Ben Theyerl – Page 2 – FasterSkier.com

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...

Feature News

Where Do All the Fluoros Go? The Ins and Outs of Skiing’s PFAs Problem.

Ben TheyerlApril 13, 2023

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...

Community Feature News World Cup

The Loppet Looks Ahead: How Minneapolis is Preparing to Host a World Cup

Ben TheyerlMarch 31, 2023

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...

Feature News World Cup

Moa Ilar’s Sacrifice Saves a Season: Maja Dahlqvist Wins Crystal Globe

Ben TheyerlMarch 25, 2023

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...

Feature News World Cup

World Champions Dominate Team Sprints as Crystal Globe Race Looms

Ben TheyerlMarch 24, 2023

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...

News

Cold Racing, Warm Spirits: Junior Nationals Returns to Fairbanks, Alaska

Ben TheyerlMarch 22, 2023

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...

Feature News World Cup

Skistad Wins Again: Crystal Globe Race In Focus Under Tallinn’s Lights

Ben TheyerlMarch 21, 2023

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...

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