It’s been 14 years since I became an Olympian, competing as a cross country skier in the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.

Since then, it hasn’t been easy to get to the Olympics as a spectator. The Winter Games have been in Sochi, Pyeongchang and Beijing, while the summer games have been in Rio and Tokyo, with an interruption by the Covid pandemic. The Paris Games were finally an opportunity for me to attend my first Olympics as a spectator. My wife Catherine speaks fluent french and has spent lots of time in Paris, so she planned out an incredible long weekend for us, striking the perfect balance between Olympic events, Parts attractions and local flavors.

We caught the opening Ceremonies and many of the early competitions on TV, so we had a pretty good orientation and impression of the experience before arriving last Thursday night, August 1 for three days in Paris.

Public transportation was plastered with Olympic branding and volunteers to direct visitors. Our accommodation in Paris’ 9th arrondissement was located right on the cycling road race route with views up to the Sacré Coeur Basilica atop Montmartre – one of the highest points in Paris. We arrived in time for a late dinner – almost all restaurants in France have strict seating times and require reservations – and an evening storm poured rain just outside the restaurant’s open facade, bringing a welcome breeze on a hot night. Parisian steak frites, paired with a bottle of Bordeaux and a fresh side salad offered a quintessential start to the trip.

Most events start later in the day, so our aim on Friday was to discover Paris. What better place to kick things off than the Eiffel Tour? Adorned with the Olympic rings, I wanted to visit the iconic landmark on the Seine and site of the Opening Ceremonies, Beach Volleyball and finish of the triathlon and road races. I wrote my Master’s Thesis about “visitor flows” and the movements of tourists through cities. Not surprisingly, one of the first places tourists go when they arrive in a new city is the highest point. In Innsbruck, the destination I studied for my thesis, that’s the Nordkette mountain range overlooking the city below. In Paris, the highest point is the Eiffel Tower.

I was surprised that there was practically no line for the elevator to the top, so we hitched a ride and were rewarded with an Olympic panorama of Paris. The festive atmosphere of the beach volleyball match carried to the top of the Eiffel Tower. BMX racers practiced at the race track on the other side of the Seine. 3 x 3 basketball courts were surrounded by spectators. The iconic Grand Palais museum, with its vintage art deco style, hosted the fencing competitions. The Louvre, Arc de Triomphe and Notre Dame – all places I knew only from photos and textbooks – came to life amidst all the Olympic venues. I didn’t get to visit any of the famous sites during my first trip to Paris, but I’m already looking forward to my next trip when I can go inside. This trip, after all, was to celebrate the Olympic Games!

And that’s exactly how it felt: a celebration. I was a bit self-conscious before my first day in Paris, so I decided to leave my USA Olympic rings shirt at home, instead opting for an unbranded neutral green t-shirt. Once I was out in the city, I realized I was probably the only person without a national flag or Olympic rings of some sort. People’s clothes were an opportunity to open conversation, congratulating sport’s fans on the achievements of athletes from their country.

Some countries with large Olympic teams even have “houses” in Paris. The houses are more like embassies. The “Team USA House” was in the Palais Brongniart, an impressive building originally built in 1826 as home to one of the world’s first stock exchanges. The Team USA House is a gathering point for athletes, their families, sponsors and even US Olympians from previous Games. At the Vancouver Olympics, the cross country skiers stayed in Whistler, so I never visited the Team USA House. One of my highlights in Paris was visiting the Team USA House and the opportunity to connect with other Olympians and share the experience with my wife Catherine and best man, Dan. Dan and I ski raced both in high school and college together. Dan is in Paris for the Olympics in his role working for Airbnb.

A couple of the highlights in the Team USA House were catching up with 5x Bobsled Olympic medalist and 2022 USA flag bearer Elana Meyers Taylor, her husband and Olympian Nic Taylor and Olympian Lauren Gibbs. Elana won her first medal at the 2010 Games (I was at the awards ceremony!) and is still competing, currently training for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games. Wow!! I’m looking forward to cheering on Elana, Nic and Lauren when they compete at the Bobsled World Cup in Innsbruck this winter. Another highlight was meeting LaShawn Merritt, 3 x Gold Medalist in the 400m Sprint and 4x400m Relay. We connected on the focus and intention it takes to achieve big goals and the power of sleep. LaShawn currently runs Nike Speed Clinics for high school athletes and runs the LaShawn Merritt Foundation, dedicated to enhancing the well-being of youth in underserved communities.

We haven’t even made it to the competitions yet! Getting tickets was definitely not the easiest or most affordable part of the games, but spending Friday night under the lights of the Stade de France, France’s national stadium, was definitely worth the effort. All 80,000 seats were sold out and the crowd was waay into it. Fortunately, there was still enough flexibility to get up and move around, so we could catch different events from different vantage points. We met the families of a few different athletes competing and had fun cheering on their athletes. The US team dominated the 4 x 400m mixed relay qualification. The women’s 5000m qualification heats featured a master class in strategy, with team tactics, rabbits and sprint finishes all coming into play. Many of the decathlon events offered an opportunity to see a variety of field sports. The highlight of the evening was the men’s 10,000m final. The crowd had a wave going around the stadium at the same pace as the runners. Grant Fisher from the US brought home an historic bronze medal on the 10k which prompted lots of texts with past running teammates of mine watching the races from home in the US.

If I had one wish for my time in Paris at the Olympics, it’s that more friends and family could join me to experience the Games. One person would be my sister Martha, who is an NCAA DI Champion rower. We went to the Rowing finals on Saturday morning thinking of her. The women’s and men’s Eights and Single Sculls featured medal finals. Rowing had a fun atmosphere with a lot of freedom for fans to walk along most of the 2 km course.

The rowing medal ceremonies finished with enough time for us to get back to our neighborhood for the Men’s Road Race. We didn’t plan this part of the trip beforehand, but the course went right past our accommodation in Paris – twice! The crowd was already starting to line up behind the fencing when we arrived, so we staked out our spot next to a crew of Irish fans, in Paris to cheer on Ben Healy and Ryan Mullen. Surprisingly, the two Irish cyclists were having a great race and the Irish crew was ecstatic, sharing updates with us from the course. I really enjoy capturing photos from events like the Olympics. At the track and rowing events, most of my photos were capturing the crowd and atmosphere, but because the athletes were so far away, it was almost impossible to get any close-up action shots. That changed when I lined up next to catch the lead pack of the cyclists. One of the absolute highlights of the Games for me was capturing a close-up of Remco Evenepoel, en route to his Olympic Gold Medal, less than 5 km from the finish and right before his dramatic bike exchange after getting a flat tire. Looking at the photo, I think you can even see a little smirk on Evanepoel’s  face as the reality sinks in that he’ll likely win his second gold medal of the Paris Olympics. A big grin is definitely apparent on French rider Valentin Madouas, en route to a silver medal. What an exciting event.

Our trip wrapped up with more exploration in Paris. Restaurants and bars were packed and patrons overflowed onto the streets watching various events on the big screens. Cheers erupted in different places from different crowds and there was a genuine joie de vivre from everyone in Paris.

As I reflect on my long weekend in Paris, I am so glad that I took the time to attend the Olympics. After this experience, there’s no doubt that the Paris Olympics will go down as one of the best ever, especially with how Paris’ cultural sites were incorporated into the venues for the competitions and how well everything was organized. I am already looking forward to the Milan-Cortina Games and feel much more knowledgeable about the Olympic system as we develop Lumi’s trip to the 2026 Games.

If you’d like to attend a World Championship event, we still have a few spots available on Lumi’s trip to the 2025 Nordic World Championships in Trondheim, Norway and the Tour de Ski trip in Val di Fiemme, Italy. The World Championships in Trondheim, Johannes Klaebo’s hometown, will be an historic series of races. The Tour de Ski in Val di Fiemme will be on the same trails as the Olympics in 2026. If the Paris Olympics have you inspired to take a trip to France, we still have a few spots available on Lumi’s France Jura trip. One of Lumi’s trip leaders in France is the mother of an Olympic Gold medalist with some incredible Olympic stories herself.

Our Olympic sale with $300/person savings for the 2025 World Cup and France trips ends this Sunday, August 11. Reach out soon for more information and to sign up!

As the 53 women Olympians who have  represented our country in cross country skiing, and calling our group United States Nordic Olympic Women (US NOW), we give an annual award, The Gold Rush Award, to a female athlete that demonstrates outstanding quantities of grit and grace throughout the year. 

Huge achievements give everyone the joy of celebrating the success.  We know it takes many people to realize these high goals. We congratulate and are inspired by each of the US Ski Team Athletes and everyone supporting them.   We cheered loud and proud as we watched the coverage of the races.  Thank you to each of you for your hard work, dedication and devotion to our sport.  We love you all.

The Gold Rush Award

The past recipients of the award who chose this years athlete are: Rosie Brennan, co-recipients: Sadie Maubet Bjornsen / Sophie Caldwell Hamilton, and Jessie Diggins.

The 2022 US NOW Gold Rush Award goes to Julia Kern!    Congratulations Julia!

Julia has been working hard for a long time, and we are so proud to recognize not only her outstanding results this season, but her grace and strength in bouncing back from many injuries over the years and her perseverance and trust in her training. Julia’s season highlights included making the 2022 Olympic team, a World Cup podium and 4th place finish, multiple US National Titles and her career-best World Cup distance races. 

This winter was another year of stressful and strict covid safety protocols, which limited social interaction and increased the feeling of isolation and loneliness. As an extrovert who thrives off of group social activities, Julia handled the challenging situation with grace and spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep the team safe and create safe yet fun chances to interact and lighten the mood. Additionally, after a hard year last season and difficult injuries over the summer and fall, Julia kept faith in the hard work she was putting in during the training season, and continued to get stronger over the entire winter, ending the season as the best sprinter and distance skier in the US! Her work ethic and never-give-up attitude inspires all of us, and we are lucky to receive all the energy she brings to the team. 

As if this weren’t enough, Julia is also a wonderful role model and ambassador to the next generation of skiers! She spends the summer training months engaged in many outreach activities, and comes back to her home club each year to get the younger skiers fired up. 

Again, Congratulations Julia!

There, the source explained how a decision by international skiing officials to disqualify a Chinese cross-country skier from a race was like killing a baby.

China does not have, exactly, a long tradition of success in winter sports like cross-country skiing. But after several years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars invested in facilities, Scandinavian and Russian coaches, athlete development and gear, it was hoping for big results in Beijing, especially from star sprinter Wang Qiang.

Wang, in cross-country’s Olympic skate sprint last month, was poised for a top-10 finish, and maybe even a medal — definitely the only hardware that China’s cross-country ski team had a chance to win on home snow during the Games.

But in one of the event’s preliminary head-to-head knockout rounds, Wang tangled with a Norwegian skier, Pål Golberg, who crashed. The International Ski Federation jury overseeing the race relegated Wang to 30th place, ruling that he’d obstructed Golberg, even though China vehemently disagreed.

Hence the tamped-down outrage I was witnessing from my source, who wanted international followers of cross-country skiing to understand his country’s anger over the disqualification.

China had just poured huge amounts of money into hosting the Olympics and building up cross-country skiing; thousands of volunteers had put their lives on hold to pull off the Games during a pandemic. The ski federation, known as FIS, couldn’t give Wang the benefit of the doubt? In a country with hundreds of millions of potential new cross-country skiers and skiing fans, where the sport was still in its infancy?

“You don’t kill infants,” the source said.

This is a Chinese-friendly perspective on Wang’s disqualification, and many others disagree, saying that Wang committed a clear infraction and that skiing’s rules must be enforced without regard to politics or business.

But the Chinese perspective on the event is one that’s worth understanding. Because doing so can help answer one of the most interesting, and important, questions in cross-country skiing right now: Will China keep up its investment in the sport?.

“What I’m very curious about is: What next?” Vegard Ulvang, the retired Norwegian Olympic gold medalist who now chairs FIS’ cross-country committee, said in a phone interview. “Will they continue? Will they have a national team? Will they join the World Cup? To be honest, we don’t know. I have no information on what they will do.”

The question has enormous implications for the sport of cross-country skiing, given the size of China’s potential market for skis, wax and television broadcasts. 

But I got conflicting answers when I asked the people who would know the answer. 

The source close to the government said Wang’s disqualification soured China’s sports minister, Gou Zhongwen, on further investment in cross-country skiing, and he said the sport’s future in the nation looks deeply uncertain. Many of the team’s Scandinavian employees have contracts that end in May, without assurances they’ll be renewed.

“Everything is political, and the culture is completely different,” said Tor Arne Hetland, a Norwegian coach and former Olympic gold medalist who’s worked with Chinese athletes. “If the sports minister says, ‘We are not going to pursue winter sport or cross-country skiing or biathlon,’ then of course, there will not be any money for it. And the project will be completely dead.”

But in an interview in Zhangjiakou during the Games, Zhang Bei, the Communist Party official who leads China’s cross-country ski team, struck a positive note.

She said her country’s commitment to training athletes will continue into next year, and plans have already been announced that the team will keep sending athletes to train in Finland through the 2026 Games. Wang also proved his potential with a podium performance on the top-level World Cup circuit earlier this month in Drammen, Norway.

But Zhang would not reveal details about China’s cross-country budget. And she also suggested, logically, that the country would be scaling back its investment in skiing infrastructure from its big Olympics build-up.

“There is a saying in China: Everything is difficult to start,” Zhang said in the interview, conducted through a translator. “After you have the bases for the infrastructure, then of course, there is an adjustment.”

Ulvang has closely watched China’s cross-country program and, as the country’s athletes trained in Scandinavia before the Olympics, he hosted two of the nation’s top female prospects, Bayani Jialin and Dinigeer Yilamujiang, for a week at his home.

Ulvang described China’s efforts to train ski champions as “all out.” But he’s still waiting to see if the country’s commitment will last, because, he said, developing a durable skiing culture takes time.

“We need to see if this was motivated by the medals on the home field,” Ulvang said, “or if this was part of a long term strategy.”

“Starting from zero”

China’s huge pre-Games spending on cross-country skiing was fueled by Zhongwen’s belief that the discipline was one of the best measures of a nation’s overall prowess in winter sports, said the source close to the government.

The country spared no expense. Among its investments was a $150 million, 1.3-kilometer indoor ski tunnel that athletes can use to train year-round; one Chinese team employee showed me a video of another contraption that resembled an enormous plate with snow on top, which spun in circles while athletes stayed in the same place by skiing in the opposite direction.

China hired dozens of Scandinavian coaches and experts at yearly salaries that reached $120,000. The government recruited hundreds of Chinese athletes from other sports into cross-country skiing, and sent them to training centers in Norway and Finland. (Chinese officials considered Alaska as an option, where athletes could fly in helicopters to train at Alaska Pacific University’s facility on Eagle Glacier, but Zhang said securing visas proved too difficult.)

The team spent millions more on wax and equipment. In Zhangjiakou, the Chinese team had access to the Games’ only on-site ski waxing bus, which has sliding doors and facial recognition technology.

“They have started from zero,” said Hetland. The skiing infrastructure that the country has built up, he added, “is more than what Norway has done in the last few years.”

In the years before the Olympics, the team’s athletes recorded impressive results, even though some had only been skiing a few years — unlike many European athletes who have raced for the majority of their lives. 

Yilamujiang and Bayani both cracked the top 30 on the World Cup circuit, and notched top-15 results at the world championships for juniors and athletes under 23 years old. Wang, China’s star male skier, performed at a similar level.

But at the Olympics, other than Wang, none of China’s cross-country skiers cracked the top 30. Some people close to the team described the event as a disappointment, given the Chinese athletes’ proven potential.

Former employees of the Chinese team said two dynamics help explain the results. 

One was a tendency by Chinese team leaders to disrupt the Scandinavian coaches’ training programs, by pushing athletes through brutally difficult workouts that the Chinese staff thought were needed. 

The other was the decision by team leaders to pull China’s athletes out of the World Cup circuit during the COVID-19 pandemic — a move that kept the skiers safe but deprived them of experience against international-caliber competition on trails outside their home country. (Chinese officials did hire semi-elite Russian athletes to travel to China to give the country’s athletes more racing experience.)

“They need to spend even more time in Scandinavia and learn from everybody in the environment that is around a skier,” said Hetland, the Norwegian coach. “And that has been maybe the biggest challenge for the team, when due to COVID they have stayed at home in China in the last two years.”

Hetland said it’s important to remember that China has its own distinct culture from those of the European nations that have historically dominated cross-country skiing. Adapting that culture takes time, he and others said.

“I visited China two years ago, and I was clear to the officials there that developing or training up a good skier, fighting for medals, is not a quick fix,” said Ulvang, the Norwegian FIS official. Still, he added: “It’s really special to see such fast development into some of the best racers in the world.”

Zhang, the Chinese leader, had no complaints about her team’s Olympic results.

“I am very much satisfied with the performance of our athletes,” she said. “I also feel very satisfied that each of our athletes is enjoying the competition, and that they are happy.”

“They cut him”

Zhang spoke with me in a busy athletes’ lounge in the bowels of Zhangjiakou’s biathlon building. 

With the help of some of her European coaches, I’d picked her out of her white-jacketed, fur-hatted entourage at the cross-country skiing venue a few days before. She reacted with surprising openness, and agreed to an interview after I supplied her with enough details to get approval from her superiors.

Zhang embodies China’s recent foray into winter sports: She came to her job four years ago, with a background as an elite rower, and only recently took up cross-country skiing herself. She told me she was too shy to try it in front of her athletes because she was worried they’d laugh at her.

In our hour-long discussion, Zhang came across more like a politician or ambassador than a coach or executive, striking a vague but upbeat tone that glossed over some of the challenges I’d heard about from former employees. 

“We have a very good start,” she said in response to a question about her program’s future. “Most importantly, we have many young people that are interested in cross-country skiing. And we have to help them to fulfill their dream.”

The only time Zhang acknowledged even a hint of tension or conflict was on the subject of the disqualification of Wang, China’s star athlete. She said she and other team members were upset about the decision at the Olympics, which Zhang called “wrong.”

Technically, FIS’ race jury ruled that Wang would be “ranked as last” in the freestyle for breaking international competition rules against obstructing other skiers. 

Slow motion replay of the event shows Wang in his neck-and-neck sprint heat edging to his right in a way that appeared to impede Golberg, the Norwegian, who was skiing alongside Wang and ultimately crashed. (The video cannot be posted here due to Olympic broadcasting rules, but FasterSkier can provide a copy by email upon request.)

The video isn’t exactly conclusive, and the jury’s decision has its critics — including, apparently, Gou, China’s sports minister. 

Four separate sources told me that Gou learned of the disqualification during a dinner with Johan Eliasch, the FIS president, where Gou subsequently “lost his appetite” and raised his concerns with Eliasch directly. (A FIS spokesperson said in an email that the federation “does not comment on speculation about discussions between individuals during private dinners.”)

China ultimately appealed the jury’s decision, but the appeal was rejected, said Ulvang. The source close to the government said China also asked FIS to extend some type of goodwill gesture after the disqualification, but that request wasn’t granted either. 

Representatives from cross-country ski equipment manufacturers were frustrated, too. Currently, the industry sells only small amounts of gear and skis in China, and only to elite athletes there — not to “normal people,” said Hans Hubinger, an official from ski giant Fischer who was working at the cross-country venue in Zhangjiakou.

“It’s not easy for us to see if there’s a future for the Chinese market or not,” Hubinger said in an interview.

Wang was the industry’s only hope for a Chinese cross-country skiing medal, which could have stimulated new interest, and gear sales, in the nation’s massive market. That market could also bring much-needed television viewers to cross-country skiing’s broadcasts — a major source of revenue for the sport. 

Hubinger said he thought Wang’s disqualification was a close call where the jury could have given him the benefit of the doubt.

“I think, ‘Oh, this is the chance now, to turn some guys into heroes’…and they cut him,” he said. “If the rules are clear, then you have to cut him. But this rule is not clear.”

Pierre Mignerey, FIS’ cross-country skiing race director and a member of the jury that disqualified Wang, said he sees the situation completely differently. 

In an interview in Zhangjiakou, Mignerey said it would be completely inappropriate for a race jury to weigh political factors, like the size of China’s ski market or its investment in the Games, in their decisions.

“Sports mean that we have some rules. And that would be, in my opinion, quite shocking if the rules would not apply to everyone in the same way, regardless of if it’s the host nation,” said Mignerey, a retired French racer. “What would people say if the jury had decided something else?”

Others placed responsibility for the disqualification on Chinese team leaders, arguing that their decision to skip international races during the pandemic left athletes like Wang without enough experience in the kind of tight-quarters competition that happened in the Olympic sprint.

In the weeks after the Games, Wang delivered results that only underscored the opportunity he missed when he was disqualified — regardless of who bears the ultimate responsibility for that decision.

In his first World Cup race after the Games, in Finland, Wang, 28, finished a career-best sixth place. The following week, in Norway, he landed on the podium for the first time.

That result delivered a shot of hope to those who want to see the Chinese program continue. 

On social media afterward, Wang made clear his intentions to continue in the sport, even if his country’s commitment to its skiing program remains something of a mystery. 

“Today is a milestone. This is the first time a Chinese athlete stands on the podium of the World Cup series. We have won the respect of the world,” Wang said on a platform called Weibo. He added: “I will continue to pursue my dream with a humble attitude.”

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See you on the trails,

The FasterSkier Team

On February 20th, Jessie Diggins made Olympic history yet again, taking second in the 30 k mass start skate to round out the colors of her medal collection. Gold in the freestyle team sprint in 2018, silver in the 30 k skate, and bronze in the individual skate sprint.

Now thirty years old, Diggins is the most successful American cross country skier in Olympic history. She has spent over a decade rising to the top of American and international ski racing, elevating those around her as she reaches for goals that make us lose sight of the fact that the American women’s cross country program was only reinstated with funding in 2006. 

There are currently thirty-nine pages of articles tagged with Diggins name on the FasterSkier archives, detailing the many steps forward, and backward, she has taken in her career, transforming her into the athlete, role model, and spokesperson she is today.

Her first tagged appearance was on January 25th, 2010 amid coverage of the Junior World Ski Championships in Hinterzarten, Germany. Both Diggins and Sophie Caldwell (now Hamilton) raced in the quarterfinals of the 1 k freestyle sprint that day, where Diggins crashed and ultimately finished 26th.

“50 meters into her quarterfinal here, Jessie Diggins found herself on the ground, seeing stars,” wrote one of FasterSkier’s young reporters, Nat Herz.

Perhaps it is fitting that 12 years later, following the press conference for Diggins’ Olympic silver medal, it was Herz who caught Diggins as she left, creating the opportunity for this unique interview. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and to account for the extreme wind at the venue, which significantly impaired the audio in a few places.

Nat Herz / FasterSkier: How are you feeling?

Jessie Diggins: Honestly, I’m feeling okay now. I haven’t felt that bad at the finish of a race maybe ever. It was a little scary. I couldn’t really walk. But also I’m not surprised, because like 24 hours ago I felt pretty awful too. It’s been a wild, wild last 48 hours. 

***

Following the race, Diggins had shared with the media that came down with food poisoning the day before the race, leaving her unsure whether she would be able to line up for the final Olympic event, and if she did, what amount of fight would be left in her body.

Elaborating on what it had been like to cross the line in second place after this experience, Diggins said she felt “disbelief” and that mentally, she had been preparing herself to accept whatever outcome the day would behold. “You’ve had a great time [at these Games] and just do what you can to take care of yourself.”

Diggins continued by explaining the support she received leading into the race that allowed her to keep herself in the positive headspace she needed to perform.

JD: I had a great talk with my sport psychologist, my fiancé, and with my parents. They reminded me that this — the weather, the wind, it’s just like skiing at Giant’s Ridge in Minnesota when I was a kid. You know, I’m just gonna go out there and ski because I love to race and [we’ll] see what happens. My mom reminded me last night, ‘You don’t have to decide right now. Wait. Just see how you feel once you’re actually racing. And then see how you feel in another 5 k and another 5k. You don’t know right now and that’s okay.’ So I went from like, ‘Wow, this is not the race prep I envisioned’, like laying in bed force feeding myself oatmeal and soup from a can. I was really proud of the amount of sport drink I consumed… and I was just like, ‘Okay, we’re just gonna see what happens out there.’ And I just wanted to race because I love to race. 

How she would feel while racing became apparent early. Diggins explained that by 12 or 13 k, her body was already beginning to fight against her efforts. 

JD: I just kept trying to keep down some sugar and then my left knee started cramping and then my right quads and my left quads and my left hip. I tried to keep telling myself ‘Use your arms, use your arms.’

Grateful for the distraction and encouragement as she endured the pain of racing in that state, she expressed her gratitude from the support she received from the sidelines.

JD: I think we had like all of US Biathlon out there. The whole ski team was out there, all the techs. I mean, Oleg was cheering on the last lap, ‘We’re proud of you!’ And I was like, ‘I’m gonna cry.’ That was the coolest thing. Pretty much every other country also started cheering for me, and so I felt like the whole world was helping me get up those hills when my legs were just spasming and going numb. And I just kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to keep pushing as hard as I can, because at any point — what if my legs give out? I can’t back down. I can’t let up on this pace. I just have to keep going.’

FS: I imagine you were kind of on this seesaw between, ‘I’m in a medal winning position and I could fall over at any time…

JD: I was trying very hard to not think about that, and just think about using my arms, using my head — what I mean by that is like, I’d come over the top and it’s really windy, and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m just going to doublepole.’ Or, ‘I’m gonna hold this tuck longer.’ Because it was the sustained climbs where I started to really cramp, so I kept thinking like, ‘Okay, I gotta ski as smart as I can, and be really thoughtful about where I use my legs and where I use my arms.’ Which is funny, because normally, I’m a legs skier, so that was a funny flip for me. I tried not to let myself think about a medal, because I had to stay focused on getting through the race, and not let myself think about anything else.

FS: When you think about the amount of pride you’re gonna feel in finishing that race the way that you did, when you’re ultimately able to look back on that, would you say this would rank up there in your catalog of things you’ve had to suffer through?

JD: I think that might have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It might be.  Finishing the Tour de Ski this year was also very hard, but that’s why I did it. 

I told myself last night, nothing will probably feel harder than being actively sick and finishing that final climb. I’ve prepped for this. My head is tough as it is ever going to get, and I need that right now. And I’m grateful for all those super hard training sessions and all those super hard races where I finished, without being able to feel my legs at all because in the middle of the race [today], when my legs were spasming and I couldn’t really feel them, I was like, ‘This is not new.’ Unfortunately, which is probably medically concerning. But this is not a new thing for me, and so I know I can survive this. 

The other prominent storyline of the day was that Rosie Brennan knocked on the door of an Olympic medal yet again, perhaps helping Kerttu Niskanen of Finland to bronze, only to walk away empty handed herself in sixth place. Brennan had been fourth in the freestyle sprint the week before, and had tagged off to Diggins in third place after her final lap of the classic team sprint where the Americans finished fifth. 

It was perhaps not altogether a very different Olympic experience from Diggins’ in PyeongChang in 2018, where she took fifth in two individual races, sixth in another, and seventh in the last. In the 10 k skate, Diggins fifth place meant she was the first woman not to earn a medal, as Marit Bjørgen (NOR) and Krista Pärmäkoski (FIN) had tied for third.  

FS: When you think about Rosie’s results today, and here, just overall. Is there anything you would want to say about that, because you’ve sort of similar positions — fourth places, tough spots.

JD: I do know how that feels, and I think it’s so important to remember that nobody gets to say if that was a good race or not but Rosie. Nobody gets to judge. Nobody gets to criticize. She’s the one who gets to define what success looks like. And personally, I’m just so proud of her. I mean, the Olympics is an emotional roller coaster. And she rode it with grace, and as a good teammate, and looked out for other people. She’s just been amazing. And to me, she found success in every definition that matters.

FS: If you were Rosie, would you be proud of your races? 

JD: Yeah, I would. Because when I was fourth [in the 10 k skate in PyeongChang], or fifth because of the tie, I was proud. When you give it everything you have in a race, you can and you should be proud. And I think that’s that. 

ZHANGJIAKOU, CHINA — American Olympic cross-country skier Kevin Bolger grew up in Wisconsin. His girlfriend, Olympian Maja Dahlqvist, is from Sweden.

During the Olympics, in China, they got to spend a couple of weeks in the same place. Among their options for dates:

• Go cross-country skiing together, but stay side-by-side, six feet apart.

• Eat meals at the Olympic Village dining hall, separated by head-high plastic dividers.

• Socially distant walks.

Welcome to the coronavirus Games, where parents and fans were banned, masks were mandatory indoors and out, and even couples like Dahlqvist and Bolger had to stay at respiratory droplet-safe distances.

Okay: There was one moment of weakness — but only after Dahlqvist won silver in the individual freestyle sprint event, where she was heavily favored to take a medal. Afterward, there was a very satisfying hug.

“My team didn’t care. And his team didn’t care. It was just, like, to celebrate then,” Dahlqvist said in an interview later. “But I don’t think we should do that every day.”

Dahlqvist’s and Bolger’s Olympic romance is a neat kind of encapsulation of China’s Covid Olympics: It was making a decent time out of a difficult situation, but nowhere close to the real thing.

Matt Whitcomb, the U.S. team’s head coach, described their relationship like this.

“You still get to go for a walk, you get to go for a ski with each other. You still get 90% of the companionship,” he said. Asked to reconsider that figure, he added: “Yeah. I would actually say, 30%.”

Nobody on the American or Swedish ski teams got Covid during the Olympics, so we can chuckle now about what Bolger, 28, and Dahlqvist, 27, endured. 

But the protocols were no joke, and the stakes were about as high as they get for Olympic athletes.

China’s strict coronavirus protocols meant that an infection during the Olympics, or in the lead-up to the Games, could cost athletes a shot at medals.

Just before the Olympics began, several members of Norway’s team tested positive after an altitude camp in Italy. 

The cases sidelined a star woman, Heidi Weng, even though she’d been quarantining from her own boyfriend and had other people shopping for her groceries in the weeks before the Games. 

One of Norway’s star men, Simen Hegstad Krüger, spent the first days of the Olympics pacing his hotel room in Italy after his own positive test.

Krüger recovered in time to get to China and win a bronze medal in the Olympics’ last men’s cross-country event. But Weng missed the Games altogether — underscoring what was at stake for Bolger, Dahlqvist and the teammates whose medal chances could also be jeopardized by a positive test.

“I think we both understood the risks — personally, for each other, and then, bigger scale, for the team,” Bolger said.

He and Dahlqvist, who both specialize in sprint races, started seeing each other last season, while their teams followed the elite-level World Cup circuit around Europe. 

Bolger got to spend two months with Dahlqvist in Sweden over the summer. And during the early part of this winter, they could spend time together without too much coronavirus stress.

“Everyone had the vaccine. Omicron wasn’t a thing,” said Bolger. “We were still being smart about things. But it wasn’t a big deal.”

But the situation changed as the Olympics approached and omicron took off. 

The Swedish and U.S. teams had simultaneous pre-Games altitude camps in Italy; Bolger’s and Dahlqvist’s accommodations were within shouting distance. But there was no canoodling.

“She’s like, ‘Come on, give me a hug!’” Bolger said. “I was like, ‘No — don’t even get near me until, like, maybe after the (Olympic) sprint.’”

Even on walks, the couple wore KN95 masks and stayed at least two meters apart. They’ve taken similar precautions during the Games. 

“God knows what was happening on those walks,” quipped Bolger’s teammate Luke Jager, before adding: “We really trusted them. We were never concerned about it. We knew they hadn’t been sneaking off and smooching in the woods.”

Bolger and Dahlqvist were by no means the only couples contending with Covid-related relationship complications in the lead-up to Beijing. And athletes and coaches said that the steps the coronavirus forced them to take were painful.

Erik Flora, who coaches several Olympic cross-country skiers at Alaska Pacific University’s elite team, said one of his athletes wore masks around and slept in a different room from their partner.

Jessie Diggins, the star U.S. skier who won two medals in Beijing, has described skipping weddings and celebrations and spending four months on the road last year without any time with her family or fiancé, Wade Poplawski. That kind of emotional support can be especially important at high pressure events like the Olympics, she noted.

“You really want your family and your loved ones around you, right?” Diggins said in an interview. “I don’t have a choice. I don’t get to see Wade. But (Bolger and Dahlqvist) are right there, and they made the choice to protect the team. And that is so cool, and I can’t say thanks enough.”

To state the obvious: Going through the Olympics while socially distancing from your partner is hard. “Super hard,” said Dahlqvist.

“It was, like, so close, yet so far away,” Dahlqvist said. “It was just so annoying.”

The hug she got from Bolger, after winning her first of three medals, was such a relief, after facing intense pressure beforehand.

“I just cried,” she said. “It was so nice to have him there.”

As the Games ended, Dahlqvist left Beijing before Bolger, who remained with the U.S. team through the closing ceremonies and then flew to Finland to continue the World Cup season. Dahlqvist is competing in Finland this weekend, as well.

Bolger said he thinks they can start relaxing their precautions now that the Olympics are over, if not entirely. But the couple will be able to truly let their guards down in a couple of weeks, when the World Cup circuit heads to Sweden and Bolger will get to stay with Dahlqvist — forming their own bubble of two. And then she may travel with him, back to the U.S.

“In a sport that has so many women with massive shoulders and thighs, Diggins looks like a sprite in her racing suit, and it’s not clear exactly where she gets her power. But the power is there, as she flies up hills, and comes off climactic turns with a burst. On the downhills, she tucks low and cuts through the air,” writes Matt Futterman in his February 8th New York Times coverage of Nordic skier Jessie Diggins’s historic bronze medal win at the Beijing Olympic Games.

A former college teammate of mine sent me a screenshot of this excerpt with an outraged, “We are past commenting on women’s bodies in sports!!” 

In a response to Futterman, sportswriter Lori Nickels wrote a piece in USA Today documenting such reactions from female athletes and wondering at their intensity, when men’s bodies are so frequently fodder for sports analysis. 

As a female athlete and a former collegiate nordic skier, I would like to offer an explanation to Nickels and Futterman and anyone else who may be wondering why this seemingly commonplace commentary is such a big deal.

Athletics can be an amazing tool for teaching women how to use their bodies effectively and powerfully; knowing how to become healthier, faster, and stronger is information that our society has historically neglected to teach women, to our great detriment. On the other hand, we are simultaneously receiving programming from nearly every direction that smaller is better, that women with muscles are ugly, they look too much like men, that men won’t find our shapes attractive. And in an appearance-oriented society where women seem to be valued especially for their ability to fit into an idealized category, that is no small thing. Growing up, even as they powered activities that brought me joy and self-worth, my pronounced muscles (“massive shoulders and thighs,” if you will) felt like blemishes. Some days they still do. 

And that is only half of it. Nordic skiing is a sport in which strength to weight ratios play a role, albeit a small one. However, when so many other factors feel out of their control, that single, tiny factor can loom large in the minds of both male and female competitors. I know all of us have fielded comments from performance-obsessed coaches, our own parents, and often other parents concerning our body types, weights, and emphasizing the advantage of a low body mass. This adds up to a complex of emotions and ideas surrounding food. Endurance athletes are particularly susceptible to disordered eating given their tendency towards self-discipline and performance.  

I am not saying men and male athletes don’t suffer from similar or analogous notions and prejudices – in fact I would love to open that conversation – but they do display a different level of intensity and contain fewer contradictions. Female athletes really sit at the nexus of a particularly overwhelming complex of ideas and judgments surrounding our bodies. And that is even before mentioning the pressures of sex and the constant threat of sexual assault that every woman feels. It makes us unsure who our bodies really belong to. 

I am lucky that this dissociation with and antipathy towards my body was relatively mild, and never developed into an eating disorder like it has for many. Regardless, years out of adolescence and competitive racing, I am still trying and often failing to inhabit my own body and trust that it is beautiful no matter the form it takes, that it is my own by right, and that I can’t let others decide how I feel about it or what I do with it. And I am finally learning how hard my teammates, role models, and competitors have also had to fight to avoid this disassociation, to preserve the vital relationships to their bodies that is at the heart of their love for athletics. 

Ironically, Jessie Diggins herself has been one of the fiercest supporters and advocates for those suffering from eating disorders and has been a key player in raising awareness of the issue. In her memoir, Brave Enough, she writes about her struggle to overcome an eating disorder, which threatened her health and prevented her from competing, culminating in outpatient treatment. She is hardly alone in the work. My high school teammate Julia Burnham, also an eating disorder survivor, is the co-creator of a podcast called Bodies in Motion, chronicling the stories of those – especially female athletes like Jessie – who have experienced eating disorders. A clear and consistent take-away from her discussions is that we need to stop commenting on each other’s bodies. No matter how positive or negative, direct or indirect, these comments generate the feeling that how our bodies look is more important than what we do with them or that what we do with them is more important that the relationship we have with them. 

This is not meant to be an attack on Futterman. His words were poorly chosen, but we have all made similar comments regarding fellow bodies. I know I have, and I regret them all, for I have felt acutely so many times the detrimental effect of such words. Comments like Futterman’s may have sent my ninth grade self into a well of negative feelings about my body and a bout of obsessive eating. It is sensitive terrain, which means we are all responsible for being aware and careful. 

So to everyone who may be reading this – and I really mean everyone – if you are ever tempted to make a comment about someone’s body, consider keeping it to yourself. Please. 

About the Author:

Ivy Spiegel Ostrom grew up skiing in the mountains of Leavenworth, Washington. She went on to ski for Williams College where she majored in English and Environmental Studies. Since graduating in 2020, she has been living in her hometown, indulging in her other favorite sport of rock climbing while learning how to farm and live sustainably.

Earlier in the season, Laukli popped a Top-20 at altitude in Davos, Switzerland, finishing 19th in the 10 k individual start skate. 

It’s become clear: Laukli is a contender in freestyle distance races, and the harder (and higher) the better. 

Heading into the Games, Laukli knew she would be starting the 30 k mass start freestyle. Given the elevation, the challenge of the course, the technique, and the distance, perhaps this selection by the coaches was a no-brainer. 

“I love this course,” Laukli said of the venue in Zhangjiakou in a post-race interview with FasterSkier in the mixed zone. “The hills really work to my advantage.”

But no one could have predicted just how challenging the day would be. Wind ripped across open sections of the course, forcing athletes to drop into low gears even on flatter sections just to stay upright and moving forward. Most athletes wore large strips of tape across their faces, with buffs covering all remaining exposed skin save for their mouths and noses.

The American women showed they could handle whatever Zhangjiakou threw at them that day. Highlighted by Jessie Diggins silver medal performance – earned while fighting through painful cramping and fatigue after spending two days with food poisoning – the team put all four starters inside the top-20. Rosie Brennan skied to 6th, with Laukli in 15th, and Novie McCabe 18th.

But Laukli was almost 13th. 

With only a few hundred meters to go, Laukli made a wrong turn, accidentally following the lap course rather than the route to the finish lanes. 

How did it happen?

“I honestly don’t know exactly,” Laukli said in the mixed zone. “There was a huge gust of wind that kind of covered where it was marked ‘finish’ and ‘lap’, and I think it was a combination of [being] tired and not really seeing where to go. I definitely noticed a little bit too late, and then got passed, but I guess those things happen. I’m definitely a little bit bummed out. But I’m happy with the overall race.”

Laukli is not the only athlete to have made a wrong turn at the Olympics. A wrong turn during the 30 k classic might have cost Austria’s Theresa Stadlober a medal at the 2018 Games in PyeongChang. There’s adrenaline, fatigue, nerves, and so many other factors at play, without wind gusts lifting clouds of dry loose snow into the air in the stadium. 

“I’m bummed for her,” said coach Chris Grover, “that she lost two places, because she worked hard for those… but she did the right thing, retracing her steps all the way back, and that’s one of the lessons that you do once on the big show and then you never do it again. Jessie did it in Sochi.”

Having one of the best races of her season during her first and only appearance at the 2018 Games, Laukli admitted she felt panicked as she backtracked to the split to avoid disqualification. Having come to a stop and lost all momentum, it was devastating to see a pair of Norwegian twins, Lotta and Tiril Udnes Weng, skiing fast with a tailwind toward the final bend into the stadium. There was nothing Laukli could do to avoid losing those two places. 

But to her coaches and supporters, this wrong turn was not the defining moment of Laukli’s Olympic debut. 

Laukli showed mental toughness, dedication, and patience as she spent the three weeks prior to the 30 k training in Zhangjiakou, watching, supporting, and celebrating her teammates as they raced in earlier events, while trying to stay focused on her own opportunity that was yet to come. 

“It was definitely not the easiest last month,” she told FasterSkier. “I really love racing, and so to have such a long break and just wanting to race, it was a bit tough.”

She explained that, without races as a fitness checkpoint, she poured herself into her training to maintain her race shape, but ultimately was not sure what would happen on race day.

“I think I was lucky in that it was a 30 k – it’s maybe easier to race a 30 k when you’re not in your fastest form, because it’s just a slower race. So I think that helped a lot.”

At the 10 k mark, Laukli sat in 15th, racing on the back of a large chase group led by Rosie Brennan. Over the next 5 k, a group of three, including Laukli, lost contact with this group and slowly separated. For the second half of the race, as the wind “really, really picked up”, Laukli found herself racing on her own with no one to work with or use as a wind break. At times, the headwind was so strong that Laukli said she ended up fighting it in V1 as she lapped through the false flat of the stadium at 22.5 k. 

Ever onward, Laukli kept pushing, eventually overtaking a Latvian athlete who began to fade to find herself in 13th – 13th in the world at the Olympics – with a roughly 45 second gap to the next skier in the final kilometer. 

“I felt like I was able to pace it pretty well,” she said. “It was definitely a bummer that I had to see most of it alone because I think it would have been beneficial to be in a group. But I did my best and I’m pretty proud of how it went.”

While the takeaway here should remain that Laukli posted a top-15 result in her first Olympic performance at 21-years-old in some of the gnarliest conditions imaginable, the sting was still painful as she passed through the mixed zone. 

“I’m probably in a better place than I was the minute after I finished. But to be honest, I’m pretty pissed. I really wanted to prove myself today, to prove that I earned that start. And just to make such a stupid, preventable mistake at the end… I was not stoked. But like I said, that happens, I guess. It sucks that it’s at the Olympics in my Olympic debut, but yeah, not a lot I can do about it now.”

Perhaps Nat Herz said it best as their conversation in the mixed zone ended. 

“As a guy who watches a lot of these races, I don’t think anyone’s gonna hold it against you, or remember it in however many years.”

“I had a dislocated cuboid bone, and she diagnosed it over Skype and essentially talked me through repositioning it, and I was better,” said Holly Brooks, the retired Olympic cross-country skier from Alaska. “It was insane.”

Eli Brown, one of the team’s ski technicians, thought he had an Achilles tendon problem.

“She worked on me for five minutes and gave me this, like, grab-onto-the-side-of-my-groin type of claw move, and it fixes it all the way down,” he said. “It’s like magic voodoo.”

Eleven-ish months out of the year, Rogers operates an Anchorage physical therapy clinic that caters to runners and skiers. 

But she’s also become a trusted asset of the U.S. Ski Team, which flew her to China for a volunteer gig working with cross-country athletes at the Olympic Games this month. She’s one of some 20 Americans working with the team behind the scenes — coaches, support staff and ski technicians who athletes call indispensable to their performances here.

As the team’s physical therapist, Rogers helps the Olympians recover from injuries, strains and the inevitable tweaks that crop up over two-and-a-half intense weeks of racing. 

The job also involves an array of less glamorous tasks, like carrying athletes’ bags, choreographing start times and logistics and making sure people are fed and hydrated. 

“It’s a very stressful vacation,” Rogers said. “A working and very rewarding vacation.”

Rogers took a circuitous path to her work with the ski team, which she’s been doing for about a decade.

She grew up as a downhill ski racer on socialist Czechoslovakia’s and Slovakia’s national team, then was recruited to compete for University of Alaska Anchorage. She still doesn’t know what exactly led to UAA’s coach to cold-call her at home.

“I didn’t speak any English,” Rogers said. “So, I graciously deferred for one year and made an effort to learn a little bit more.”

The call was a huge opportunity to leave the country, and Rogers ended up as a three-time all-American. Afterward, she took her interest in medicine to physical therapy school, and she started working with skiers through Alaska Pacific University’s club team, which has brought her to camps on the Eagle Glacier above Girdwood.

The work with the U.S. team at events like the Olympics and the Tour de Ski are a chance for her to get experience with elite athletes — and to trade knowledge with other members the squad’s medical support staff, like massage therapists and doctors.

It’s also a chance to watch the athletes perform from a few yards away.

“It gives you that adrenaline rush — especially knowing the background of the athletes and how much work they put into it,” she said. “It gives me shivers down the spine.”

Athletes at the Games said that Rogers, in addition to being a skilled physical therapist, adds a warm and reassuring presence to the U.S. team — particularly for younger skiers in the frenetic environment of the Olympics.

“She’s just really confident — she’s been around for so much,” said Luke Jager, 22, a U.S. sprinter competing at his first Games.

“You come to her after a race, or between a qualifier and heats, and she’s like, ‘Here’s what we need to do,’” said Ben Ogden, 22, another Olympic rookie. 

Coaches said that physical therapists like Rogers can also be an important outlet for athletes.

“They’re some of the people that have the best opportunities, sometimes, to talk. Because the athletes are just on the table,” said Matt Whitcomb, the U.S. Ski Team’s head coach at the Olympics. “A lot of times, particularly on a race day, the coaches are up at the venue. And maybe the athletes don’t want to talk to us.”

Whitcomb called Rogers a “catch” who he hopes will keep working with the American team for another decade. That seems likely, even if Rogers is only a volunteer.

“We don’t get paid with money, but we get paid with other means,” Rogers said. “And I would not change it for anything.”

This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and the 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.

Sunday morning, battling through ripping winds, the women delivered an impressive and dramatic final cross-country event to close out the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. For the first time, skiing further than the men (gender parity coming more quickly than anyone could have guessed) thanks to the men’s kilometer event getting shortened to 28.4 k due to harsh conditions. Though the thermometer did not read particularly low in the Zhangjiakou stadium, roaring winds made racing both considerably colder and considerably more difficult as the women completed four laps of the 7.5 k course, the race happening three hours earlier than originally planned due to the weather.

First the highlights, Therese Johaug of Norway secured her third individual gold medal of the Games in dominant fashion, +1:43.3 clear of second place. In a truly gutsy performance, Jessie Diggins earned US women’s cross-country its second individual women’s medal, securing silver, and all four American women finished in the top twenty. 

But how did we get there? Within five minutes of starting, Johaug was at the front, pushing the pace. Any thoughts that she might have preferred to stick with pack skiing given the windy conditions were quickly banished. After just 2.9 k, she had successfully broken up the field and pulled away, bringing six athletes with her. Moments later the front group was down to four as Johaug charged ahead, with Diggins, Ebba Andersson of Sweden, and Delphine Claudel of France sticking with her. A chase pack formed, initially composed of Rosie Brennan of the USA, along with Krista Pärmäkoski and Kerttu Niskanen of Finland, the bronze and silver medalists from the 15 k classic. 

The rest of the first lap saw lots of lead changes among the front four as no one was eager to take on the wind at the front. In each of the more sheltered sections we saw Johaug applying pressure, but the three athletes with her responded to the moves and stayed with her. Behind them, Brennan was working hard to close the gap but not finding luck gaining any ground. 

With one lap complete, we saw the first withdrawal from the race as skiathlon silver medalist, Natalia Nepryaeva, representing the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), stopped her race. Petra Novakova of the Czech Republic also pulled out later on. 

Up at the front, as the athletes took on the first major climb out of the stadium, Claudel (FRA) started to fade. By the top of the hill, she had lost contact and was off the back on her own. Behind her, the chase pack had strengthened in numbers to ten, led by Brennan (USA) and trailed by her teammate, Sophia Laukli (USA) making her first Olympic appearance. 

As Johaug (NOR), Diggins (USA) and Andersson (SWE) crested the initial climbing section and entered a feed zone, Johaug seized an opportunity. Diggins and Andersson swung wide to grab bottles and Johaug rocketed away. Though Diggins worked to chase her down, the move was set and Johaug had taken up her favorite race position- out front on her own. 

With 10.4 k of racing complete, the first four athletes were spaced out evenly with 16 seconds between each of them. Johaug led, +16 ahead of Diggins, who was trailed by Andersson (+32.8), followed by Claudel (+49).

Behind them, Brennan was having difficulty getting her two Finnish shadows to take on any of the lead work as she battled the wind, still trying to close. 

With two laps of racing complete, the time gap continued to grow in Johaug’s favor. The chasers were quickly reeling in Claudel (FRA) and looked to be nearing Andersson (SWE) as well, just +14 seconds behind her. On the A-climb out of the stadium, Claudel was absorbed by the group and the margin to Andersson was down to just ten seconds. Perhaps sensing this, the Swede redoubled her effort and at 17.9 k had widened the margin to +31 seconds. 

The front two, each entirely by herself, continued fighting hard, Johaug’s advantage to Diggins and the rest of the field growing steadily. At 21.2 k Johaug was +1:08 ahead of Diggins and +2:07.1 ahead of Andersson. As such, the top three entered and exited the stadium in turn, each one leaving as the next entered, now with one lap to go. 

Andersson (SWE) appeared to be well clear of the chasers, +36.1 seconds ahead at 22.5 k. Around this time, Pärmäkoski (FIN) broke a pole and dropped from the chase pack, which was now composed of Brennan (USA), Claudel (FRA), Niskanen (FIN), Jonna Sundling (SWE), Tatiana Sorina (ROC), Teresa Stadlober (AUT) and Mariya Istomina (ROC). 

Through 25.4 k, Johaug had a lead of +1:39.8 to Diggins. Andersson was +2:40.2 behind and still 36 seconds up on the chasing group, as the camera caught Johaug lapping a skier, a full 7.5 k ahead.

Heading into the final grinding climb the chasers seemed to have sensed an opportunity. Spindrift almost fully obscured Niskanen and Brennan, being blasted by the wind as they closed in on Andersson, +14 seconds behind at 28.7 k. 

Over two minutes ahead of them, Johaug entered the stadium and was handed a Norwegian flag to manage in the wind as she headed into the finish. 1:24.54 of racing and she had earned her third gold medal of the games, having won every distance race.

“I am so proud and I am so happy,” said Johaug, “It is a dream come true that I can stand here for Norway with three gold medals in the same Olympics. I was so, so happy 14 days ago when I got my first [gold medal] and I cannot believe I should have more. It’s fantastic to end my Olympic career with these three gold medals.”

Johaug, who is 33 years old, announced before the 30 k that this would be her last Olympic appearance.

With Johaug winning by the second-largest margin of victory in this event, +1:43.3 later came Diggins, V1’ing across the finish line and collapsing, having spent everything out on the course.

“It’s really emotional,” said Diggins after the race, “That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my whole life, especially because I had food poisoning 30 hours ago, which is why I thought I was going to die at the finish line… My legs were cramping the whole last 17 k, I don’t know how I made it to the finish. It was amazing.”

Diggins now holds three Olympic medals, gold from the team sprint in 2018, silver from today’s effort, and bronze from the skate sprint two weeks ago. With this silver medal Diggins also becomes the first non-European woman to land on the podium in the women’s 30 k event.

Speaking to the food poisoning issue Diggins said, “I woke up yesterday morning and pretty much everything was coming right out of me, so I basically laid in bed all day and made myself eat food. Luckily it wasn’t so bad, but I was feeling pretty bad 24 hours ago. I talked to my parents and my mom said, ‘Don’t decide how you feel right now, just go out there and ski because you love to race.’ And she was right.”

Johannes Høsflot Klæbo withdrew from the men’s race yesterday, also citing food issues. 

“We had amazing skis,” concluded Diggins, “Our team worked so hard. I just tried to ski smart and then I wanted to ski a gutsy race, so when Therese [Johaug] went, I tried to go with her and I couldn’t stay. So then I thought I would just put my head down and ski my own race.”

“That might have been the best race of my entire life, I’m not going to lie. It was also maybe the hardest race of my whole life. It’s been an emotional roller-coaster, but I am so happy we made it to the end. To have a medal in the sprint and the 30 k are the ultimate bookends for me. I have been trying to be a good all-around athlete my whole life, so this has been really cool.”

With the first two medals decided, the race for bronze was turning into a nail-biter. Having held off the pack and skied by herself for nearly 20 k, Andersson (SWE) was quickly being overtaken. Niskanen was closing fast and bringing the rest of the chase group with her.

As the skiers headed into the final little climb into the stadium, Niskanen blazed past Andersson. Suddenly, what had seemed like a sure bet for bronze had turned to an 8th place for the Swede as Sundling (SWE), Sorina (ROC), Brennan (USA) and Claudel (FRA) all finished in front of her.

Niskanen (FIN) earned her second medal of the Games, after finishing just +0.4 behind Johaug in the 10 k classic, with bronze in the 30 k, this time with a much larger margin of +2:33.3. “The last 1500 meters in a 30 k is important,” said Niskanen in the press conference afterwards, “everyone is tired and I only did push hard and believe in my medal all the time.” 

The Niskanen family cumulatively won five medals in Beijing, Kerttu’s brother Iivo won gold, silver and bronze over the course of these games.

“We’re both happy,” said Kerttu, referring to herself and her brother, “I am happy that he made an amazing Olympics here. The whole family is waiting for us at home. Everyone is very happy.”

Having taken on much of the lead work for the majority of the race and after her near-medal performance in the skate sprint earlier in the Games, Brennan was once again just outside, finishing in 6th position (+2:38.7).

“[It’s] Frustrating,” said Brennan afterwards, “I literally tried everything I had and nobody wanted to work with me, so I just had to try to do the best I could and unfortunately it wasn’t enough and that’s hard to swallow, but I tried my best.” 

Bringing us further inside the experience on course, Brennan continued, “There was a gap that formed [at the beginning] and I just wasn’t in the right place at the right time, and Jessie played that so beautifully, it was amazing. I thought about fighting the wind to bridge it but I had a feeling there would be some places that popped off the back so I was trying to get that group to work with me and keep a steady pace and pick up the people that dropped, but those girls had absolutely zero interest in working with me. I kept yelling at them and being like ‘lets go get them’, and they did nothing. When that happens, there’s not much you can do but ski your own race. I did everything I could. I think the Finns have really fast skis, which was hard for me. I don’t regret trying but I wish it had turned out differently.”

When asked about not sharing the lead, Niskanen (FIN) replied, “I have to say that Rosie was really strong today, she push sometimes really hard to uphills and it was good for me because I thought that we had the best skiers in our group to make a strong speed all the time. I thought that we need to ski fast all the time, but many times I was tired and sometimes I thought that Rosie go in front of me but I think I had a little bit faster skis today so it helps me a little bit. I think everyone was really really tired, a long trip, many many races, and I was tired but today’s race was like a tired girls competition.”

Brennan confirmed that her skis were not competitive with those of the Finns, and when asked about seeing those athletes ski past her after she had done so much pulling she said, “It’s definitely a little demoralizing. Especially since I don’t think I had the skis to match that, I wasn’t able to get enough of a gap on the uphill to hold it on the downhill and that’s always a bummer but that’s a part of ski racing too.”

In the end, Brennan reflected, “I feel very confident that I’m in the best shape of my life this past week and I did everything I could to be in a place to win a medal and the rest is just largely out of my control. I can’t control the weather, I can’t control my skis, I did everything I could to prepare for the day so I have to be proud of that.”

Brennan also gave a shout-out to her supporters at home, saying, “I’m overwhelmed with all the support I’ve received, especially given the time [difference] and the number of people that have become nocturnal to cheer me on. It really means so much.”

“I’m so happy for Jessie, and I never wanted a podium more for someone like Rosie today.” said USST head coach, Matt Whitcomb, “Nobody deserves it more or less than anybody [else]. You just see Rosie come so close and all this hard work, and she’s at the absolute peak of her career, it’s been a long wonderful career, a challenging career, and you just want to see a medal wrapped around her neck. And so, if there’s something to take away from today, it’s one of the most successful days in US skiing history.”

Speaking to Brennan’s work leading the chase pack for much of the race he said, “[Niskanen’s] bronze medal was in large part earned by Rosie, and everybody knows it. And that’s just racing, it’s like a game of poker. Every time Rosie would try to pull aside and let someone else lead they would not. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s just tactics, but 10 seconds would open up every time she did so she would stay on the gas. She had no other choice. She did the only thing she could have done.”

Minutes later, the camera showed an American skier who had gone the wrong way, entering the lap instead of the finish. It turned out to be Laukli, who had to double-back and in the process was passed by the Weng twins, Tiril and Lotta, of Norway. In the end, Laukli came across the line 15th, +6:27.2 back.

“I’m bummed for her,” said coach Chris Grover, “that she lost two places because she worked hard for those but she did the right thing, retracing her steps all the way back and that’s one of the lessons that you do once on the big show and then you never do it again. Jessie did it in Sochi.” 

He continued, “It’s just an outstanding performance [by all the women] we had great skis. The techs did a great job.”

Laukli was followed just seconds later by her teammate Novie McCabe who completed her Olympics with an Olympic personal-best 18th place (+6:28.5) after an impressive few weeks of race efforts. McCabe was 24th  in the 10 k classic, and helped the American women to 6th in the relay last week. 

The scene at the finish line was reminiscent of the top of the Alpe Cermis after the Tour de Ski, skiers lay sprawled on the snow as staff members rushed to get them into warmer clothes.

Diggins was unable to stand on her own and was escorted out of the finish pen with two helpers on either side. 

Grover shared, “Jessie had food poisoning 36 hours ago and had a really rough night, she didn’t ski the last few days. You could see out there, her body language, for the last two laps she did not look fresh and for her to hang on like that for those two laps was an unbelievable athletic and mental performance. [Diggins] asked Matt in the feed zone what lap she was on and we had to tell her she was in the third lap, she had one more to go and then when she needed to go to the finish.” 

He added, ““I think this might have been the deepest she’s ever dug.”

Leading the way for the Canadians, Cendrine Browne finished in 16th (+6:27.6).

“[This is a] Canadian record in a mass-start at the Olympics and it’s also my personal best,” said Browne, “It’s amazing to leave the Olympics on such a high note. I’m thrilled, I have no words. It was tough conditions out there, really cold, very windy but I think I played it well. In the last lap there was an attack and I was able to stay with the group and pull away to finish 16th.”

In a race with giant time margins, Kathrine Stewart-Jones notched 30th, +7:39.3 behind Johaug. Dahria Beatty was 39th (+11:14.2) and Laura LeClair was 51st (+15:20.5). 

Jessica Yeaton, competing for Australia, was 43rd (+12:12.1). 

World Cup racing resumes next weekend in Lahti, Finland with a skate sprint and 10 k classic for the women. 

Results

Here’s why you should remember Rosie Brennan, too.

Brennan, 33, may lack Diggins’ magazine covers and national endorsement deals. But she performed at ever-so-close to the same level in Beijing, and came heartbreakingly close to the medals.

First, there was Brennan’s fourth place in the Games-opening individual sprint. She and Diggins finished in what was almost a dead heat — but the single second and single place between them was the difference between a bronze and no medal at all. 

Then, there was the team sprint, where the two U.S. women were paired. Brennan handed off to Diggins in medal contention after her last of three laps, but Diggins couldn’t hold on.

Finally, on Sunday, the last day of the Games, Brennan found herself on the wrong side of a split in the lead pack. Diggins was on the right side and went on to win silver. Brennan put her head down and dragged an uncooperative chase pack back into medal contention — only to again lose out on bronze by five seconds in the finishing sprint, when she was passed by the women she’d dragged back to the leaders.

“I literally tried everything I had,” Brennan told reporters afterward. “And unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, and that’s hard to swallow. But I’m very proud of my effort.”

Brennan’s efforts in Beijing deserve recognition in their own right. But they’re also important because of the circuitous route she followed to achieve them — and the path she paved for other skiers to follow in her footsteps.

At the start of Brennan’s career, the U.S. Ski Team was pushing athletes, hard, to skip conventional four-year college and commit full-time to skiing for the American program. Diggins, 30, did that.

Brennan went to Dartmouth University and raced on the collegiate circuit. 

When she started at school, she was also supported by the U.S. Ski Team. But then, after her sophomore year, she was cut. 

Brennan, who had also been injured in a car crash, almost quit the sport. But she ultimately decided to continue racing after college with the Alaska Pacific University club team in Anchorage.

Even after that, Brennan’s rise to the very top of cross-country skiing came with ups and downs: She got mononucleosis during the 2018 Olympic year, when she finished in third-to-last place in her sole race at the Games — and was cut from the U.S. Ski Team again.

But now it’s clear she belongs. And the U.S. coaches now concede that the cold shoulder they gave to collegiate athletes was the wrong approach. At the Beijing Games, more than half of the American team finished or is enrolled in a traditional college program.

“We were cutting the community in half. We took a hard stance, and it was an error,” Matt Whitcomb, the U.S. team’s head coach, said in an interview after Sunday’s race. 

Encouraging athletes to skip college, he added, is “not realistic, because you’re not taking the American culture into consideration.”

“Being social in college, and being a kid a little bit, for a little bit longer, is what we now understand helps us get longer careers,” he said. “You could almost look at Jessie Diggins as an anomaly.”

Whitcomb was one of the many U.S. coaches, team members and fans who watched Sunday’s race with mixed emotions — with joy for Diggins’ medal, but also with some anguish for Brennan’s third close call of the Games.

“She’s at the absolute peak of her career. It’s been a long, wonderful career, a challenging career. And you just want to see a medal wrapped around her neck,” Whitcomb said.

Chris Grover, the director of the U.S. cross-country program, summed it up this way: “It’s really hard when the medals only go three places.” He added: “The achievement for Rosie is spectacular.”

Diggins, for her part, had nothing but good things to say about Brennan.

“I’m just so proud of her. The Olympics is an emotional roller coaster, and she rode it with grace, and as a good teammate, and looked out for other people. She’s just been amazing,” Diggins said Sunday. “To me, she’s found success in every definition that matters.”

Brennan, after her last race, said she expects to be losing sleep for a while over her Olympic near-misses. 

But she also said she’s trying to keep things in perspective: She achieved her goal of racing all six events at the Games with good energy, and she’s proud of the training she did to make that possible.

“I feel very confident that I’m in the best shape of my life this past week, and that I did everything I could to be in a place to win a medal. And the rest is largely out of my control,” she said. “I did everything I could to be prepared for the day, and I really have to be proud of that.”

As Brennan heads back to the European World Cup circuit for more racing next weekend, she also will likely be keeping in mind a message she gently delivered to reporters earlier in the Games, after she and Diggins finished fifth in the team sprint. The takeaway: Keep paying attention.

“One thing that the U.S. is really bad at is only caring about the Olympics. But we’re racing World Cups every weekend,” she said. “It’s been a good experience. And we’ll head straight back to the World Cup and keep fighting for more.”

Last week, she posted a message to social media broadcasting some of the hateful criticism she’d received during the Games, telling her audience that “there will always be turkeys” and that it’s “not the end of the world to fail.”

Cross-country star Jessie Diggins, after winning a silver in her final race of the Games — her second medal in Beijing — had her own response to share.

“People need to remember that they don’t get to judge. They can try, but it’s nobody’s place to assess somebody’s mental state. It’s nobody’s place to assess their performance, or critique them or judge them,” Diggins said in an interview after her race, in which she brought up Shiffrin herself. 

Diggins has said she’s tuned out from social media and news coverage during the Games, where expectations for medals have put her in the spotlight. She also was at the center of a controversy around the New York Times’ coverage of her first medal in Beijing, as American cross-country skiers and fans objected to the newspaper’s description of Diggins’ body.

Diggins, in the interview Sunday, said teammates had shared Shiffrin’s post with her, and that she’s had identical attacks leveled at her. People, she said, “need to remember that there’s a human on the other end of that.”

“Someone’s out there putting their heart and soul on the line, over and over and over. That’s amazing,” Diggins said. “All we should be doing is applauding their guts and their grit. And so, I just think people need to chill, with the judging.”

Cendrine Browne set a new Canadian Olympic record by finishing 16th in the women’s 30-kilometre cross-country ski race in the free technique in Beijing.

Browne, of Prévost, Que., wrapped up her second Olympics by having the race of her life on one of the most challenging Nordic courses in the world, clocking a time of 1:31:21.6.

“This feels amazing to finish the Olympics on such a high note. I’m beyond happy,” beamed Browne following her second top-20 finish of the Beijing Games.

Canada’s previous best women’s finish in the 30-kilometre Nordic distance race came at the 1992 Olympic Winter Games when Lucy Steele was 33rd.

The 28-year-old Browne maintained a steady pace throughout the four grueling laps that featured long, steep climbs and gusty conditions at the Zhangjiakou National Cross-Country skiing Centre.

“I’m really happy with how I was able to manage my energy and keep my energy until the last lap.When there was an attack, I was able to follow today,” added Browne, who climbed 13 spots up the standings in her final 7.5 kilometres. “Wow, what an epic race. It was so tough out here today.”

Norway’s Therese Johaug led wire-to-wire, dusting the women’s field with a time of 1:24:54.0. Jessie Diggins, of the United States, celebrated the silver medal with a time of 1:26:37.3. Kerttu Niskanen, of Finland, skied to the bronze medal in a time of 1:27:27.3.

Katherine Stewart-Jones also skied into the top-30 for the second time in Beijing. The Chelsea, Que. skier clocked-in at 1:32:33.3.

“It was a tough race with really windy conditions, and a tough course, but I’m proud of how hard I pushed,” said Stewart-Jones, who was competing in her first Olympic Games. “Obviously I am a little disappointed because I was skiing in a group from 17th to 30th place. I was hoping to have more energy in the last lap, but I wasn’t able to hold on. I did the best I could with the energy I had today.”

Dahria Beatty (Whitehorse) wrapped up her second Olympics with a 39th place finish on Sunday, and a time of 1:36:08.2.

“It was an awesome experience,” said Beatty, who was 18th earlier in the week in the 10-kilometre individual start. “I’m happy to have had some really strong results across the board. To have the entire team have strong performances, it was an awesome Games to be a part of.”

Laura Leclair (Chelsea, Que.) placed 51st with a time of 1:40:14.5.

“It was definitely hard, mentally and physically,” said Leclair. “The conditions and course were really hard, but I skied smart. I lost the pack at the start but stayed there to conserve my energy throughout the race.”

Complete Results: https://bit.ly/34S0ZxK

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There were a number of stories to unpack during the men’s 50-kilometer mass start free, which was changed last minute to 28 k due to extreme weather conditions in Zhangjiakou. You’ve got Alexander Bolshunov leading the charge to collect a third gold medal of the Games, continuing his streak of nine Olympic medals in nine Olympic appearances. Bolshunov was followed by his teammate Ivan Yakimushkin, with all four members of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) finishing in the top six, interrupted only by two Norwegians, Simen Hegstad Krüger and Sjur Røthe, the first of whom earned bronze in his first Olympic appearance following a COVID-19 detention in a hotel room in Seiser Alm, Italy. 

But let’s get one key story to the front off the bat: The only American on the start list for the final men’s event of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games was Scott Patterson, and he skied to eighth place, just 26.9 seconds shy of a medal. It’s the second best result in American men’s cross country ski history, only surpassed by Bill Koch’s silver medal in 1976. That’s the best result in almost 50 years. 

Let’s rewind.

The news of the change in time and distance arrived just hours before the start of the race, with the following message from the organizers: “Due to strong winds and the resulting extreme conditions on course, the distance of the originally planned 50km will be shortened to 30km. The decision was taken in regards to the athletes safety, to reduce the time of exposure of athletes in extreme conditions.”

While there were various opinions on this change, which we’ve covered separately, there’s no getting around the fact that the race distance was slashed nearly in half. Nonetheless, as the lead group moved in and out of the wind, finding shelter on the leeward side of hills and under the protection of treed sections, the four lap course skied like a long-distance event. 

At the end of the first lap, the top-30 were separated by less than five seconds, thinning to a 13-man pack by the end of the second lap, and a group of 10 by the end of the third, with an 11 second gap to the first chase group.  

Perhaps the only truly noteworthy moment at this point in the race was the departure of Norway’s Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, who won gold in both sprint events – the individual freestyle and the classic team sprint – while also collecting a silver medal in the men’s relay and bronze in the 15 k classic. Klæbo later reported that he was struggling with a stomach illness and had spent more of the night prior to the race in the bathroom than he had been sleeping.

“I thought I would’ve regretted it if I didn’t give it a try but now I’m standing here and it didn’t work out on the whole,” Klæbo told the media.

He said it was “sad” pulling out of the race, but will focus on leaving the Games with his best Olympic distance results.

“I’ll definitely bring with me what’s been positive. What makes it feel more annoying is that my shape has felt better and better and I’ve actually felt that I’ve had a good energy today too. Then the stomach started to speak up and then it got very far to make it to the finish line.”

The race for medals truly began in the final lap. With Bolshunov and Krüger each surging to thin the lead group, Sweden’s William Poromaa and France’s Maurice Magnificat began to fall off the back. Patterson was tucked into seventh, working with Clement Parisse (FRA) and Denis Spitsov (ROC) to maintain contact and respond to the accelerations of the front. 

Over the final 5 k, Bolsunov kept the pressure on, looking relaxed as he tried to create space between himself and Krüger, who had been tucked onto his tails, matching him push for push. With them was Yakimushkin, the three skating in tandem as the finish line drew nearer. 

At 24 k, the leaders had only a few seconds on Patterson’s chase group, but when they hit the 27.2 k checkpoint, the gap had drastically expanded. Artem Maltsev (ROC) and Røthe were still just a few seconds back, but Patterson, Parisse, and Spitsov were now over 20 seconds behind, with a 20 second cushion ahead of the next chasers.

Up the final long climb, Krüger would not yield, holding his ground immediately behind Bolshunov. Tucked low into the downhill, the three stayed together, with Bolshunov upping the tempo and power as they accelerated out of the curves and over the gentle rises that interrupted the sweeping descent. 

As the three hit the final rise into the stadium, Bolshunov began to break away, with Yakimushkin using Krüger’s draft to slingshot into second with 500 meters to go. 

Entering the stadium, the gold medal looked to be predetermined. With a fist pump as he made his way around the final bend into the finish lanes, Bolshunov V2ed powerfully down the home stretch, crossing the line with his hands raised in 1:11:32.7.

Holding his advantage through a final sprint to decide silver and bronze, Yakimushkin crossed the line second (+5.5) with Krüger taking third (+7.0) for Norway.

Behind, Maltsev came to the line fourth (+10.7), followed by Røthe in fifth (+15.8). 

Spitsov led the now-spread chase group to the line, taking sixth (+26.2) ahead of Parisse in seventh (+28.8) and Patterson eighth (+33.9).

Nine Olympic medals. Three gold. Four silver. Two Bronze. Five from the 2022 Olympic Winter Games.

“Five? Really?” Bolshunov counted on his fingers as he exuberantly celebrated the golden ending to his Beijing Games appearance. “Five medals, three gold, it is something unbelievable because before the season I set the goal of two gold medals and now I have three. I’m just unbelievably happy. The emotions overfill me. This is above all praise to win these medals here. It’s very cool, and in every race that I took part in.”

Regardless of the color of the medal he earned, Krüger said his real victory was simply making it to Zhangjiakou and having the opportunity to race at the Games. Though his illness stayed mild and he stated that it did not impair him in today’s race, he had still spent 10 days in isolation in his hotel room, and remained in isolation while the opening event of the Games, the men’s 30 k skiathlon, was underway. Krüger was the defending Olympic champion in the event after taking gold in 2018. He went on to win a silver medal in the 15 k skate, and help Norway to gold in the men’s relay. 

During the 2021 World Championships, Krüger earned two silver medals, first in the 30 k skiathlon and the next in the 15 k free, with a bronze in the 50 k skate. He was one of the top distance skiers on the World Cup heading into the 2022 Games, shouldering Norway’s medal hopes; the nation experienced collective heartbreak following the news of his positive COVID test in late January. 

“To be able to go home with an Olympic medal, that’s a huge victory for me and an amazing feeling,” Krüger said after the race. “I’m really proud of what I have achieved today; from not thinking I would be able to ski one single competition to being able to get everything out here today.”

For Patterson, eighth place meant achieving the goal, though he admitted being in the hunt for positions even closer to the podium leaves him hungry for more. 

“I’m happy,” he told FasterSkier in the mixed zone. “I came in wanting the top 10 and got it today. It’s a little tantalizing to be in eighth and 33 seconds back from the win.” 

He continued that the “dream” of a medal crossed his mind as he found himself inside the lead group in the final lap, but he could feel the fatigue accumulating in his body and recognized that he was finding it hard to respond to the tactical moves of the eventual medal winners. “I don’t think it was exactly realistic to fully believe it was happening today,” he said frankly. 

Patterson’s result, while historic, should not come as a surprise to American cross country ski fans. He was 11th in the skiathlon at the opening of the Games, and has made his ability to come on form and earn season-best results during Championships well known over the last four years. 

During the 2018 Games in PyeongChang, he put together breakout performances, skiing to 18th in the skiathlon, 21st in the 15 k skate, and 11th in the 50 k classic. He raced into the top-30 in each individual distance race of the 2019 World Championships, with a 23rd place finish in the 50 k free. Improving on these results in the 2021 World Championships in Oberstdorf, Germany, Patterson was 14th in the skiathlon, 27th in the 15 k skate, and 10th in the 50 k mass start classic. 

And, he likes going long. He said he would have preferred another 20 k today – “I wanted the grinding instead of the punches” – and might have even been able to pull off a higher result had the race been longer. 

Back in 2016, his first World Cup appearance was in the 50 k classic at the Holmenkollen, which sits above Oslo, Norway. He was 32nd on the day in perhaps the most storied and highly revered cross country ski race on the World Cup. Patterson advanced to 28th the following year, before making a leap into the top-20 to finish 16th in 2018 and 19th in 2019.

From the outside, it can be hard to appreciate the dynamics of mass start racing among the best athletes in the world in the sport. Energy management, tactics, drafting, protecting equipment while the field remains dense in the first lap, which Patterson called “chaotic.”

“You get those lead skiers fighting the wind, and a lot of the back skiers that could just draft in. And there are a few people who definitely don’t have a lot of World Cup experience making a mess out of the pack,” Patterson described.

In his second Olympic appearance at the age of 30, with plenty of World Cup experience, Patterson skied a smart race, telling FasterSkier that he felt “strong” and “relaxed”, while looking to be “in a comfortable position and not [using] too much out of my energy.” He also reported having competitive skis that allowed him to utilize the downhills and stay in the position where he wanted to be. 

U.S. Ski Team head coach Matt Whitcomb complemented Patterson on his race execution, telling FasterSkier emphatically that he was “so proud of him.”

Talking through the race from his vantage point, Whitcomb pointed out that Patterson stayed calm through the congestion in the opening lap, rather than becoming flustered and wasting energy by constantly trying to move up. He also shared how Patterson was able to “wisely” keep himself on the correct side of other racers to utilize the windbreak on unsheltered sections of the course.

“Some incredible skiers ended up on the wrong side of the break and were toast…” Whitcomb explained. “When that happened, I heard a Finnish yelling at a German skier saying, ‘Hey, take me up to them!’ People were desperate to do work together, and so [I’m] very proud of Scott and unsurprised that he was in a tactically wise position.”

Apart from battling the elements, maintaining an optimal position within the lead group is also a skill that requires experience and maturity.

“If you have a pack of 15 guys, of course, it’s easy to follow in a draft in 14th and 15th,” Whitcomb said. “But what you don’t realize is that there’s quite a big accordion effect, so you’re constantly pulsating on the gas pedal. What you saw [today] was Scott moving up into between fourth and seventh, for a large part of [the race], and that ends up being a much more efficient position to ride. Draft is good, but you’re also able to just kind of stay on a steady gap.”

For Whitcomb, Patterson’s eighth place ends the Games on a high note for the American men’s program as a whole.

“This is, this is for sure one of the goals that our men’s program wants: to start breaking through in one of the ultimate races of the Olympics,” Whitcomb shared. “To do that today, under conditions like this, is such a huge success for our program and for Scott and for his club, APU. For all the coaches over the years, Erik Flora that’s worked with him, and the [rest of the] coaches at APU. It’s such a huge success for [Patterson’s collegiate program], the University of Vermont; Alaska Winter Stars where he started skiing; and just so many people have been a part of this incredible journey. And so happy for all of them. But mostly for Scott because he earned this sucker today. It was brutal.”

Two Canadian’s raced the 50 k today, with Olivier Léveillé leading the Canucks at the finish in 27th (+4:21.6). 30 seconds back, Rémi Drolet crossed the line in 35th (+4:54.4). 

Racing continues tomorrow with the women’s 30 k mass start freestyle, the final cross country event of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games. At this time, the distance of the women’s event remains unchanged, however, the start was moved up by 3.5 hours to account for the forecasted weather conditions.   

Results

But Bolshunov, who competes for Russia, is still going home with the gold medal.

That development is the result of a decision by race organizers to shorten the Olympics’ iconic 50-kilometer marathon event in the face of brutal wind and cold.

But they’re now facing harsh criticism from some competitors, coaches and fans of the sport, who denounced the decision — made just one hour before the start — as avoidable and unnecessary.

“It was an absolutely ridiculous decision,” Andrew Musgrave of Britain, a long-distance specialist, told reporters after finishing 12th. “If you can race 28.4 k, I don’t see why on earth you can’t race 50 k. Cross-country skiing’s meant to be the ultimate test of endurance.”

The International Ski Federation (FIS), which oversees Olympic cross-country skiing, would not comment beyond their statement announcing the change, saying the officials responsible for the change were in meetings after the race. 

“The decision was taken in regards to the athletes’ safety, to reduce the time of exposure of athletes in those conditions,” the announcement said.

Conditions at the cross-country skiing venue in Zhangjiakou, the mountain resort area outside Beijing that’s hosting the Olympic races, were extreme Saturday.

Strong winds shuddered windows and blew clouds of snow through the stadium and across the trails; a weather bulletin posted two hours before the race pegged temperatures at 3 F, with winds gusting at 30 mph to produce a wind chill of -21 F. Athletes ended up racing in neck warmers and layers of tape covering their cheeks to protect from frostbite.

But forecasters from the Beijing Games’ organizing committee had been predicting difficult conditions for days. The International Biathlon Union moved up its race scheduled for Saturday to Friday, citing low temperatures and strong winds in the forecast.

Athletes in Saturday’s 50-kilometer cross-country race, which was scheduled for 2 p.m., were still girding for a tough race in the cold when organizers sent a bulletin to teams at noon. The update said all options were on the table: “cancellation, rescheduling, shorter distance” or a course change.

The 28-kilometer distance, plus a one hour delay, were announced 45 minutes later.

Reactions were mixed, and a number of athletes and coaches said they understood the decision.

“It’s not ideal. But what is ideal about a day like today?” said Matt Whitcomb, the U.S. Ski Team’s head coach. 

Organizers, he added, have athletes’ best interests in mind. “They’ve got a lot riding on their wise choices, and to be a little bit conservative because of the cold and exposure is not a bad thing,” he said.

Scott Patterson, who placed eighth as America’s only competitor, said it felt like a “half-measure” to reduce the race’s length, adding that he would have preferred a delay to Sunday. 

But he was also skeptical that running the race at its original distance would have substantially changed the results.

“Those top guys were strong, and they would have been strong with 20 more k,” he said in an interview. “No fault to the organizers. I think they had a tough decision and made a decent call with it.”

Others, though, fell on a spectrum from frustrated to irate.

“Everyone wants to run 50 kilometers. Not 30,” Markus Cramer, one of the coaches for the Russian team, told Norwegian media. “Most teams are not happy.”

Musgrave, the British athlete, called the decision a “f@*king joke” on Twitter, and raced in a headband — not even a hat. Retired Norwegian superstar said the race should have either been postponed or canceled outright. And Petter Skinstad, a Norwegian ski racer and television commentator, said the decision destroyed years of training for athletes that specialize in longer distances.

“Why on earth is a 30 k okay and not a 50 k, and why on earth didn’t they do as biathlon and do the race a day in advance?” he said in a message — a point echoed by Hans Christer Holund, one of Norway’s top finishers in the race.

Biathlon officials said discussions about moving their race earlier started several days beforehand, with the forecast released by the Beijing Olympics organizers, said Max Cobb, a member of the International Biathlon Union’s executive board and president of the U.S. Biathlon Association.

Cobb, who stressed that he was not commenting on the ski federation’s decision Saturday, said the change in the biathlon schedule was not made lightly.

That’s because Olympic events are carefully sequenced to minimize conflicts in television broadcasts between different sports — and because of the risk that a forecast changes and renders a schedule change unnecessary.

“We really relied on the strong track of the meteorology team. And they’ve been nailing it,” he said.

In the end, and perhaps because the hour-long delay gave the winds a chance to subside, competitors said they didn’t end up feeling especially cold — and could have survived another 22 kilometers of racing.

“In retrospect, we could have raced all 50 kilometers, because the weather improved,” Bolshunov, the winner, said at a news conference after the race. “I didn’t get cold. It was only waiting for the awards ceremony that I got just a little shivery.”

Ivan Yakimushkin, the Russian who won the silver medal in the event, said he didn’t freeze during the race, either.

“I even broke a sweat,” he said.

We recently brought you a roundup of Olympic race suits from some more traditional nordic powers, focusing on those nations that had at least four men on site in Zhangjiakou and so were able to field a team in the men’s 4 x 10-kilometer relay. This article now turns its attention to athletes from some countries that you might not initially think of when you think of nordic skiing, as well as more traditional ski countries (Poland, Ukraine) that did not field a team in the men’s relay.

These photos, all of which are copyright NordicFocus, are from the qualification round of the women’s freestyle sprint, early in the Olympic Games on February 8.

Argentina

Armenia

Australia

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Brazil

Croatia

Greece

Iceland

Kazakhstan

Latvia

Lithuania

Mongolia

Poland

Romania

Slovakia (ft. alt. national-team race suit)

South Korea

Thailand

Turkey

Ukraine

Canada’s Olivier Léveillé wrapped up his first Olympic Games with his second top-30 finish of the week, finishing 27th in the men’s 30-kilometre free technique race. 

The Sherbrooke, Que. resident persevered through a broken ski and heavy winds that shortened the scheduled 5- kilometre race to 30 kilometres at the Zhangjiakou National Cross-Country Skiing Centre near Beijing. Léveillé completed the course with a time of 1:15:54.3.

“I’m very proud of my first Olympic Games. It was bittersweet. I felt insanely good today,” said the 20-year-old. “I was well placed in the pack and was about to make a move to climb forward into the top-30 on the first lap, but unfortunately someone stuck their pole on my ski, and it broke it.”

Léveillé was forced to battle through the next kilometre on one ski until he was met by a Team Canada ski technician to make the change.

“I lost at least a minute on the pack in that kilometre so I was proud to make it back,” said Léveillé. “It was a a mental battle today against myself and the wind, but I was able to get my second top-30 of the Games.”

Léveillé was also the top Canadian in the 15-kilometre individual classic cross-country ski race earlier in the week where he placed 29th.

Two Russians, Alexander Bolshunov and Ivan Yakimushkin, finished one-two in the race. Bolshunov was first across the line in a time of 1:11:32.7. Yakimushkin claimed the silver at 1:11:38.2. Norway’s Simen Hegstad Krueger was third at 1:11:39.7.

Rémi Drolet (Rossland, B.C.) was the only other Canadian in the 60-man field and finished 35th with a time of 1:16:27.1.

“It was a tough one out there. “It started off okay, but it didn’t go as well as I wanted today,” said Drolet. “It was just one of those days where I was really struggling and wasn’t able to find that next gear.”

The women’s 30-kilometre free technique race is set for Sunday in Beijing.

Complete Men’s Results: https://bit.ly/359dNiS

Alexander Bolshunov, the Russian skier who is the odds on favorite to win Saturday’s 50-kilometer freestyle marathon at the Beijing Olympics, may have more on his mind than a momentous ski race: A potential Russian invasion of Ukraine will likely pass near to his childhood home in the rural village of Podyvot’e, in Russia’s Bryansk region. 

Bolshunov grew up in Podyvot’e where his father taught him to ski on a pair of green wooden Malyshokas on trails he built by hand in the fields and forests near their home. “I don’t remember my childhood without skis,” Bolshunov has said in an interview. 

When Bolshunov was a kid he could travel by ski or otherwise into Ukraine, whose border is only a couple of kilometers from town. That changed in 2014 when Russian forces and Russian backed separatists invaded the Crimea and Donbas regions of Ukraine. Since 2018, Russian men between the ages of sixteen and sixty are banned from entering Ukraine. 

Now, with tensions rising as the Russian military surrounds Ukraine, some analysts have pointed to a potential invasion route of Ukraine that would take Russian forces close to Bolshunov’s family home. 

The Center for Strategic & International Studies has suggested that the northern invasion route may include “a 200-mile thrust through Troebortnoe, Russia…into Kiev.”

A major arterial highway runs through Troebortnoe. On the Russian side of the border it is called the M3 and leads to Moscow. On the Ukrainian side it is the M2 and runs close to Kiev. A Russian invasion would likely need that highway to move forces quickly toward the Ukrainian capital. 

The border crossing at Troebortnoe is only about 14 miles from Podyvot’e, separated by fields and a forest that stretches near to the doorstep of Bolshunov’s family home. “Just 500 meters from the house begins a large forest,” said Bolshunov, “Where there are those [loops] that I always run when I go there – 10 k, 15 k.”

For Bolshunov, this landscape of birch and pine represents the natural idyllics of his youth. “I love to go to the forest picking mushrooms, [and] also fishing if I have enough time.” Bolshunov said in an interview with FIS. 

“Childhood memories of the village—strawberries, for which we often went,” recounted Bolshunov. “Sometimes, 10 liters were collected. Another [were] blueberries—it took six hours to collect a bucket of 5-6 liters. Everything grew near our house.”

For the older residents of Podyvot’e, the forest also carries somber memories: A quiet memorial remembers the 182 villagers that were massacred by the Nazis as they hid in the forest. 

Whether conflict will arise again in the area remains to be seen. Should Russian President Vladimir Putin decide to invade this weekend, it would mark the second time he has done so in conjunction with the men’s Olympic 50 k race. 

In 2014, the night before the final cross country race at the Sochi Olympics—the men’s 50k—Putin held an all night meeting at the Kremlin with his security and defense leaders to discuss the annexation of Crimea. 

“We finished about seven in the morning.” Putin told a Russian TV documentary as reported by the BBC. “When we were parting, I told all my colleagues, ‘We are forced to begin the work to bring Crimea back into Russia’.”

Four hours later, the men’s 50 k race kicked off in Sochi and the Russian men notoriously swept the event. Putin would fly back in time for the closing ceremonies where the three skiers received their medals before a packed stadium. 

The correlation between the Olympics and Russian military adventures is quite direct. At the Sochi Olympics, the Russian medal haul helped boost Putin’s public approval numbers to record highs, and in his all night war room meeting that February, Putin carefully considered secret polling that showed favor to the annexation issue. 

In the Netflix documentary Icarus, former RUSADA head Grigory Rodchenkov who helped to orchestrate the 2014 Russian state sponsored doping program, said of the post Olympic invasion of Crimea, “I felt my personal guilt for such [an] event. [If] Russia had [won] less medals, Putin would not be [so] aggressive.”

In terms of medal count, the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) heads into the final weekend in second place. Their medal haul has been bolstered by the cross country ski team which has won a third of all ROC medals. Of those, four have involved Alexander Bolshunov, who at 25 years old has already become the winningest cross country skier in Russian history. He has won a medal in every Olympic race he has entered and is poised to deliver again in the men’s 50 k on Saturday. For his success, he has been nominated by the State Duma to carry the ROC flag at the closing ceremonies. 

For Bolshunov’s father in Podyvot’e, the results of his son have meant more than any economic advantage that his career has provided, and Bolshunov Sr. still prepares his ski trails in the hope that his son might make an unscheduled return. “Neighbors think I’m crazy,” Bolshunov Sr. has said. “But my son has such results. This is worth living for. Money is not manna from heaven, I never needed it.” 

Bolshunov Sr. has no plans to leave Podyvot’e. “You can’t kick me out of there with a stick,” Bolshunov’s father said in 2018. “As we lived, so we live. We don’t get into politics. Ukraine is nearby, but no one seems to be coming to us from there. Everything is fine.” 

Through no fault of Bolshunov’s own, a possible gold medal in the Olympic 50k could help burgeon feelings of confident nationalism in Russia and put his hometown on the frontlines of what could be the largest European war this century. When it comes to the men’s Olympic 50k race, the stakes are often much greater than gold.

BEIJING, China (Feb. 18, 2022) – Competing in the first mass start of her career on the Olympic stage, Deedra Irwin (Pulaski, Wis./ National Guard Biathlon & USBA) went toe-to-toe with the world’s best biathletes to finish 23rd in the elite field of 30 on Friday as the Beijing 2022 Winter Games’ biathlon competition came to a close at the Zhangjiakou National Biathlon Center. Irwin was 3 minutes, 24.1 seconds back with six penalties.

“This has just been such an incredible experience,” said Irwin after the race. “I’m still processing everything that’s happened these past couple of weeks at the Olympics.  I’ve gained a ton of confidence at these Olympics and really just went above and beyond my Olympic goal which definitely didn’t include the mass start. It was just an honor to get on the start line today and I was in awe the entire time.”

As with most of the competitions at the Beijing Games, the women’s mass start featured cold temperatures and strong winds cutting across the shooting range. As a result, none of the competitors shot clean. Irwin had four penalties in prone and two in standing, but felt privileged to be racing among the elite of the sport.

“Definitely during the race, skiing next to some of the best women in the world…wow…I am just still speechless,” Irwin said. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from these Games it’s that I have a lot more to learn and I’m just so excited to keep climbing the ladder. Skiing next to Denise Herrmann and Hanna Oeberg and Mona Brorsson and all the girls today…being able to fight next to them I am just so excited to continue racing and see what else I can push my body to do.”

France’s Justine Braisaz-Bouchet won the mass start gold medal with four penalties and a time of 40:18. Norway’s Tiril Eckhoff, also with four penalties, won the silver medal, 15.3 seconds back, while her teammate Marte Olsbu Roeiseland claimed her fifth medal of the Games, taking the bronze 34.9 seconds behind Braisaz-Bouchet with four penalties.

The biathlon season now shifts focus to the last three IBU World Cup events of the year, beginning with the March 3-6 competition in Kontiolahti, Finland.

Women’s 12.5km mass start results

Check out the Watch Olympic Biathlon schedule for viewing options of all the races from Beijing. You can also follow all the action on the IBU app – download it today!

https://apps.apple.com/app/official-ibu-app/id1581415457?l=en

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.ibu.app

Part 3: Olympic Hopes and Misgivings in Norway

For the Chinese cross country ski team, the 2022 Beijing Olympics opened with a blaze when Dinigeer Yilamujiang was selected to co-light the Olympic flame. It was an enormous honor for the twenty year old cross country skier from Altai, China with Uyghur roots. Yet her ethnic background overshadowed the moment, and, like so many aspects of the Chinese cross country skiing project, the ceremony meshed sporting aspirations with political theater.

Dinigeer, known as Dini on the ski circuit, is a rising star on the Chinese ski team. She is one of the few of the team’s new generation that grew up with skiing, and her father had hopes of becoming a great skier himself, and later became a coach. 

Dini’s father Mulaji Yilamujiang, never expected her to become a professional athlete. That began to change when at age twelve, Dinigeer competed in a regional race and a competitive chord was struck. “She wanted to win the race like a professional athlete and get on the podium,” Mulaji recounted to Chinese news outlet Xinhua.

It was hardly surprising then that when Kristian Bjune Sveen took the job as coach of the Swix China team in 2017, he picked fifteen year old Dini. 

Since then, her success has by any measure been extraordinary: At the 2020 and 2021 Junior World Championships, Dinigeer proved that she was among the best in her age group, finishing 5th and 6th respectively in the 5k distance. 

Together with her teammate Bayani Jialin—who had no prior skiing experience before joining Sveen’s team—the two have skied together on the World Cup to top ten team sprint finishes and top thirty in individual sprints. 

“Going from being an untrained person to being able to beat half the Norwegian national team and become a top 30 in a sport you [didn’t] know existed,” Sveen told NRK, “it is objectively completely insane!”

Liu Rongshen is another twenty year old Chinese skier that has impressed early in the Games. Originally a runner from Yunnan, he was “one of the athletes that came to Meråker [in] March 2019,” wrote Tor-Arne Hetland to FasterSkier. Liu finished 38th in the men’s skiathlon, some 16 seconds ahead of Johannes Klæbo. “Pretty [impressive] that he never had been on skis before he came to Norway,” Hetland wrote, adding, “Maybe in the sprint China can have athletes in the semi-finals.”

Hetland’s prediction nearly came true when Wang Qiang—China’s best sprinter and medal hope—qualified in 5th in the men’s sprint and appeared to have advanced out of his quarterfinal heat only to be ruled out due to obstructing another skier. 

In biathlon, the women are led by Meng Fanqi—one of the best sharpshooters on the circuit—as well as Chu Yuanmeng and Zhang Yan. All three are top class on the range, and with a home snow advantage, and fast skis provided by Norway, a relay medal remains a tangible, if distant, prospect. 

Although some juniors such as Dinigeer Yilamujiang spent the last few winters in Norway, much of the Chinese cross country team has been based in China since the start of the pandemic. 

To compensate for the lack of international racing for their homebound skiers, Russian second tier racers were hired to come to China for extended periods and enliven national races and ski with Chinese athletes. 

To the Chinese skiers advantage was sole access to the Olympic courses in Zhangjiakou ahead of the Games, although their coach Bernhard Rønning dismissed this assertion to Dagbladet, saying that while they had trained and competed in the area “not so much in the Olympic tracks.”

Still, the team was not without excellent training opportunities, with ready access to altitude, year round skiing in the Beishan tunnel, and “the best equipment,” according to Max Volkov, coach of the Chinese distance team.

Volkov, the former assistant coach to Alexander Bolshunov, joined a talented coaching staff in China, including his compatriot and former Olympic champion Nikita Kriukov, who trained their sprint team. 

Magnus Frodahl worked with the Nordic combined team, and former Norwegian World Champion Terje Langli ran the Chinese cross country teams wax service, and trained in two apprentices, Li Xin & Wang Yihan. 

Rounding out the core foreign coaches for the cross country team were Ole-Marius Bach, Bernhard Rønning, and Kristian Bjune Sveen.

Bjørndalen

The highest profile coaches to sign on to the Chinese Olympic project were Ole Einar Bjørndalen and his wife, former Belorussian biathlete Darya Domracheva. The two joined in 2019. 

After the pandemic interrupted their debut season with the team, Bjørndalen rejoined his squad in China during the summer of 2020.  

There, even for a legendary biathlete, the work was anything but glamorous. That summer, Bjørndalen worked daily from six in the morning to eleven at night. Each time he entered China he had to undergo a 17 day quarantine. Always the athlete, Bjørndalen ran 20 k a day inside his hotel room, running the length of the room around one thousand times. 

The biathlon team spent the 2020/21 season training in China inside of an intense bubble. “There is no question of anyone coming in,” Bjørndalen told NRK, “And if you are going out on an errand in Beijing, it is straight into the corona quarantine.”

That winter, Chinese President Xi Jingping visited the team. “I think he liked biathlon,” Bjørndalen said in the article.

According to NRK, Xi’s visit to the Biathlon camp underscored the expectations to deliver results. “We have set ourselves the goal of winning a medal in the relay,” Bjørndalen explained, adding, “It’s a pretty horrible goal, but anything is possible.”

The work of the famous duo has been apparent on the IBU World Cup, which China returned to this winter. US Biathlete Clare Egan said, “They’ve really done an incredible job bringing the athletes up. It’s funny because Daria [Domracheva] has a very unique and beautiful, graceful ski style and now all of the Chinese women, half the time I think they’re Daria when they go by me, they all ski exactly like her.”

The shooting prowess of the Chinese biathletes is exceptional according to Egan. “They’re incredible, incredible precision shooters. I have to imagine that their team hit percentages are at least as high, if not higher, than any of the other teams.”

“The reason they’re not winning medals is because they’re not quite there with the ski speed,” Egan said, “Even though they’ve really improved a lot.”

When Bjørndalen took the job he ensured his athletes would have competitive skis by signing a deal with the Norwegian biathlon team to wax their skis through to the Olympics. 

 Tobias Dahl Fenre, the head waxer for the Norwegian biathlon team, said of the wax deal, “We do not share the expertise. It will be in Norway. We employ Norwegian waxers in the Norwegian system.”  

The deal, worth an undisclosed sum, allowed the Norwegian biathlon team to hire four more techs, bringing their service team size to fifteen. 

Egan said the results of the wax partnership were clear on the IBU World Cup. “It’s cool to see them have a chance on skis because previously when they were waxing their own skis, they just didn’t have that background to be internationally competitive. Now sometimes they’re passing us on the downhill.” 

While the work of Bjørndalen, Domracheva, and Sveen have impressed, for the foreign coaches working in China, the experience varied. 

For Kristian Bjune Sveen, who took the job with Swix China when he was twenty five years old, the experience had been positive, if exhausting. “I work around the clock, every day, and have almost no privacy,” he told NRK. Nevertheless he said it was “an insanely exciting job. It is a coach’s dream to be able to design a plan that you want.”

Sveen felt that he would not find another opportunity to influence a whole skiing culture in the way that he could in China, and fretted that the next job wouldn’t match the significance of his present work. “It’s almost like I’m not sure if I want to be a coach again after this,” Sveen said. “These are athletes I think can be the best in the world.”

Others had more jaundiced views of coaching in China. When Anita Moen’s athlete’s were recalled abruptly in December 2019, the pandemic prevented her from rejoining her team until the following August. 

“By then, five months had passed without me having been a coach for them,” Moen recounted. “That was when I noticed the change. The basic work we had done, and on which we made such great progress, was destroyed.”

Moen’s athletes had returned to a Chinese sport system marked by authoritarian control. The result had a big effect on her. 

“I knew these athletes very well,” she said. “I did not need to talk to them. I could see it in their eyes…The joy I had seen was gone.” Moen found the experience troubling, and decided to end her involvement.

A non disclosure agreement had prevented her, (as well as many other coaches) from discussing the team’s work. Through these legal tools, much of what the Chinese team has been up to in the last year and half has remained opaque.

Soul Searching

As the Games crept closer, so did criticism of China’s human rights record. In Norway, the agreement to help the Chinese skiing programs became a contentious topic, with anxiety over whether the work of some one hundred coaches, techs, and physios was done in the service of expanding the sport, or rather a massive nation branding campaign to distract from China’s human rights abuses. 

Had Norway, the home of the Nobel Prize and defender of human rights, sacrificed its moral center for a trade agreement masked by a feel-good ski coaching story? 

That was the argument made by John Peder Egenæs, the head of Amnesty Norway, who suggested to NRK that China’s 2019 hiring of Bjørndalen—the most popular athlete in Norway—as the head coach of their biathlon team was part of a “big political game.” 

Egenæs believed that the Olympics were being used to “launder a deplorable human rights record,” and feared that Bjørndalen would be used as an “ambassador for [Norway] to forget the negative sides of China.”

Bjørndalen disagreed with the criticism, and told NRK, “I do not feel any political game in what I do. I focus on the skiers I have and do not have any dialogue about any propaganda with any leader.”

Sports commentator Andreas Selliaas fretted about the whole agreement, saying to Aftenposten, “I do not think Norwegian sports really know what they are involved in. This is not about skiing, but about nation building and domestic politics in China.”

Questions began to be raised about why the Sports Confederation was not consulted prior to the 2017 agreement. “The sport was thrown in like a meat bone to the Chinese,” was the assessment of Gudmund Skjeldal, a former Norwegian national team skier. 

Tom Tvedt, the former President of the Norwegian Sports Confederation believed that the agreement had overstepped the historic divide between Sport and State, saying, “In this area, the independent, free sports movement was abused.”

In an op-ed to Aftenposten, a group of PhD students at the Norwegian Sports Academy wrote, “Perhaps the point is not whether we, a tiny country, can influence the gigantic China. There is something called losing one’s soul. There is something more important than Olympic gold medals. It’s something more important than salmon, even.”

The authors pointed to the history of Norwegian sports resisting oppression, and ski jumping hero Birgir Ruud, who refused to organize competitions during the Nazi Occupation and was imprisoned.  

“So one might like to ask:” The authors wrote rhetorically, “[Why didn’t] Norwegian sports protest against being forced to cooperate with such a totalitarian power as China?”

The answer, they suggested, had much to do with funding. 

Others asserted that Nordic skiing needed China to survive in the future. In a story in Aftenposen, Rønning said, “If you bring China with you, you have almost saved the sport of cross-country skiing.”

Tvedt disagreed. “It’s really a disaster. Both for sports and Norwegian democracy.” 

Skjeldal and others have called for the Norwegian Parliament to investigate the matter. That the calls of alarm came at the doorstep of the Olympic Games may be telling. 

While Norway wrestled with the ethics of their nearly completed sports agreement, the Chinese cross country ski team faced controversies over the diversity of the team’s athletes that include ethnic Uyghur, Kazakh, and Tibetan skiers. 

The diverse team has been celebrated by Chinese State Media and questioned abroad. As a Uyghur athlete, Dinigeer Yuliamujiang is the prime example. She gained international fame overnight by lighting the Olympic torch—but not as a skier. Instead she has been viewed symbolically as Beijing’s defiant and brazen counter to charges of an ongoing Uyghur genocide. 

Dini’s teammate, Bayani Jialin, is an ethnic Kazakh, and Chen Zhendui (whose Tibetan name is Tsering Damdul), made history by being one of the first Tibetans to compete for China at the Winter Olympics. He too was caught in the furor of the Tibetan exile communities’ protest against the Games over human rights abuses and an Olympic inspired crackdown in Tibet.

The push and pull of dueling narratives has put the young and unseasoned skiers in an impossible position as they seek to make good on the far fetched expectations of medaling on home snow. 

The Chinese skiing project is something of a looking glass, with those involved seeing in it what they wish to see. For Moen, who had grown close to the athletes under her care, the project represented a lost opportunity.

“Imagine if we could have the Chinese athletes here in Norway most of the time, in all these years,” she pondered. “Then I think the whole project could have been very, very exciting. Because they had such extreme progress that they could [have] continue[d]. There could have been results that would have been sensational.”

Whether or not Chinese athletes in the Nordic disciplines manage to medal remains to be seen. The Games will mark the culmination of an expansive and unprecedented experiment in cross country skiing. 

Historians of the future may well parse out the significance that a few hundred novice Chinese skiers and their Norwegian coaches had on the course of geopolitics. For now, all we can do is watch them race.