. Nationals] was in Rumford, and [my boss] called me, ‘one of the people couldn’t make it,’ and they were like, ‘We really need extra help.’ So I went there and really got thrown into it.”

When he arrived in Maine, conditions were, to say the least, challenging, but the rest of the BSF service team didn’t question his ability. They put him in charge of kick, even though Baucom felt as if he had imposter syndrome.

“I think I was honestly in charge of kick—which was a joke at the time—because I had no experience making skis for that quality of athlete and that high level of race.”

Baucom knew the stakes were high and that he had better figure out what to do quickly, but then the weather of New England did what New England weather does in January and tossed a wintery mix classic race day at everyone.

It was situations like that that Baucom loved, having to get creative when there was no other option.

How He Made it to the World Cup

As a parent, you try to teach your child to advocate for themselves, and clearly, Baucom was taught that lesson well.

“For a few years, politely persistent. I emailed [Chris] Grover a few times, being like, ‘Hey, I’m interested in this job.’ I emailed [Jason] Cork [on the tech side] and was like, ‘Any advice if I want to be a tech on the World Cup?’”

The message back was simple: keep doing what you are doing, it is really the only way. What Baucom may not have realized about the impression he was leaving wasn’t just that he was skilled when things got unpredictable, but that he brought the right ‘vibe’ with him to the wax trailer.

“I think if you have the right personality, and enough people see that, I think that helps. That is huge for a team like this. We’re living together for four or five months… one of the most important aspects is to be able to work together.”

Eventually, that persistence with the right vibe got Baucom to Europe to start lending a hand.

Baucom’s Role: Manual Structure

For people who don’t know what manual structure is: basically, the base of any ski has structure in it, small etch marks that help move water through the base or over snow crystals, depending on the temperature and the sharpness of the crystal.

When World Cup skis come from the factory or, more directly, from the brand reps at World Cup races, they are ground, which creates a more permanent structure cut by a machine. What Baucom and the rest of the team are trying to determine on race day is whether adding a different pattern over that grind with a hand tool improves speed compared to the structure already on the ski from the brand.

“The idea is to find something that’s durable, lasts the duration of the race, doesn’t pick up excessive dirt, works well with the grind that’s under it, and works well with the base material.”

The US Cross-Country Ski Team has five different ski brands represented, and “they all have factory grinds that are great, and we use them. So we need to find something that works well for everyone.”

In the days leading up to a race, the team will run a structure test or two and another on race morning before both the men’s and women’s races, “depending on conditions, it could be eight pairs, it could be four,” said Baucom.

“We’re trying to narrow a giant box of different hand structures down to eight on the morning of, and then from there down to one—or maybe two options—that could work with different grinds.”

Trial, Error, and Evolution

Not everything Baucom and the team do works, so they have to catalog the results and move on with that knowledge for the next time similar conditions arise.

“There are certain structures we stay away from that we’ve had bad luck with… and there are certain grinds from different ski companies that we pretty much won’t ever put manual structure on.”

That’s the tricky part: not all athletes ski the same way, are looking for the same feel from a ski, or ski on the same brand of skis.

“The most important thing is for each individual tech to have an idea of what works with their athlete’s skis.”

A Historic Day

Elite skiers train nearly a thousand hours a year, year after year, which is the required ante chip to line up at a race, especially an Olympic one. For Baucom and the rest of the US Ski Team service staff, the skis raced on World Cup weekends and at these Olympics did not come together the way you might prepare them for a Saturday morning ski. It, too, took thousands and thousands of hours of work over decades of involvement for the entire service team to put world-class skis in the athletes’ hands so they could realize their dreams.

Another historic day might materialize at these games, and one thing we know for certain is that the service staff is working hard to make it happen.

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Matthew Voisin

As owner and publisher of FasterSkier, Matthew Voisin manages the day-to-day operations, content, and partnerships that keep the site gliding smoothly. Away from the desk, he’s doing his best to keep pace with his two energetic sons.