It’s like a Norwegian Hunger Games, like a Scandinavian Lord of the Flies, like Nordic skiing’s version of Survival of the Fittest. Norway just announced eight members (5 men, 3 women) of its Olympic Team for Milano-Cortina. Those eight are in, while the committee has the opportunity to choose eight more skiers (3 men, 5 women) in weeks to come. Those already chosen can relax a bit, get back to training, stop worrying about what...
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,...
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 night sprint in Davos has a way of making the sport feel louder than it usually allows itself to be. The course is short, the laps repeat, the crowd sees the same...
On most race weekends, I take my job seriously — up at 3:00 am EST, fresh coffee made, woodstove loaded, notebook out, logged on to coverage early to make sure I don’t have a technical issue. Then once the race starts, I begin looking for subtle, important moments to describe in greater detail in the race report. But there are also weekends, like this past one, when I toss my journalism hat onto the mantle...
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. There are winter mornings when a World Cup feels like a World Cup, and there are winter mornings when the sport seems to slip into its future tense. Today, in Trondheim, was the...
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...
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...
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. Okay, who else didn’t sleep last night? It felt like waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve — that fizzy, restless anticipation you can’t shake, even as an adult who should know better....
On a bright March afternoon at Dartmouth’s Oak Hill, with a soft and slow course under his skis and a band he himself had organized blasting in the stadium above, John Steel Hagenbuch approached the final climb where he learned something that would shape the early years of his career far more than any podium ever could. He had come into the NCAA Championships with the weight of a thousand private dreams — a home...
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...
On a late-October morning, Julia Kern sat in San Diego, sunlight spilling through the window after cradling her infant nephew. “He’s a cutie for sure,” she laughed. In a few short weeks, she’ll trade baby giggles for the squeak of ski pole baskets on the cold Finnish snow, but the warmth in her voice already says a lot about where she is mentally this Olympic year: grounded, grateful, and still having fun. “It’s been a...
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. Everybody will be fresh on Day 1 of the Olympic Cross Country schedule; the racing is likely to be fast and furious. The 16-day Olympic schedule is more spread out than last season’s 10-day World Championship schedule. Athletes will have the benefit of more rest...
The old season just ended. Let the new season begin . . . Ten months from now, the Olympic Winter Games are scheduled to begin in Milano-Cortina, Italy. Ten months is practically enough time to build a ski team from scratch: to cure lingering illnesses, to heal nagging injuries, to initiate new training strategies, to fix any technique foibles, even to learn new secrets for waxing and ski prep. If only Norway and Sweden would...
In a recent Instagram post (June 21, 2023), the International Ski Federation (FIS) announced that permanent changes have been made to the “equality” in race distances for men and women in both FIS sanctioned races and those races set to be staged at the upcoming Olympic Winter Games in 2026. The post included the following wording: BIG NEWS: Equal distances has taken another step, a step that involves the Olympics in Milano Cortina 2026!🙌🏼 The...