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Ben Ogden

Eli Brown – The Ski Caddy

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...

Schumacher! Two Days, Two Podiums

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. Maybe the Americans really are that good . . . With the Olympic Games just around the corner, American men (lots of them!) are surging toward the front of the World Cup...

Olympic Preview, Sort Of—USA Third in Goms Team Sprint

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. For the skiing stars of Norway, World Cup victories are commonplace—almost expected. For the skiers of most other nations, any World Cup podium appearance is a career-defining event. That said, some of...

Klaebo Controls Toblach as Schumacher Anchors the Chase in Men’s 20 k Classic Pursuit

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. By mid-morning in Toblach, the cold had settled into the valley in that particular Dolomite way—dry, bright, and unforgiving. The stadium clock read 10:30 a.m., the tracks were hard-packed, and the Tour...

Schumacher Wins in Toblach as New Four-Heat 5K Format Turns the Race into a Clock-Chasing Puzzle

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 Tour de Ski has always asked skiers to live with imperfect information. You race hard when you’re tired. You make decisions based on feelings and instincts, while coaches are screaming ‘splits.’...

Stenshagen Sets the Pace in Toblach as the Men’s Tour Takes Shape

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. By the time the final seeded skier pushed through the finishing straight in Toblach, the race had already revealed what interval starts always do best: not who looks fastest, but who stays...

Fire, Ice, and Belief: Two Vermonters Deliver Under the Lights in Davos

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 lights come on early in Davos, not because they are needed, but because Davos wants them on. By mid-afternoon, the valley is already sliding toward dusk, the alpine light thinning and flattening,...

The Trial in Trondheim

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 men’s 20-kilometer Skiathlon at Granåsen never felt like an ordinary World Cup. From the moment the athletes stepped into the start pen, there was a tension in the air that didn’t match...

Klaebo’s 100th: Norwegian Sprint Cauldron Boils Over in Trondheim

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. Johannes Høsflot Klaebo’s 100th World Cup win did not arrive with the roar he’d grown used to on this course. Granåsen last March had been a cauldron—tens of thousands of fans in plastic...

Blueprinting Beliefs: Ben Ogden’s Mind, Mechanics, and the Engineering of a Community

Somewhere over the Atlantic, on a red-eye to another winter in Europe, Ben Ogden opens his laptop and stares at a grid of digital joinery. Tiny posts, miniature knee braces, angled mortises — a small timber-frame sauna, scaled down to the dimensions of an airline tray table. He sketches in precise strokes, clicking through angles and offsets, rotating the model the way he rotates race courses in his head: looking for structure, looking for flow....

From Olympian to Coach to Mentor: Patrick Weaver, the Quiet Architect of UVM’s Ski Culture

The first time you meet Patrick Weaver, you might not realize you’re talking to one of the most quietly influential coaches in American skiing. There’s no bravado, no self-promotion. Just an easy Vermont calm — a man who measures his words the same way his athletes measure their training: carefully, purposefully, with feel. On a fall morning, the UVM Nordic team threads through the mist at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, the quiet hum of rollerskis...

The Devon Kershaw Show: We’re back, baby, with Benny, for the Olympic season

Guys, the Olympic season is upon us. Athletes are getting into the sharp end of the dry-land season and waiting for snow to fall; Devon and Nat have awakened from summer hibernation and have launched the new season of the podcast. This year’s will be like nothing you’ve seen before, except with similar amounts of questionable audio production, perfunctory efforts to avoid using profanity and unkept promises of future guests. In all seriousness, we’re excited...

Kern and Ogden Top Spring National Sprints

This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers.  If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Sprint day at the Spring National Championships at Mt. Van Hoevenberg is the day when the best and the brightest showed up. Less than a week since collecting her World Cup Distance and Overall Crystal Globes, Jessie Digins (USA) arrived to lay down the day’s...

Klaebo Thrills Hometown Crowd with World Sprint Title

FasterSkier’s coverage of this week’s FIS World Championships stands as a proud tribute to American Skiing Icon Marty Hall, who (with his wife, Kathy Hall, and their A Hall Mark of Excellence Award) has generously supported our coverage of international cross-country ski events. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, please contact info@fasterskier.com. We’ll miss you, Marty.  Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (NOR) won bronze in the Individual Sprint way back in 2017 in...

A ‘huge party’ of a World Championships is ready to kick off in Norway

This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers.  If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.   TRONDHEIM — It’s back. It’s been 14 years since Norway hosted a cross-country skiing World Championships, with the 2011 event going off along Oslo trails mobbed with Scandinavian fans. The championships return to the skiing-mad nation again Thursday, with the first of six medal races,...

Technique and Durability—FasterSkier’s Ben Ogden Interview

This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers.  If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription.   As this interview gets into, I was really interested in the connection between the movement quality I saw Ben display during dryland training and the improvements in his skate technique that Devon saw on snow. What better time than a physio session to ask some...

Norway Sweeps Cogne Sprint, Schoonmaker 9th, Ogden 12th

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. It’s rumored that World Cup Sprint (and Overall) leader, Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo will return to action next week in Falun, Sweden, leaving room at the top for a host of contenders to battle for...

Edvin Anger Powers to Les Rousses Sprint Win, Schoonmaker Fifth

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. Straight after his victory in yesterday’s Norwegian National Championships, Even Northug (NOR) hopped on a plane and showed up in Les Rousses, France in time to contest his Sprint qualifier (in which he advanced...