Dear Cross Country Community, We are pleased to announce the XC Team for Period 1 of the 2026-27 World Cup season: Ruka, FIN 10 km C & Trondheim, NOR 10 km C Men Zach Jayne Objective 25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader Gus Schumacher Objective 12th Distance World Cup 25-26 Zak Ketterson Objective 36th Distance World Cup 25-26 Ben Ogden Discretion 11th Lake Placid World Cup 10 km C Zanden McMullen Discretion 18th...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. U.S. Biathlon’s board votes Wednesday on a formal operating alliance with U.S. Ski & Snowboard. Supporters call it the stability the sport has always lacked. Skeptics call it a surrender of independence. Both are working from the same set of facts. Here is what the deal actually says, and what...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. For Ben Ogden, the strangest change since taking home two medals from Milano Cortina has not been that more people started recognizing him around Vermont. He admits he is still adjusting to the newfound fame, but that part has mostly been fun. There have been school visits, community events and...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Rosie Brennan has stepped away from the World Cup, though she’s still figuring out exactly how to define the next chapter in her life. Retirement is the easy word, and in some ways, the accurate one. She is done with the World Cup. She is done with the version of...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. I was reviewing recent U.S. Ski & Snowboard Cross Country Sport Committee meeting minutes and came across an interesting note in the April 7, 2026, meeting. The following item stood out: “Rick shared the announcement of adding Para Cross Country and that there is a strong drive from the...
This episode was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Yeah…the Olympics really took it out of us. But we’ve finally rallied the troops, plus a special guest, for our last episode of the season. We recap Oslo and the Lake Placid World Cups before signing off. We’ll be out getting our last kilometers of the year, but will read...
John Caldwell, born November 28, 1928, passed away February 27 at 97 years old. John’s contribution to cross-country skiing in the United States is unquestioned. He was a 1952 Olympian in Nordic Combined. He wrote several books on cross-country skiing that became our training guidance, our bibles, in the early and mid-1970s. He was a long-time teacher and coach at The Putney School, an early U.S. Ski Team coach, and a member of the coaching...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. If you are a parent or coach and have been responsible for waxing skis for an important race — a state championship, a Junior National Qualifier — you know how stressful that can be. Now imagine it’s the morning of the Team Sprint at the Olympics, and you are...
Dear Cross Country Community, We are pleased to announce the Team for Period 4 (Falun, Lahti, Drammen, & Oslo) of the 2025-26 World Cup season: Falun Sprint F & Lahti Sprint F Men Zach Jayne Objective 25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader Ben Ogden Objective 5th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Gus Schumacher Objective 21st 25-26 Sprint World Cup Jack Young Objective 26th 25-26 Sprint World Cup JC Schoonmaker Objective 28th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Kevin Bolger ...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped us put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Megan Chacosky had just finished cleaning up from dinner when she hopped on the Zoom from the US Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team’s pre-Olympic training camp in Livigno, Italy. “Yeah, that’s okay,” she said. “I appreciate...
Gus Schumacher is one of the stars in U.S. cross-country skiing, and he was one of the team’s top medal hopefuls coming into the Winter Olympics in Italy. Against the same field that competes at the Games, the Alaskan won a World Cup race in Minnesota in 2024. Then, Schumacher, 25, was on the World Cup podium twice more just last month, in Switzerland. So far, though, his Olympics haven’t gone as planned, with tough...
PREDAZZO, ITALY — Ben Ogden, the U.S. cross-country skier, was ready to celebrate his historic Olympic silver Tuesday with his signature backflip off the podium. But there was a problem: He had to pee. After Ogden won the first men’s medal in cross-country skiing in a half-century, doping testers needed a urine sample. So, he did the obvious thing and “drank, like, three bottles of water, immediately,” he said. The need to relieve himself, he...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Tim Baucom mountain biking with his parents on the Bangtail Divide Trail in Bozeman, Montana. (Photo: Courtesy Photo) After a historic day like yesterday, there are so many possible stories, some big, some smaller, but all...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. PREDAZZO, ITALY — Particularly among the citizens of the Scandinavian nations where cross-country skiing is religion, bringing up the United States right now does not exactly elicit warm fuzzies in Europe. U.S. President Donald Trump, after all,...
Two years ago, U.S. cross-country skiing star Jessie Diggins was battling a relapse of an eating disorder — an episode that she publicly acknowledged at the time. What she didn’t share until now, though, was how close it came to derailing a year in which she won cross-country skiing’s season title and celebrated the return of the top-level World Cup circuit to the U.S., in her home city of Minneapolis. In the middle of that winter,...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. PREDAZZO, ITALY — The Olympics have traditionally been known as a kind of sports melting pot, where competitors from different backgrounds and countries could share meals and trade pins at tight-knight athletes’ villages. For winter sports, though, those social traditions ground to a halt at the COVID Olympics in China in...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. At some point before every race, there is a moment when the conversation ends. The skis are ready. All the questions have been answered. The athlete has described, more than once, how the ski felt through the camber, how it released, and how it held when needed. Their part...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. On race mornings, when the athletes are still quiet, and the stadium hasn’t yet decided what kind of day it wants to be, Eli Brown is already working through choices that won’t appear anywhere in the results sheet. Brown is a technician for the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Team, a...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A Portfolio, Not a Resume Paul Choudoir did not set out to work at the Olympic Games. He did not study engineering. He did not grow up in a wax room, nor did he apprentice under a legendary grinder with a machine humming in the background. He went to school...
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