MINNEAPOLIS — All winter, cross-country ski race organizers in this midwest metropolis faced weather that just wouldn’t cooperate.
Heading into the weekend, it had not snowed in Minneapolis in nearly a month, with daily high temperatures above freezing every single day since late January.
All this as a local nonprofit, the Loppet Foundation, was set to host the first cross-country World Cup events in America in more than two decades — after a last-minute, coronavirus induced cancelation in 2020.
The World Cup circuit is the sport’s highest level of racing, and it’s contested almost exclusively in Europe.
The Minneapolis organizers had borrowed snowmaking equipment from neighboring ski areas and made enough during a ten-day cold snap to stretch a strip of white through an otherwise barren municipal golf course.
But athletes, fans and volunteers were girding for a decidedly non-wintry atmosphere for the two days of racing this weekend.
Until Wednesday. That’s when a fast-moving storm dumped some six inches on the city — nearly double the entire winter’s snowfall at its airport—and transformed Minneapolis back into a winter wonderland on the same day that the Olympic-level World Cup athletes arrived for the sold-out events.
Claire Wilson, the Loppet Foundation’s executive director, described the storm as a “magic snowfall.”
But, she said, “We were ready to do this yesterday, when it was a ribbon of snow on brown ground.”
Across the board, World Cup racers—most of whom arrived in Minneapolis on Wednesday from the Canadian Rockies — said they were delighted to find fresh snow and engaging skiing at Theodore Wirth Regional Park.
“Exquisite,” “city skiing at its finest” and “American dream”—replete with an eagle and stars and stripes emoji—were among the reactions that athletes posted on social media after their first laps at Wirth.
“I think it’s really pretty here,” Lena Keck, a 23-year old German, said as she left the trails Thursday. And, she said, “it’s a really tough course,” which was not what she and her teammates anticipated.
“Everyone’s surprised,” said Chris Grover, a longtime U.S. World Cup team coach. “I think they heard ‘golf course’ and thought, like, Boca Raton or something.”
The 3.3-kilometer loop that athletes will ski three times in Sunday’s distance race winds through trees and open sections in rolling terrain, with views of downtown skyscrapers from the course’s high points.
Scott Patterson, the veteran American who excels on difficult courses, said he did a harder training session Thursday and found the loop to be unexpectedly grueling, mainly because of the new snow slowing his skis down.
“It’s kind of slow on the downhills, and you have to work all the way down—so it feels like you hit the bottom of the next hill and you really haven’t recovered much,” he said. “It felt hard, for sure.”
Patterson and several other Americans skied Thursday in newly printed “fan club” bibs featuring the faces of the team’s coaches and ski waxing support staff—their own twist on bibs that U.S. supporters sold printed with athletes’ faces to raise money for the team.
The celebratory atmosphere spread across the park Thursday, with eager volunteers—some 700 total will help this weekend—fanning out to unload pallets of food and drinks, tweak course fencing and manage traffic.
Organizers have distributed some 30,000 tickets, with many fans eager to see Jessie Diggins, the Olympic gold medalist and U.S. superstar who leads the women’s overall World Cup standings this year.
Diggins grew up in Afton, a half-hour east of Minneapolis, and returned to the U.S. this week for the first time since she left for Europe in the fall.
Her home is a little too far out of town, and too full of visiting family members, for her to stay there this week. But, she told reporters earlier this week, at least she’ll be reunited with her husband at the World Cup race hotel.
The kind of attention that Diggins is receiving for the hometown events, she said, is not quite the same type as at major championships like the Olympics. But particularly given her lead in the World Cup standings, she added, the weekend “comes with its own different, special kind of pressure that feels about as big.”
“My goal is to enjoy it and hopefully not be so overwhelmed that I can’t be present,” she said. “It will be a delicate balance, for sure, but one that I’m going to try to achieve.”
The rest of the American athletes—even the ones who aren’t from Minnesota—also seem to be soaking in the excitement around what still feels like a home event.
“The whole way here, on the plane, on the bus, people have heard that tickets have sold out, they sold out really fast,” said Kristen Bourne, another U.S. coach. “People have been looking forward to this, from all different countries, for a really long time. So, I think the stoke is insanely high.”
Keck, the German racer, said that the trip to the United States is the first of her life—and the setting has definitely made an impression.
“Everything is so much bigger than in Europe,” said Keck. “The houses, the cars, the trucks, also the landscape—it’s so much wider.”
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.
