Bend’s Neve Gerard Embarks on Her Next Chapter

As a sixth grader growing up in Bend, Ore., Neve Gerard was paying attention when Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins won U.S. cross-country skiing’s first Olympic gold medal. She wasn’t a full-on skier back then—she was more into running and mountain biking—but she remembers thinking how cool it was.

Nearly six years later, she found herself warming up on the same Olympic course where the duo won the team sprint in PyeongChang, South Korea. Gerard, who had since delved deep into nordic skiing, was preparing for her second race of the 2024 Youth Olympic Winter Games.

“We were racing on the biathlon courses from the 2018 Olympic Games, but I got to warm up for that race on the sprint course from 2018, where Kikkan and Jesse won,” Gerard recalled in a phone interview. “That got me so hyped to race.”

She went on to place sixth in the 7.5-kilometer classic race, following up on a 17th-place finish in the freestyle sprint the day before at the Youth Olympics.

“I finished the race, and I saw the result, and I just like ran up [my coach] Reitler [Hodgert] and gave him a hug,” Gerard said. “I’ve always been so much better at skate, and in the past two years, I put so much effort into my classic technique. It’s been a really frustrating, slow grind to get it better, but it just clicked in that race.”

She finished the Youth Olympics with a fifth-place finish in the 4 x 5 k mixed relay with Rose Horning, Benjamin Barbier, and Tabor Greenberg.

Thinking back to her “breakout” result of sixth in the individual classic race and the impact Randall and Diggins had on her, Gerard called it “super full-circle.”

“Best warmup ever,” she added.

This summer, Gerard balanced full-time training with the Mt. Bachelor Ski Education Foundation (MBSEF) and working at events and babysitting before a trip to Europe in early August. There, she attended an International Junior Camp in Sjusjøen, Norway, with more than 80 athletes from 15 countries. She traveled with eight other U.S. skiers—Natalie Nicholas, Elsie Weiss, Maeve Ingelfinger, Owen Young, Murphy Kimball, Grey Barbier, Tabor Greenberg, and Cole Flowers—and coaches Greta Anderson and Tuva Granøien. They arrived in Norway a week early to train on the Holmenkollen rollerski track in Olso.

“It’s been really fun to ski with the fastest girls in the world from my age group,” Gerard wrote in an email during the camp last month. “I feel like I pick up little things they do that work.”

She returned to Bend on Aug. 13 and left for her freshman semester at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City the next day.

Gerard explained her easy decision to join the Utes—the reigning NCAA skiing champions since 2019. Another MBSEF skier, Zachary Jayne, will join her on the team.

“I just really want to go to a place where I can be surrounded by super-fast girls,” she said. “I want to be the worst on the team so that I get a lot better, and the coaching staff and the support is just phenomenal. Once I visited, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is where I want to go.’ ”

The last time Gerard was at the back of the pack was in middle school when she dabbled in nordic to be with friends and skied about once a week.

“The first race I ever did, I got dead last by like three minutes, and I was like, ‘Oh this sucks. I just wanna be fast,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t really realize that in order to be fast, you have to put a lot of training into it.”

When the 2020 pandemic affected her mountain bike racing, Gerard shifted her focus to cross-country skiing. As entering freshmen, she and her friends began training more seriously, ramping up to six days a week that summer with MBSEF at the Mt. Bachelor Nordic Center.

The following winter, she raced to ninth in a skate sprint at Western Regionals. “I remember being super stoked about that,” she recalled.

As a former cross-country runner and all-around athlete, training came naturally to Gerard, who enjoys it more than most.

“I just really like training and pushing my body,” she emphasized. “I feel like I have big goals, and I just want to work really hard to get to those goals. I think I’ve always been that way.”

According to MBSEF Program Director and Head Coach Reitler Hodgert, she’s one of the hardest-working individuals he’s ever met.

“My job as a coach … has been to convince [Neve] to do less and to slow down and to take breaks,” Hodgert explained. “She has not had any single breakout year, but her skiing has been very much a rising tide of just continuous, consistent results and performances.”

She got her first taste of international racing at last year’s Scando Cup in Finland, where she finished ninth in the 5 k freestyle.

“What really stands out from Finland for me is just how different international racing is,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Wow, like this is like even more fun than racing in the States.’ ”

This past January, Gerard won the junior 10 k freestyle mass start at U.S. Nationals in Soldier Hollow. She was then invited to 2024 World Junior Championships but declined her spot to race at the Youth Olympics.

She finished out her senior year in Bend by returning to mountain biking, a sport Hodgert encouraged her to resume for cross-training. She and her high-school teammates (the Lava Bears) won the 2023 Mountain Biking State Championships team title, and Gerard placed second individually.

“Reitler wanted me to mix up my training a little bit, and at that point, I hadn’t mountain-bike raced since eighth grade,” she recalled. “It was fun. I got to mix it up a little bit, and it was a good experience.”

“We feel that being a multi-sport athlete as long as you can is super important for athlete development,” Hodgert noted.

“My coaches are the best and care about me as both a human and a skier which I appreciate,” Gerard wrote. “They have been so helpful in developing my skiing. Mt Bachelor has been a great venue to call home, having snow late into the spring/summer has been super beneficial in my training.”

“She’s been an incredible leader on our team for the last, last four years,” Hodgert said.

At the U of U, Gerard is interested in studying pyschology.

“I’m really into criminal psych,” she said. “I just really like how the brain works.”

Neve’s Favorite Fall Workout

9 x 4 minutes L4 double pole intervals up Skyliners Road (a slight uphill gradient that goes up for 8 miles) after school

“We do this workout a few times each fall, and it’s always so hard but really fun and rewarding once you’re done.”

Warmup: 30-minute ski to the start with some speeds/pickups

Cool down: Ski Skyliners in the opposite direction/downhill