Holly Brooks is no ordinary story. She grew up in Seattle (“towards the end of the Seattle grunge scene”) and attended a small alternative school with classmates who smoked, worshipped Courtney Love, and thought nordic skiing was the name of a Swedish rock band. Her own high school had few sports, so she played soccer and ran track for a larger school that was nearby. When she first started skiing, it was with her family, who would...
A Midwest native and avid mountain biker, Garrott Kuzzy is as passionate about the outdoors as he is about nordic training and racing. Starting as a ski jumper and nordic combined athlete, his love of the cross country aspect of the sport won over. Early on he was exposed to the real world of nordic by his dad, Jim, who was a Worldloppet Master and took his young son first to watch and later to...
Ben Koons has been New Zealand’s fastest nordic skier for quite some time. Born and raised in Dunedin, on the South Island, he grew up participating in a variety of sports but only cross country skied a handful of times. His family moved to Maine when Ben was fourteen and he started his freshman year as a hockey player at Messalonskee High School. Soon afterward he switched to nordic skiing, found he had an aptitude for the...
After proving her talent as a junior racer, Rebecca Dussault hung up her skis for several years between 1999 and 2003 in order to focus on her family. After returning to racing in 2004 she found that she still had the talent, love for the sport, and a mind for the competition. Since then she has set her focus on national and international titles – not only in nordic skiing but also in winter and summer...
As a three-sport athlete at Whitman College, Laura Valaas earned four All-American titles in Nordic skiing as well as five podium finishes and three more top-ten finishes in the National Collegiate Cycling Championships. As if that wasn’t enough, Laura also ran cross country in the fall. She graduated Whitman in 2006 with magana cum laude honors and a BA in Applied Mathematics. In the year following, Laura made herself very well known on the national and...