Chad Salmela has a gift for pinpointing the critical characteristics of a moment and building something special from it. See “Here Comes Diggins,” the emphatically shouted announcement of an historic performance in American skiing, one that defined the careers of Olympic champions Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall, and of Salmela, himself. When it comes to Nordic skiing, Salmela knows what to say, how to put analysis into a context that audiences will understand, how to...
It was, “a race people still talk about,” said long-time Stillwater Area High School Coach Bill Simpson when FasterSkier interviewed him in February. Distinctive red and white letterman jackets looked on from the stadium, medals clanging from the giant “S” insignias in the cold Iron Range wind. Giant’s Ridge, just outside of Biwabik, looked like the Hoosiers Field House if the janitor had forgotten to turn the heat on. A pairing of two future stars...
What are European World Cup skiers asking ahead of the circuit’s first-ever visit to Minneapolis next February? According to Jessie Diggins, “They’re like, have you heard of the Mall of America?” In a recent media event held at Theodore Wirth Park, Diggins—with fellow Minnesotan US Ski Team member Zak Ketterson—highlighted plans to make the first FIS World Cup held in the United States in 22 years an even bigger Twin Cities attraction than a mall...
After each of her races on the World Cup this season, Hailey Swirbul would write in her journal. “I tried to answer a couple of questions,” she explained. “What was good today? What was hard? And what do I want to carry forward?” That last question, “What do I want to carry forward?” typically kept an eye on next week’s racing. But after she crossed the final finish line in Lahti, Finland, those questions would...
The International Ski Federation (FIS) recently announced that next season will be the first where the use of fluorinated ski waxes—fluoros—will be banned at the World Cup. Or rather, the FIS are planning on enforcing a ban that initially was announced in 2019, and has been delayed year-to-year ever since. In its rationale behind the latest delay last August, the FIS responded to reports by the Swedish Newspaper Expressen that the chosen field test for...
In 2024, Minneapolis, Minnesota will host an FIS World Cup. That fact has been the source of pure excitement across US Skiing, and also of déjà vu. For many skiers and ski fans, the cancellation of the planned World Cup races at Theodore Wirth Park in March 2020 will forever be associated with those uncertain first days of the COVID-19 pandemic. American World Cup athletes had come home, the banners and bleachers were up, when...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. After Maja Dahlqvist (SWE) qualified third in Saturday’s classic sprint, the tension rose to a fever pitch. With ten bonus points earned, Dahlqvist had cut the Sprint Crystal Globe gap between herself...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. World Cup Finals began under overcast Finnish skies Friday, as the circuit looks to settle the questions of a long season over the next three days. Who was—and who wasn’t—racing in Friday’s...
Volunteers dug out the blankets. It was ten below (and falling) at Birch Hill in Fairbanks, Alaska, but the stadium was packed. There were sprint races on, after all: Junior National Championship sprint races. So, the dedicated volunteers cloaked racers in blankets between heats, and the best junior skiers in the nation took on the look of one of those old NFL Films sideline shots where hulking linemen huddle around heaters as steam rises off...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. For the last week of World Cup sprinting, two pairs of skis have followed each other back and forth, every stride marked in tandem with the other. Twenty meters from the finish...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. There had been glimpses of Swedish firepower all day. Into the first exchange, Calle Halfvarsson (SWE) had shot through the field. When Federico Pellegrino (ITA) broke away on leg three, Edvin...
The second half of this year’s NCAA Championships took place Saturday in Lake Placid, New York, with a 20 k mass start classic which both the women’s and men’s field would race in true, dynamic, mass start style. Packs came, moves went and, in the end, one skier would come out the strongest on the day in both the women’s and men’s races. Thursday’s results left open the possibility for plenty of history to be...
The NCAA Ski Championships began in Lake Placid, New York Thursday, marking the culmination of America’s collegiate race season in one of America’s most storied ski venues. This marked the fifth time that Lake Placid has hosted NCAA Championships, and the first time since 2015 when the Freestyle event that kicked off the event was won by Dartmouth Sophomore Patrick Caldwell on the Men’s side, and Austrian Freshman Veronkica Mayerhofer from the University of Utah...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. On the final day of a World Championships defined by new highs in terms of results for the United States, Rosie Brennan (USA) delivered a performance that reiterated that—for Brennan and her...
The coaching staff for the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club (SSWSC) huddled around a tinny iPhone speaker set out on a wax bench. It was the last Rocky Mountain Junior National Qualifier of the season in Aspen, Colorado, but there was no illusion about where the main event in North American skiing was last Saturday. On the American Birkebeiner live stream, Adam Verrier and Dennis Kruse delivered the news that one of the coaches usually...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. What was old is new again: for the first time since equal-distance racing policies were put into effect this season, the men’s field was set to race a 15 kilometer individual start....
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. Five years on from the milestone of Olympic gold—and ten years on from the milestone of World Championship gold—the event was the same for US skiing; the Team Sprint. Socks adorned with...
It was the end of the weekend, but the start of a whole new generation of Americans skiers on the World’s stage. Tabor Greenberg, the Green Mountain Valley School attendee and a U16 national champion last season pulled into the final kilometer of a 3 x 5km Team Relay, locked stride-for-stride with the familiar red suit of his Norwegian counterpart. The stadium was ahead, and for the first time clad in a US Ski Team...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. By the time the men’s final started, the procession had all but begun. Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR) went to the front, kept the rest of his competitors just out of reach, and...
All friendships have a mythology, and all mythologies have their origin story. For Annika Martell and me, that origin story takes place in a marsh outside of West Bend, Wisconsin. Anni and I did not meet until college—we were both part of the incoming class of 2020 at Colby College that arrived on campus in Waterville, Maine in August 2016, but my mother and her father were both raised in this same heart of heartlands...