Dear Cross Country Community, We are pleased to announce the XC Team for Period 1 of the 2026-27 World Cup season: Ruka, FIN 10 km C & Trondheim, NOR 10 km C Men Zach Jayne Objective 25-26 Overall SuperTour Leader Gus Schumacher Objective 12th Distance World Cup 25-26 Zak Ketterson Objective 36th Distance World Cup 25-26 Ben Ogden Discretion 11th Lake Placid World Cup 10 km C Zanden McMullen Discretion 18th...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Rosie Brennan has stepped away from the World Cup, though she’s still figuring out exactly how to define the next chapter in her life. Retirement is the easy word, and in some ways, the accurate one. She is done with the World Cup. She is done with the version of...
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. Lake Placid, N.Y. — The French coaches had questions. Two days before racing began at Mount Van Hoevenberg, they were standing in Saranac Lake — 55 degrees, windy, woods in every direction...
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. Lake Placid, N.Y. — The eve of the World Cup finals at Mount Van Hoevenberg brought press conferences, sound checks that went sideways, and three American skiers who couldn’t stop making each...
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. As Jessie Diggins climbed the final hills in Lahti on Sunday, she could hear something unusual rising above the crowd noise. Scattered along the course were hand-made signs held by Finnish fans...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. This essay by Jim Galanes was written on the evening of the Olympic Men’s Classic Sprint in Val di Fiemme, when Ben Ogden won silver to become the first American man in 50 years to medal in an Olympic cross-country skiing event. It was drafted from the race course...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Ciao a tutti! Greetings from Torino, where this fatigued Olympics correspondent has retreated to recover through bike rides and repeated doses of pizza with family. I had the chance to attend the closing ceremonies — mostly as a spectator — in Verona on my trip down from the mountains. After more...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. LAGO DI TESERO, ITALY — A day before Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won his fourth straight gold medal in cross-country skiing at the Winter Olympics, a strange sight was unfolding next to the race trails in Northern Italy....
This episode was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. The highs were high and the lows were low in the Olympic team sprint in Italy, with the Ogden-Schumacher men’s team claiming silver and the Diggins-Kern women’s pair finishing out of the medals. Devon and Nat break the whole thing down. We’ll be back after Saturday’s men’s 50 k....
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped us put our Nat Herz on the ground reporting at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. PREDAZZO, ITALY — Eight years ago, on a different continent, the words “Here Comes Diggins!” by Chad Salmela vaulted American cross-country skiing into a new era. On Wednesday in Val di Fiemme, the event...
Gus Schumacher is one of the stars in U.S. cross-country skiing, and he was one of the team’s top medal hopefuls coming into the Winter Olympics in Italy. Against the same field that competes at the Games, the Alaskan won a World Cup race in Minnesota in 2024. Then, Schumacher, 25, was on the World Cup podium twice more just last month, in Switzerland. So far, though, his Olympics haven’t gone as planned, with tough...
PREDAZZO, ITALY — Ben Ogden, the U.S. cross-country skier, was ready to celebrate his historic Olympic silver Tuesday with his signature backflip off the podium. But there was a problem: He had to pee. After Ogden won the first men’s medal in cross-country skiing in a half-century, doping testers needed a urine sample. So, he did the obvious thing and “drank, like, three bottles of water, immediately,” he said. The need to relieve himself, he...
This episode was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. The one Jessie Diggins was waiting for: Nat and Devon were both on hand for the Olympic 10-kilometer freestyle and have this recap. It gets pretty heated! But in a good way. We’ll be back tomorrow after the showdown between Johannes Klaebo and Einar Hedegart in the men’s race....
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. PREDAZZO, ITALY — Ben Ogden finished his semifinal standing upright, his skis still on, lungs burning in the familiar way that meant the work had been done, but the verdict was not. He crossed the line...
Two years ago, U.S. cross-country skiing star Jessie Diggins was battling a relapse of an eating disorder — an episode that she publicly acknowledged at the time. What she didn’t share until now, though, was how close it came to derailing a year in which she won cross-country skiing’s season title and celebrated the return of the top-level World Cup circuit to the U.S., in her home city of Minneapolis. In the middle of that winter,...
This reporting costs money. Please support this coverage with a voluntary subscription (below) so FasterSkier can provide this level of access to the sport we all love year-round. On the eve of the opening event of the Olympic cross-country program, U.S. head coach Matt Whitcomb sounded equal parts energized and grounded. Speaking with FasterSkier’s Nat Herz in the mixed zone, Whitcomb touched on everything from ski exchanges and early-Games logistics to the long arc of...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. On Monday, a clear winter morning in northern Italy, Zak Ketterson skied intervals while his teammates enjoyed a point-to-point on an idyllic pre-Olympic winter day. The sun was out. The snow was good. He was working. “I did some hard intervals,” he said later. “So it was still nice...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. PREDAZZO, ITALY — The Olympics have traditionally been known as a kind of sports melting pot, where competitors from different backgrounds and countries could share meals and trade pins at tight-knight athletes’ villages. For winter sports, though, those social traditions ground to a halt at the COVID Olympics in China in...
This coverage is made possible, in part, 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 days in this sport when the numbers feel like the whole story: a time, a place, a gap. But every so often, cross-country skiing produces a day that...
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 Tour de Ski has always asked skiers to live with imperfect information. You race hard when you’re tired. You make decisions based on feelings and instincts, while coaches are screaming ‘splits.’...