Feature – Page 42 – FasterSkier

From Athlete to Technical Delegate: An Interview with Annie Pokorny

Rachel PerkinsMarch 8, 2022

Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day, which celebrates “the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women.” Simultaneously, International Women’s Day is a call to action, recognizing the disparity and challenges women face for a variety of reasons in different realms of society, and seeking change. While the American women’s team has put together an ever-growing highlight reel on the race course, cross country skiing, like most sports, remains male dominated when it comes...

Community Feature Juniors Racing

Plain Valley Nordic: The Little Team that Could

FasterSkierMarch 7, 2022

As the 2022 Junior National Championships kick off, we’re featuring a small team from the Pacific Northwest who has sent eleven athletes to Minneapolis, MN, including the author of this story. To follow JN’s, you can view a livestream of races on the National Nordic Foundation (NNF) Facebook page, and find live results on SuperiorTiming.com. By Isabel Menna In March of 2021, in the tiny resort town of Jackson, Wyoming, the Intermountain Division Junior National...

Feature News Olympics

FasterSkier Needs Your Help: Consider a Voluntary Subscription

FasterSkierMarch 1, 2022

As the 2022 Olympic Winter Games draw to a close – we hope you’ve been enjoying our coverage – we need your help. FasterSkier is celebrating its 20th year and we are committed to doing what we do best in the years ahead. That means publishing robust journalism and real-time news about all things cross-country skiing. That means bringing international racing to life with athlete interviews, podcasts, high-quality photos and in-depth analysis. That means helping...

Community Feature Olympics Racing

Inside the hardest race of Diggins’ life: a unique post-30 k interview with FasterSkier in Zhangjiakou

Rachel PerkinsMarch 1, 2022

On February 20th, Jessie Diggins made Olympic history yet again, taking second in the 30 k mass start skate to round out the colors of her medal collection. Gold in the freestyle team sprint in 2018, silver in the 30 k skate, and bronze in the individual skate sprint. Now thirty years old, Diggins is the most successful American cross country skier in Olympic history. She has spent over a decade rising to the top...

Community Feature General News Product News Resources Waxing

Environmental consciousness without performance compromise: the MountainFLOW Eco Wax team takes on the Birkie

Rachel PerkinsFebruary 23, 2022

A team of familiar faces is soon headed to the American Birkebeiner, and rumor has it, their race suits will be something to behold. Spearheaded by brand ambassador Simi Hamilton, the team of Sophie Hamilton (Caldwell), Sadie Maubet-Bjornsen, Liz Stephen, Matt Gelso, Sylvan Ellefson, and Erik Bjornsen will be racing as members of the mountainFLOW Eco Wax team. Based in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, where Hamilton grew up, mountainFLOW Eco Wax is the...

Community Feature General News

Among the oldest races in American cross country skiing, the 2022 Stowe Derby adds to its legend

Ben TheyerlFebruary 22, 2022

A pair of American skiing pioneers skied up Mt. Mansfield, Vermont in 1946, skied down to settle a bet, and in the process created a race that’s remained true to the individual and communal spirit that sustains nordic skiing to this day. At one point in time, skiing was simply a way to get from point A to point B. Take stock of humans gliding on snow at this moment in 2022, though, and it can...

Community Feature Olympics Racing

Alaska physical therapist is one of USST’s secret weapons in Beijing

Nathaniel HerzFebruary 21, 2022

ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — Just about everyone involved with the U.S. Ski Team has a story about physiotherapist Zuzana Rogers fixing some weird corner of their body. “I had a dislocated cuboid bone, and she diagnosed it over Skype and essentially talked me through repositioning it, and I was better,” said Holly Brooks, the retired Olympic cross-country skier from Alaska. “It was insane.” Eli Brown, one of the team’s ski technicians, thought he had an Achilles...

Community Feature News Olympics Racing

Rosie Brennan won’t take home medals from Beijing. She still helped change U.S. cross-country skiing.

Nathaniel HerzFebruary 20, 2022

ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — Jessie Diggins’ silver medal, the best-ever individual Olympic finish by an American woman, is what most people will remember from Sunday’s Games-ending cross-country ski race. Here’s why you should remember Rosie Brennan, too. Brennan, 33, may lack Diggins’ magazine covers and national endorsement deals. But she performed at ever-so-close to the same level in Beijing, and came heartbreakingly close to the medals. First, there was Brennan’s fourth place in the Games-opening individual...

Community Feature News Olympics Racing

The Chinese Ski Team’s Path to Beijing (Part 3)

Pasha KahnFebruary 18, 2022

This is the final installment of a three-part series on the development of the Chinese ski program. Click here to read part 1 and part 2. Part 3: Olympic Hopes and Misgivings in Norway For the Chinese cross country ski team, the 2022 Beijing Olympics opened with a blaze when Dinigeer Yilamujiang was selected to co-light the Olympic flame. It was an enormous honor for the twenty year old cross country skier from Altai, China...

Community Feature Olympics Racing

In harsh Olympic glare, Gus Schumacher demonstrates how to struggle with grace

Nathaniel HerzFebruary 14, 2022

ZHANGJIAKOU, CHN — Imagine being 21 years old. You’re in a foreign country, 4,000 miles from your family, where you can’t really socialize. Thousands of people are scrutinizing your job performance. Your job performance is not meeting their expectations, nor is it meeting yours. Reporters are asking for an explanation, and you don’t really have one. Welcome to U.S. cross-country skier Gus Schumacher’s world at the Beijing Olympics. Schumacher, who’s seen as America’s Next Great Hope...

Community Feature General News

The Chinese Ski Team’s Path to Beijing (Part 2)

Pasha KahnFebruary 13, 2022

You can find the introduction to this three-part series on the development of the Chinese ski program here. Creating a Generation of Skiers China, pursuing Olympic medals on home snow, signed deals in 2018 to train Chinese skiers in Norway and Finland. The first hurdle would be filling these programs with potential skiers. To that end, a talent building program was initiated and young professional athletes in the second tier of rowing, kayaking, and running...

Community Feature News Olympics Racing

Athletes weigh in on NY Times statement that Diggins looks like a “sprite” relative to her competition

Rachel PerkinsFebruary 11, 2022

On February 8th, cross country skiing made the New York Times headlines as Jessie Diggins collected an historic bronze medal in the 1.5-kilometer freestyle sprint. No American woman had ever won an individual medal in cross country skiing, and no American cross country skier of either gender had won multiple Olympic medals. Diggins had earned gold in 2018 racing the freestyle team sprint with partner, and current NBC analyst, Kikkan Randall. Normally, attention given to...

Feature

At the Olympics, women cross-country ski race half as far as men. But that could be changing.

Nathaniel HerzFebruary 7, 2022

Female American and Swedish cross-country skiers are pushing to race equal distances as men. But some of the sport’s star women remain unconvinced. ZHIANGJIAKOU, CHINA — At the end of her first-ever competition at the Winter Olympics — a 15-kilometer effort that left her sprawled on the ground gasping for breath — Julia Kern contemplated the idea of racing twice as far. “I personally like the shorter distances,” said Kern, a rising American star. But,...

Community Feature General News

The Chinese Ski Team’s Path to Beijing (Part 1)

Pasha KahnFebruary 7, 2022

Salmon for Skiing Over the last four years China has undertaken perhaps the grandest experiment in cross country skiing history: can hundreds of athletes cherry picked from other sports and given seemingly unlimited resources be turned into Olympic medalists in nordic events? Chinese athletes have never medaled in any of the nordic disciplines, and their teams head into the Olympics as the darkest of dark horses. Success, in the form of medals, is key to...

Community Feature General News Olympics

On the Ground Report: A Beijing Olympic Winter Games Preview

Nathaniel HerzFebruary 4, 2022

ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — After months of headlines about coronavirus tests, travel logistics and geopolitics, Beijing’s Olympic cross-country skiing venue, on the eve of its first competition Saturday, has emphatically changed the subject. To the winds of Zhangjiakou. Icy gusts billowed athletes’ training bibs, filled the resort town’s immaculately groomed ski tracks with dry, squeaky powder and generally consumed everyone’s attention Friday — from the team members who shielded their faces with buffs and layers of...

Community Feature News

The Enigma of Zhangjiakou and the Kuyangshu Nordic Center

Pasha KahnFebruary 3, 2022

The ski trails at the Zhangjiakou Olympic venue – completed during the pandemic – will be seen with fresh eyes for most athletes and service staff as they arrive ahead of the 2022 Games. For service teams that often prepare years in advance of an Olympics, the uncertainty surrounding Zhangjiakou, from its weather to its snow, is a new phenomena. What is certain is that climatically, there is the potential for some very interesting conditions. ...

Feature General News Olympics Racing

From the Archives: Norway Beats Italy in Olympic Relay in Soldier Hollow (February 2002)

Gavin KentchFebruary 1, 2022

This humble website went live twenty years ago today. (How long ago was that? Pretty long, judging from this recent Buzzfeed listicle.) As a later retrospective on this site would explain, “FasterSkier was founded in January 2002 by Torbjœrn Karlsen, Cory Smith and Erik Stange. FasterSkier.com was launched on February 1, 2002 and quickly grew to become one of the most trusted sources for Cross-Country skiing information in the United States … .” The ur-articles...

Community Feature News

Insights From a Pre-Olympic Media Conference with Jessie Diggins

Rachel PerkinsJanuary 28, 2022

As January draws to a close, energy, excitement, and perhaps anxiety surrounding the rapidly approaching 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing is steadily building. In an effort to better manage her time and energy heading into these Games, Jessie Diggins offered a media conference facilitated by U.S. Ski & Snowboard cross country communications manager Tom Horrocks to answer questions about her preparation, outlook, and plans for the remainder of the time before the team heads to...

Feature General News Olympics Racing

From the Archives: Six Big Problems with the Beijing 2022 Olympic Bid (June 2015)

Gavin KentchJanuary 26, 2022

The following opinion article was originally published on FasterSkier on June 20, 2015. It was written by Chelsea Little, who contributed sterling ski reporting to this site for nearly a decade before ultimately retiring from nordic ski journalism, though not from nordic skiing. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University outside of Vancouver, B.C., where her research interests focus on community and meta-ecosystem ecology. The article was published roughly...

Community Feature News

Unstoppable: Beckie Scott and Spirit North

Ella HallJanuary 24, 2022

Three-time Olympian, gold and silver medalist, long-time chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Athlete committee, Officer of the Order of Canada, company founder and CEO, the list of Beckie Scott’s achievements is both lengthy and remarkable, and those included here only scratches the surface. In the nordic world specifically, Scott made history as the first North American woman to earn a medal at the Olympics in cross-country skiing. She has also been a long-time advocate...

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