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. With only three weekends of racing and five races left, the 2024 World Cup Season is entering its home-stretch run, and fans of team USA are hoping that Jessie Diggins can hang on...
No frills, no guests, just Devon and Nat breaking down six races from Lahti, Finland, as the World Cup returns to Scandinavia. Two more weekends to go after this one — stick with us. Send feedback, comments and anything else at devon@fasterskier.com and nat@fasterskier.com.
MINNEAPOLIS — After Gus Schumacher’s upset win at an international cross-country ski race here last week, one of his first moves was not to celebrate at a bar, but instead, to stand in front of the crowd and talk about climate change. With hundreds listening to the panel discussion from the grandstand, Schumacher, his teammate Jessie Diggins and activist and author Bill McKibben passed a microphone back and forth. The subject, for Schumacher, is immediate...
It hasn’t always been the same race, but it has always been the American Birkebeiner. Courses have changed, directions have changed, ski techniques have changed, conditions have changed, field sizes have changed, reputations have changed. Thin snow conditions across the American Midwest even necessitated that his year’s race was not even contested on the Telemark trail between Cable and Hayward, but over five laps of a ten kilometer loop painstakingly preserved just for this event....
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. MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA: After a glorious weekend that surpassed all expectations, it’s time to look back at some of the big picture takeaways from the weekend, and to remind our audience of some things...
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. MINNEAPOLIS — Gus Schumacher, a 23-year-old from Anchorage, accomplished something Sunday that no American man had done in 40 years: he beat every single Norwegian, Swede, Finn and all other comers in an...
What a weekend. If you weren’t able to make it to Minneapolis, we had the good fortune of taping this episode of the podcast in front of a live audience at a local brewery, and we think it brings through a little of the amazing atmosphere. British skier Andrew Musgrave joined us in-person, Ben Ogden zoomed in from mono jail and a very special guest whose name ends with Schumacher joined us mid-pod. The audio...
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. Ski racing is all about time, and the magic power of the best ski racers is that they’re seemingly able to bend time the way they want it to go. Lives are lived...
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. A week ago, golfers in shirtsleeves were playing the course that abuts Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A narrow white ribbon of just-skiable snow had been preserved on the course laid out...
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. MINNEAPOLIS—The suspense and the nerves built all morning at Theodore Wirth Regional Park, where America’s cross-country skiers were set to contest their first World Cup race—the sport’s top competition circuit—in 23 years. By...
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. MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA—The World Cup in Minneapolis is ramping up today with skiers practicing on the course and the American team holding a press conference. If you’ve never been to a World Cup race...
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. MINNEAPOLIS — The last time cross-country ski racing’s most elite race circuit, the World Cup, traveled to the United States from Europe, Jessie Diggins was nine years old. At the time, in 2001,...
MINNEAPOLIS — All winter, cross-country ski race organizers in this midwest metropolis faced weather that just wouldn’t cooperate. Heading into the weekend, it had not snowed in Minneapolis in nearly a month, with daily high temperatures above freezing every single day since late January. All this as a local nonprofit, the Loppet Foundation, was set to host the first cross-country World Cup events in America in more than two decades — after a last-minute, coronavirus...
We’re back, with our fourth? Fifth? episode in the past week. It’s been a whirlwind, but we’re still here to wrap up the last day of World Cup racing in Canmore. Amazingly, Nat is posting this podcast from a moving airplane between Calgary and Toronto, with Victoria Carl and Katharina Hennig sitting a few rows up. We’ll be back with more action from Minneapolis, including a show with a live audience late Sunday afternoon at...
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. Today marked the conclusion of World Cup racing in Canmore. So far, the competition has been exciting and hard fought. The buildup to today’s races promised to mark an appropriate epilogue to the...
We’re grinding on with our third episode in four days. Hope you’re still listening. If you don’t get the hat reference, read our coverage. We’ll be back with another episode after the last race in Canmore. To keep you from podcast withdrawal later in the week, we’ll roll out some interviews we did with a couple of international athletes here. Then we’ll be back again from Minneapolis this weekend. Speaking of Minneapolis, if you’ll be...
CANMORE, Alberta: We’re three days into a six-race series of World Cup racing in North America and I’m just one guy, which means there hasn’t been time to share all the fun little stories and subplots that have been filling my notebook. I’m summarizing a few of the better ones here. Stay tuned for more notes and some feature stories after Tuesday’s final race in Canmore. If you have ideas for stories, tips or feedback...
The World Cup gave us two great races in Canmore today to start a 10-day swing through North America. Devon and Nat recap the results, and hear from a couple of special guests at the tail end of the show. We’ll be back tomorrow. Questions? Comments? nat@fasterskier.com and devon@fasterskier.com.
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 arrival of World Cup racing in North America has brought tremendous excitement to the United States and Canada. It has also brought a surprise: as the cross-country world assembled in Canmore, Alberta,...
CANMORE, ALBERTA — Abbey Zimmer and Natalie Meinert peered over a railing out onto the course at the cross-country ski center here Thursday, where dozens of the world’s best athletes were amidst their pre-race routines. The 14-year-olds had driven seven hours to Canmore with their parents from icy Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. They were there to ski on some snowy trails and for a weekend of watching racers that they normally only see on highlight reels. “We...