On the Wednesday before the World Cup season opens in Ruka, Jack Young sits in a small condo, looking out at over a foot of new snow that’s been drifting down all morning. The air is much warmer today than it was before he and the U.S. Ski Team loaded onto a six-plus hour bus ride yesterday — “Muonio was friggin’ cold,” he says — and the mood is calmer, quieter, the way he wants...
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...
Somewhere over the Atlantic, on a red-eye to another winter in Europe, Ben Ogden opens his laptop and stares at a grid of digital joinery. Tiny posts, miniature knee braces, angled mortises — a small timber-frame sauna, scaled down to the dimensions of an airline tray table. He sketches in precise strokes, clicking through angles and offsets, rotating the model the way he rotates race courses in his head: looking for structure, looking for flow....