World Cup cross-country skiing

No One Lives Here,” They Said. Then 10,000 Plus Fans Showed Up in Lake Placid

Matthew VoisinMarch 22, 2026

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...

Feature World Cup

Glitter, Knitting, and a Phone Call from Bill Koch: The U.S. Ski Team Is Ready for Lake Placid

Matthew VoisinMarch 19, 2026

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...

Feature World Cup

Jessie Diggins Teaches Us How to Endure

Timothy DonahueMarch 19, 2026

This Sunday, a lesser-heralded chapter of American history will close when Jessie Diggins enters her final World Cup event. She will leave the sport at the absolute top of her game, for the fourth time as the overall Crystal Globe winner, having slogged it out over a season that began the day after Thanksgiving above the Arctic Circle in Finland and will end 33 races later right here in Lake Placid, NY. She is the...

Feature World Cup

Evensen Stuns Drammen as Klaebo and Ogden Crash Out of Semifinals

Matthew VoisinMarch 12, 2026

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 greatest cross-country skier in history was lying on the snow, his arms wrapped over his face, his hands holding the back of his head, and the city of Drammen — where...

Feature World Cup

Sundling Seizes Drammen, Denying Skistad on Home Snow

Matthew VoisinMarch 12, 2026

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 snow was trucked in, the rock band was playing near the finish, and Norwegian children cheered from second-story windows along the course. On a rare midweek World Cup race day in...

Feature Regional / Local World Cup

Colin Rodgers and the Culture of SMS T2

Matthew VoisinMarch 11, 2026

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. The first time I saw Colin Rodgers, he was climbing onto a podium in the basement of a hotel in Biwabik, Minnesota. I honestly can’t remember the name of the hotel, but I can remember the rooms, the enormous lobby complete with an indoor minigolf course, and the basement...

Feature Olympics US Ski Team World Cup

Chris Hecker and the Moment the Sun Came Out

Matthew VoisinFebruary 26, 2026

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. If you are a parent or coach and have been responsible for waxing skis for an important race — a state championship, a Junior National Qualifier — you know how stressful that can be. Now imagine it’s the morning of the Team Sprint at the Olympics, and you are...

Feature Olympics

Hailey Swirbul and the Experiment of Returning

Matthew VoisinFebruary 9, 2026

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. When Hailey Swirbul logged onto a Zoom call from Italy last Monday, she was already living inside uncertainty. “I’m in Livigno right now,” she said. “Yeah — the higher one.” The U.S. team held two pre-Olympic altitude...

Fast Tracks Olympics

Fast Tracks: IOC – Olympic Women’s Skiathlon – Podium Press Conference

FasterSkierFebruary 7, 2026

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. At the Olympic Women’s Skiathlon podium press conference in Val di Fiemme, the three medalists provided insight into their performances, discussing equipment choices, team dynamics, and the mental preparation that shaped one of the Games’ defining...

Feature Olympics

Karlsson Wins Gold as Diggins’ Freestyle Signals What’s Still Possible

Matthew VoisinFebruary 7, 2026

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 — The snow in the Tesero Cross-Country Ski Stadium sat in that uneasy middle ground—soft, glazed, and ready to decide races in small, brutal ways. It sat like the snow of March more than...

Feature Olympics The Devon Kershaw Show

The Devon Kershaw Show: A Swedish rivalry and Olympic preview with Expressen

Nathaniel HerzFebruary 6, 2026

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. The bad news? Devon is indisposed and isn’t here for the Olympic preview podcast. As a consolation: We have a great guest in Philip Gadd, a sports reporter with the Swedish tabloid Expressen. Philip takes us through his new podcast about Frida Karlsson and Ebba Andersson’s rivalry, the...

Feature Olympics

The Long Way In: Zak Ketterson and the Patience It Took to Reach the Olympics

Matthew VoisinFebruary 5, 2026

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...

Feature Olympics

Lauren Jortberg and the Long Way Around to the Olympics

Matthew VoisinJanuary 29, 2026

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. By the time Lauren Jortberg made the U.S. Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team, the achievement arrived not as a burst of disbelief or relief, but as something quieter and stranger: a moment that required processing. “It is a lot to take in,” she said, speaking from Seefeld, Austria in the...

Feature World Cup

Matintalo First, Diggins Second: A Classic 20 K Test Before the Olympics

Matthew VoisinJanuary 25, 2026

This coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence 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 sky above the Goms Nordic Centre on Sunday morning had the washed-out look of winter at altitude — pale and reflective. Snow had fallen overnight —...

Feature World Cup

Olympic Preview, Sort Of—USA Third in Goms Team Sprint

John TeafordJanuary 23, 2026

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. For the skiing stars of Norway, World Cup victories are commonplace—almost expected. For the skiers of most other nations, any World Cup podium appearance is a career-defining event. That said, some of...

Feature World Cup

Goms Wasn’t the Answer — It Was the Test

Matthew VoisinJanuary 23, 2026

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 World Cup races that arrive like answers, and others that arrive like mirrors. The women’s freestyle Team Sprint in Goms belonged firmly to the second category — not because the...

Feature US Ski Team

Zanden McMullen’s Closing Argument

Matthew VoisinJanuary 16, 2026

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. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in before a decisive weekend—not the calm that follows certainty, but the stillness that comes when outcomes are no longer yours to predict. Zanden McMullen arrived in Oberhof, Germany, this week carrying that quiet with him. Period Three of the World...

Feature Tour de Ski World Cup

The Day American Skiing Aligned

Matthew VoisinJanuary 6, 2026

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...

Feature The Devon Kershaw Show

The Devon Kershaw Show: Slugging it out in Davos with guest Bill McKibben

Nathaniel HerzDecember 15, 2025

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. Climate activist and author Bill McKibben joins the show this week to recap some surprising results in Davos, including standout performances from a pair of Vermonters. We’re hoping to land some interviews before the Tour de Ski kicks off, and we’ll be back with more recaps once racing resumes....

Feature World Cup

Two Degrees, One Dream: How a Future Teacher Found Her Way to the World Cup

Matthew VoisinDecember 10, 2025

The Hill That Got Easier On an ordinary winter afternoon in Fairbanks, before NCAA titles and World Cup bibs and FIS profiles, there was just a loop—eight hundred meters of snow and one long, unforgiving hill. Middle-school Kendall Kramer skied it after class, day after day, with her dad. Birch Hill. Blue Loop. One big climb, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow. What changed was how it felt. “We would just go for, like, 30...

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