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. In part one of our interview with U.S. coach, Matt Whitcomb, about Bend spring training camp he told us about training regimens and the team building approach. In part II, Whitcomb talks more...
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. May 4th through the 17th marked the return to the unofficial start of serious cross-country ski training for Team USA with their annual return to Bend, Oregon for their spring camp held at...
Asked for a reflection on the 2023-24 World Cup season, US Ski Team Head Coach Matt Whitcomb pointed straight towards one place; Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a sunny February day, filled to the brim with 20,000 people cheering loud and clear. “We often talk about athletes peaking for big events,” he said. “But I’d never considered that our American ski culture could peak for an event.” The specific dynamics between performance and...
CANMORE, ALBERTA — The World Cup circuit, cross-country skiing’s top level of racing, has officially finished its visit to Canmore, and now heads to Minneapolis for the first events in the U.S. in more than two decades. A number of teams are on a direct, early morning flight Wednesday from Calgary to Minneapolis, while others are taking an extra day in Canmore and waiting to travel until Thursday. The events in Minneapolis are sure to...
Watching the Stifel U.S. Ski Team during the first half of the 2023-24 World Cup season has, at points, been a sublime experience. That feeling of overwhelming exhilaration when looking out from the mountain top has been something literal for American athletes on top of podiums—and literal Alpes too—as they’ve traveled week-to-week, race-to-race, across Europe this winter. From Jessie Diggins’ Overall World Cup lead and Tour de Ski win, to career firsts way into her...
PLANICA, SLOVENIA — Anyone who knows Rosie Brennan, and the ups and downs of her professional cross-country ski racing career, can relate to her mother’s experience at the World Championships here. Walking among the crowds in U.S.-themed clothing, Wiggy Brennan heard the same thing, over and over, from European fans: “We love Jessie Diggins!” — a reference to Rosie Brennan’s gold-medal winning teammate. “And I say, ‘Okay. But what about Rosie?’” Wiggy said. That question...
This World Cup 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. On the final day of a World Championships defined by new highs in terms of results for the United States, Rosie Brennan (USA) delivered a performance that reiterated that—for Brennan and her...
PLANICA, SLOVENIA — From the stadium at this Slovenian ski venue, Wiggy Brennan watched on the jumbotron as her daughter, Rosie Brennan, raced with the lead pack in Saturday’s World Championships skiathlon race. Brennan, who trains with Anchorage’s Alaska Pacific University team, was feeling good and gunning for a medal against the best in the world. It’s easy to pick her out, Wiggy said, with her bright orange Rossignol skis. Then, someone crashed. “And I’m...
This World Cup 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. PLANICA, SLOVENIA – A year ago, Canadian cross-country skier Graham Ritchie had reached the pinnacle of his sport: He was competing at the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. His parents? They...
Convened for the first time since the pandemic, USSS’s biennial coaches National Coaches’ Symposium brings focus to US Skiing’s progress, and highlights the ever-evolving nature of the sport. Last held in 2019, the US Ski and Snowboard’s National Coaches’ Symposium has traditionally provided insight into program priorities and training philosophies of those coaches working directly with the US Ski Team. With in-person conventions having been interrupted by the Covid pandemic, this season’s re-convening of the...
Matt Whitcomb has been a staple of the U.S. Ski Team coaching staff for a decade, seeing it through some of its most successful years. We hear from him about the coaching lifestyle, equal distance racing and other topics in another episode that we took a litttttle too long to post. You can email us at devon@fasterskier.com and nat@fasterskier.com.
If it’s August, it must be time to ski. Head Coach Matt Whitcomb and roughly half the men on the U.S. Ski Team, accompanied by a couple of well-known distaff guests, have spent the last week on snow in the Torsby Ski Tunnel in southwest Sweden. They raced in the nearby Inge Bråten Memorial rollerski race earlier today, and will compete in the Toppidrettsveka rollerski series in Norway starting on Thursday. It’s a multi-stage Scandinavian...
While it’s difficult to get exact numbers, the general distribution of coaches and service staff on the World Cup level is largely male dominated. The recently announced Trail to Gold Fellowship aims to help change that. Following the publication of the Trail to Gold book in November of 2021, members of the book committee began discussing how to use the net proceeds generated by book sales. After bouncing around various proposals, they settled on the...
In most sports, the question of whether men and women would compete on equal playing fields, so to speak, was answered long ago. While gender inequalities remain- a recent decision by the IOC to maintain the exclusion of Women’s Nordic Combined from the Olympics comes to mind- the sport of cross-country skiing will now be joining the list of those in which competition is equal for men and women. In a press release issued on...
Believe it or not, it is mid-May. For those following a traditional cross-country calendar, this means the start of a new training year, building toward the 2022/2023 competition season. And, for many of the top American athletes, this means it’s time to make an annual pilgrimage to Bend, Oregon for the on-snow camp of the season at the Mt. Bachelor Nordic Center. The weather gods were kind to the camp attendees, with nearly a foot...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and the 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 the last hurrah, folks! The World Cup Finals kicked off in Falun, Sweden today with a classic sprint. While the season has been a wild ride for many reasons...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and the 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. Eleven years ago to the day, racing the 30-kilometer mass start skate, a 22-year-old Therese Johaug won her first individual World Championship gold medal in a breakout performance at...
ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — Jessie Diggins’ silver medal, the best-ever individual Olympic finish by an American woman, is what most people will remember from Sunday’s Games-ending cross-country ski race. Here’s why you should remember Rosie Brennan, too. Brennan, 33, may lack Diggins’ magazine covers and national endorsement deals. But she performed at ever-so-close to the same level in Beijing, and came heartbreakingly close to the medals. First, there was Brennan’s fourth place in the Games-opening individual...
This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and the 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. There were a number of stories to unpack during the men’s 50-kilometer mass start free, which was changed last minute to 28 k due to extreme weather conditions in Zhangjiakou....
ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — The 28 kilometers that Alexander Bolshunov raced Saturday was only enough to take him just past the halfway point of the race he’d entered at the Winter Olympics. But Bolshunov, who competes for Russia, is still going home with the gold medal. That development is the result of a decision by race organizers to shorten the Olympics’ iconic 50-kilometer marathon event in the face of brutal wind and cold. But they’re now...