Take a moment to visualize some iconic head-to-head finishes from recent global championships: Klæbo vs. Bolshunov in the 50 k, Oberstdorf, 2021; Nilsson vs. Johaug in the relay, Seefeld, 2019; Schumacher vs. Terentev in the relay, Lahti, 2019; Diggins vs. history in, well, you know, PyeongChang, 2018. What do these races have in common, besides drama, high-level skiing, and triumph and tragedy in equal measure? All of them feature a final downhill back into the...
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...
Ski & Snowboard Club Vail alumnus is working for Global Athlete to increase athlete-voice By Ryan Sederquist, Vail Daily News January 28, 2022 Two-time Olympian Noah Hoffman’s life is busier now than it ever was during his 10-year U.S. Nordic ski team career. The soon-to-be Brown graduate — he’ll have an economics degree by May — has thrown himself into athlete activism since his retirement in 2018. Hoffman started in the anti-doping world before becoming...
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...
By Kristen Gowdy | Jan. 31, 2022, 6:02 p.m. (ET) COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO – Following a stellar world championships performance that saw Team USA earn 13 medals in Para Nordic disciplines, U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing today announced the six women, seven men and one guide who have been nominated to compete at the Paralympic Games Beijing 2022 in March. Veteran athletes will lead the way in Beijing as Team USA looks to build on the 16...
The Planica World Cup cancellations this month brought the skiing world to the perilous edge of what it feared most, but hoped wouldn’t happen – the central focus of this ski season, and the sport’s biggest moment, the Olympics – affected by the Omicron COVID-19 variant. Over the last week in the Italian Alps, the sport went over that edge. This Olympics, as with everything in the world right now, will have to deal with...
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...
PARK CITY, UTAH (January 19, 2022) — USA Nordic Sport announced today its nominations for the U.S. Olympic Nordic Combined Team that will represent Team USA at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022. Nominations are to be confirmed by the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee when it formally announces the U.S. Olympic Team. Athletes to Watch The team will be headlined by three-time Olympian Taylor Fletcher, who looks for his first Olympic podium. Fletcher’s top finishes at the Olympics include...
The season’s biggest races start in less than a month at a venue that is by all accounts well-designed, but also has yet to host an official FIS race. Here’s some of what is currently known about the National Cross-Country Skiing Centre in Zhangjiakou, 100-plus miles northwest of Beijing in the Hebei province of China. The Courses The races will be held at altitude. The stadium is located at an elevation of roughly 1,650 meters...
CANMORE (January 13, 2022) – Nordiq Canada and the Canadian Olympic Committee have announced the four women and three men who will form Canada’s cross-country skiing team nominated to compete at Beijing 2022. Two Olympic veterans will lead a new generation of cross-country skiers loaded with potential into the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. The athletes nominated are: Dahria Beatty (Whitehorse, Yukon) Cendrine Browne (Saint-Jérôme, Que.) Antoine Cyr (Gatineau, Que.) Laura Leclair (Chelsea, Que.) Olivier Léveillé...
Here’s a quick and non-exhaustive look at some recent news in the world of nordic sports. World Cup Cancellation in Les Rousses, FRA and Planica, SLO Earlier this week, the FIS announced the cancellation of the final World Cup stop before the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, which were scheduled for the 21st to 23rd of January in Planica, Slovenia. This news arrives a week after the cancellation of the Les Rousses, France mini tour,...
It’s always tough to make the Olympic team. It got tougher this year, due to smaller quotas for all nations interacting with some math that is disadvantageous to the American men. If you just want the executive summary of this article, here it is: The maximum team size, for any nation’s nordic team for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, is eight athletes per gender. If the Games started tomorrow, the Americans would be able to...
It’s been a while. This country’s last races on the SuperTour, the highest level of domestic competition, occurred in Cable, Wisconsin, in February 2020 in connection with that year’s American Birkebeiner. Classic sprints were held on the Wednesday before Birkie weekend. (SuperTour points were likely also awarded for the Birkie marathon races a few days later.) Gus Schumacher won the men’s final; Nichole Bathe and Kaitlynn Miller were on the podium for the women. Schumacher...
Want to know how to follow all the action this weekend, domestically and abroad? We’ve got you covered. Times for World Cup races are listed in local time and Eastern Standard Time, to help you calculate the time change. (We will of course publish articles on the races after they finish; this is just to help you get your fix of live coverage.) Broadcast links for the World Cup races are as follows. Both of...
Written in collaboration by Gavin Kentch and Rachel Bachman Perkins. We’re excited to announce some additions and changes to the FasterSkier staff as we approach the next World Cup season. Read on for more. First, after many quality years on the team, Jason Albert has moved on from the managing editor position. He now writes about wider skis, higher elevations, and deeper snow as the editor over at WildSnow, a backcountry ski publication; we...
Broadcast Updates: We have a quick update to the information we published last week regarding cross country broadcast schedules from Tom Horrocks, Communications Manager for the Davis U.S. Cross Country Ski Team. After finalizing schedules, NBC will have all World Cup events available for streaming through their PeacockTV platform. As mentioned in the first post, there is also a new streaming platform, Ski and Snowboard Live, which is owned by the production company InFront. This...
Kicking off her second year as assistant coach at the College of St. Scholastica (CSS) in Duluth, MN, Kristen Bourne was recently named one of ten recipients of the Women’s Sports Foundation VanDerveer Fellowship. The program, named for revered Stanford University Basketball coach, Tara VanDerveer, aims to increase representation of women in coaching at the collegiate level through the development of the rising generation. This is the first time that the award has been granted...
FasterSkier often publishes long profiles of athletes. This is not that article. Instead, please enjoy precisely 22 words about each of the 21 athletes currently on the U.S. Ski Team in this extremely brief, but numerically pleasing, preview of the 2021/2022 season. Athletes are presented alphabetically within each team, with age as of this season’s first World Cup race. All photos are screenshots from the current USST roster site. Any evocation of a certain song by...
We’re almost as old as the SNS Pilot binding system: FasterSkier turns 20 years old this season. The site went live on February 1, 2002, a week before the Winter Olympics began in the Salt Lake City backyard of site founders Torbjorn Karlsen and Cory Smith. While the first few months worth of coverage has been lost to the sands of time, or at least to the ravages of our CMS system (2002 Olympics coverage...
The World Cup season is around the corner, and it’s adding a new stop. Already the site of the annual Transjurassienne ski marathon and recent host of the nordic combined and ski jumping events at the Youth Olympic Games in 2020, Les Rousses, France is ready to put on the country’s first cross-country World Cup since 2016. As stated in a FIS press release, recently, the FIS cross-country World Cup team met up at the...