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...
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. Love episodes like this? Help keep them coming. Feature stories like this one take time, access, and care to produce. If you value thoughtful storytelling and independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a Voluntary Subscriber. Your support directly fuels the work we do to cover the people, places, and moments...
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. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in before a decisive weekend—not the calm that follows certainty, but the stillness that comes when outcomes are no longer yours to predict. Zanden McMullen arrived in Oberhof, Germany, this week carrying that quiet with him. Period Three of the World...
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. The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, passed in 1978 and amended several times (most notably in 1998 and 2020), is the statute that created the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and granted National Governing Bodies (NGBs) exclusive, monopolistic, authority over Olympic sports in the United States....
Dear Cross Country Community, We are pleased to announce the Team for Period 3 of the 2025-26 World Cup season: Oberhof Sprint F Men Zach Jayne Objective 25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader Ben Ogden Objective 4th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Jack Young Objective 21st 25-26 Sprint World Cup Gus Schumacher Objective 27th 25-26 Sprint World Cup JC Schoonmaker Objective 36th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Kevin Bolger Objective 40th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Zak Ketterson ...
Finals week has a way of compressing time. Days shrink into problem sets and exams; nights stretch just long enough to make sleep negotiable. When Jack Lange logged onto Zoom from Hanover in late November, he was finishing his senior fall at Dartmouth, a mechanical engineering major balancing equations while packing for a training block at Silver Star. The snow out west wasn’t cooperating. Races were being reformatted. Nothing felt settled. That uncertainty didn’t seem...
Dear Cross Country Community, We are pleased to announce the Team for Period 2 of the 2025-26 World Cup season – the Tour de Ski: 2025-26 Tour de Ski Men Hunter Wonders Objective 25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader Ben Ogden Objective 5th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Jack Young Objective 18th 25-26 Sprint World Cup Zak Ketterson Objective 22nd 25-26 Distance World Cup Gus Schumacher Objective 28th 25-26 Distance World Cup JC Schoonmaker Discretion 27th Davos Sprint...
On Friday afternoon, as World Cup sprinters snap into their skis in Trondheim and the SuperTour fields gather in Fairbanks, one of the United States’ most electrifying young Nordic athletes will step onto an entirely different stage. Stanford University, the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Women’s Soccer Tournament, is marching toward the College Cup—and at the center of it all is a player who, in just a matter of days, will also begin her...