FasterSkier Feature – FasterSkier

The Cost of Being the Best: Norway Finally Locks In Its Olympic Squad

Matthew VoisinJanuary 20, 2026

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. Norway’s greatest competitive advantage in cross-country skiing has always been depth. In an Olympic selection season, that depth becomes a headache. When the federation gathered to finalize its 2026 team, the conversation was not about who belonged at the Games — those results and calculus had been logged. It was...

Feature Olympics

Objective, Discretionary, Democratic: Inside the Quiet Machinery of Olympic Selection

Matthew VoisinJanuary 16, 2026

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 persistent fantasy about Olympic selection: that somewhere, behind a closed door or a spreadsheet or a stopwatch, a single correct answer exists. That if you line up the results cleanly enough—World Cups here, Nationals there—the truth will announce itself. The fastest will go. The rest will...

Feature US Ski Team

Zanden McMullen’s Closing Argument

Matthew VoisinJanuary 16, 2026

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...

Collegiate Feature US Ski Team

“You Can’t Live Nervous”

Matthew VoisinDecember 22, 2025

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...

Feature US Ski Team

The U.S. Ski Team Star You Won’t See on Snow This Weekend

Matthew VoisinDecember 4, 2025

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...

Feature SuperTour US Ski Team

Novie McCabe’s Winding Trail to the Olympic-Season Start Line

Matthew VoisinDecember 3, 2025

When Novie McCabe spoke with FasterSkier early last month, she was looking out the window of her place in Anchorage, waiting for winter to finally take hold. “We’re patiently waiting on snow,” she said. “But today might be the day.“ Outside, the ground was still in its in-between phase—too brown for grooming, just white enough that fish-scale skis could work if you were stubborn and optimistic about it. Alaska in November often asks skiers to...

US Ski Team

Three Frames: Jessie Diggins and the Art of What Endures

Matthew VoisinNovember 22, 2025

The Zoom room filled slowly, one journalist after another blinking into existence in a grid of small rectangles. Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Helsinki, Colorado, New York — not just the coordinates of U.S. skiing scattered across time zones, but also NPR, NBC, and European reporters, over 60 media outlets, all converging on a November morning. Jessie Diggins appeared in the largest box, glowing as she does all the way from Muonio, Finland, where she had arrived...