Ben Theyerl – Page 2

Norwegian Sweep—Minus Klaebo—in Oberhof Classic Sprint

Ben TheyerlJanuary 19, 2024

This 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. It was a rare day on the World Cup, but patterns, established and emerging, were apparent too. The rare part: Friday in Oberhof marked the first time in six years that Johannes...

Feature News US Nationals

Individual Efforts and Collective Strengths—US Nationals 20 k

Ben TheyerlJanuary 7, 2024

We all work better when we work together—that would seem to be the credo being employed by American skiers these days. At the conclusion of US Nationals at Utah’s Soldier Hollow, American skiing has rarely looked better, whether internationally or domestically. The warm temps and blue skies of early week at the US Cross Country Ski National Championships gave way to, of all things, snow. Morning light came up on Soldier Hollow; snow drifted in...

Feature News US Nationals

Fast Snow, Fast Sprints—Day 2 of US Nationals

Ben TheyerlJanuary 5, 2024

Though temperatures hadn’t dropped much at Soldier Hollow on Thursday, things felt different. The pure blue skies that had been a reliable fact of life at this year’s US Cross Country Ski National Championships (US Nationals) were clouded over as skiers took to the course for Skate Sprint qualifying. Temperatures hovered just below freezing creating fast, abrasive, consistent snow. The result was consistent wax conditions between morning qualifying and afternoon heats. Men’s Skate Sprint Two...

Feature News US Nationals

Warm, Fast, 10 k Classic Opens US Nationals at Soldier Hollow

Ben TheyerlJanuary 2, 2024

Race day at Soldier Hollow in Midway, Utah offers a microcosm for the role the venue has played in US skiing. The once, and possibly future, Olympic venue is consistent, stark, and starkly consistent in its conditions, its terrain, and in the quality of the events the crew at the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center put on. The typical SoHo day starts dark, dry and frigid, before the sun crests the Wasatch Mountains and gives way...

Feature News Tour de Ski World Cup

Diggins Seizes Tour de Ski Lead, Niskanen Takes Stage 2

Ben TheyerlDecember 31, 2023

This 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. The Tour de Ski operates on two parallel narrative arcs. Day-to-day, stage-to-stage, it highlights the singularity of great ski performances, while over the course of a week it points to the dynamism that...

Feature News Tour de Ski World Cup

Linn Svahn Resurgent in TDS Stage 1 Sprint Victory

Ben TheyerlDecember 30, 2023

This 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. Over eighteen editions, the rhythms of the Tour de Ski have become familiar for the World Cup for both skier and viewer alike. The stark change of scenery from the arctic fields and...

Feature News World Cup

Klaebo Ignites Hometown Trondheim With Sprint Victory

Ben TheyerlDecember 15, 2023

This 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. The World Cup’s all-time winningest sprint racer probably didn’t need a home-field advantage, but Trondheim native, Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo, got one as the World Cup pulled into the warm, wet, sea-side city on...

Feature World Cup

Jessie Diggins’ Second Win of the Season, Three Americans Top Ten

Ben TheyerlDecember 10, 2023

This 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. At the end of the World Cup’s two-week stint in Sweden, there was one performance that defined the early stages of the 2023-24 World Cup season: At Sunday’s 10 k individual start...

Feature News World Cup

Diggins Reigns at Gallivare 10 k Freestyle

Ben TheyerlDecember 2, 2023

This 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. Gallivare, Sweden marks the outer limit of the World Cup circuit. The latitude: as northern as it gets. The course: as “unrelentingly technical” as it gets. The weather: at 5℉ (-15℃) this morning, about...

Feature News World Cup

Norway’s Jan Thomas Jenssen Wins in First World Cup Start in Three Years

Ben TheyerlNovember 26, 2023

Jan Thomas Jenssen (NOR) hadn’t been entered in a World Cup race since 2020. On Sunday in Ruka, the highlight to Jenssen’s weekend of racing was expected to be his start in the 20 k, not his finish. But something strange was swirling in the chill Arctic air, and Sunday was one for the dark horses. In the final stretch of Sunday’s race that bent two unlikely skiers—Michal Novak (CZE), and the 27 year-old Jenssen—emerged...

Feature News World Cup

Rosie Brennan Skis to First Career Classic Podium

Ben TheyerlNovember 25, 2023

The first time Rosie Brennan stepped onto a World Cup podium, she was holding a pair of classic skis. That was in Lillehammer eight years ago, December 2015, when she skied the scramble leg in Team USA’s third place finish. Since then, there has been more team revelry, plenty of skate podiums, some fast-starts, some near misses, but never an individual classic podium. Above all, in the intervening time, there has been perseverance. Stride for...

Community Feature News

Keeping the Shop Part II: Ahvo Taipale Skis On

Ben TheyerlOctober 15, 2023

Like most Midwestern states, the majority of Minnesota is an unending grid of corn and soy fields. Land isn’t so much land as it is commodity. Inhabiting that landscape tends to be a constant reminder to think in terms of economy. Life, like farming, is a series of inputs and outputs, costs, and benefits. Unlike most Midwestern states, though, things get wilder the farther North you go in Minnesota. Lakes, lots of them, jut in...

Community Feature News

Keeping the Shop, Part I: Past, Present, and Future at Finn Sisu

Ben TheyerlSeptember 26, 2023

Finn Sisu may not have been the first place to sell skis in the Twin Cities, but it was the first “ski shop.” Ahvo Taipale, a Finnish immigrant and Agricultural Engineer, had spent a decade competing (and often winning) cross-country ski races across the Midwest before he looked around at the growing number of Twin Cities skiers doing new races like the American Birkebeiner and realized that someone would need to provide all those skis....

Community Feature

Finding Mountains and Meaning in Crested Butte

Ben TheyerlAugust 28, 2023

Even for the US Postal Service, delivering mail to the end of the road at 9,000 feet is a challenge. Home delivery is out of the question: in Crested Butte, Colorado, you need a PO box, no matter who you are. As a consequence, a trip to pick up packages at the Post Office is something you make a day out of, and each member of the disparate factions that make up life in our...

Feature News

Sophia Laukli Returns to Lysebotn Opp Hill Climb for Second Podium Finish

Ben TheyerlAugust 6, 2023

This coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. Learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award—or about supporting FasterSkier coverage—by contacting info@fasterskier.com. 7.5 kilometers, 27 hairpin turns, up a fjord. For the better part of two decades, the climb up the Lysebotn Opp has marked the high point, figurative and literal, of cross-country skiing’s summer calendar. Last year, that point was...

Community Feature News

Tradition and Transformation: The Birkie Plans its 50th Anniversary

Ben TheyerlJune 27, 2023

Tony Wise could see 10,000 years at once. The last ice age had sent a glacier down over Wisconsin, and then tore it back. In the process, the landscape and lilt of a place emerged. Deep-pocketed kettles, ridges, gentle and subtle rolling hills, all draped in the needly green of the pines. Gaze at it, and time didn’t seem like something that moved forward, but instead danced within the bounds of a whole epoch. A...

Community Feature News

The Coach with the Voice: Conversations with Chad Salmela

Ben TheyerlJune 2, 2023

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...

Feature News Regional / Local

Starting out on the St. Croix: What High School Skiing Taught Jessie Diggins

Ben TheyerlMay 17, 2023

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...

Feature News World Cup

Diggins, Ketterson, and Loppet Foundation Promote Minneapolis World Cup, “We are here to do this with joy.”

Ben TheyerlMay 8, 2023

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...

Feature News

Hailey Swirbul Retires Having Achieved Loftiest Goal: “I Love that I Can Always Nordic Ski”

Ben TheyerlApril 19, 2023

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...

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