A Very Special Caturday: Skiers and Their Cats

This website has previously featured a 5,000-word profile on APU coach Erik Flora, a 3,000-word interview with a young Gus Schumacher, and, so help me, a full 10,000 words across two parts of a Kikkan Randall career retrospective.

This article is not like those articles. This article is instead a listicle of cross-country skiers and their cats. My research for this piece was fairly sporadic, and mostly consisted of a lot of time scrolling through pro skiers’ Instagram (like, even more so than normal) looking for posts of cats. I also searched for “cats” in the archives of DailySkier, which provided links for a few of these.

Happy Caturday! Enjoy.

Athlete: Jason Cork, longtime U.S. Ski Team coach

Cat: Ozzy Bean

Athlete: Susan Dunklee, retired U.S. biathlete

Cat: Ashley

Athlete: Andy Newell, retired U.S. skier and current head coach for BSF Pro Team

Cat: Finn (possibly now deceased; this post is from eight years ago, and Finn has not featured recently)

Athlete: Yana Kirpichenko, Russian skier

Cats: I read through every single comment on both posts, and sadly cannot discern from this the cats’ names. Alas. Highlights from comments (auto-translated): “My kitten also goes to training (eats a lot).” And, “It is unclear, either Yana is small or the cats are big.”

Athlete: Vilma Nissinen, Finnish skier

Cat: Mirri, in above post from 2017. Possibly now a different cat, per this story from earlier today:

Athlete: Zanden McMullen, U.S. Ski Team skier, and partner Sophia Mazzoni

Cats: Lumi (photo three) and Guinness (photo four). Here’s McMullen, via message to Nordic Insights, with some onomastic background: “Lumi (means snow in Finnish) is the white and gray one, and Guinness (yes the beer) is the black one.”

Cat: Kuzco (“My name is Kuzco after my mama’s favorite movie The Emperor’s New Groove.”)

Athlete: Logan Diekmann, American skier, and fiancée Grayson Murphy, American pro mountain runner

Cat: Skaði (the Norse goddess of skiing)

Athlete: My friend and APU Masters training partner, Anna Engel

Cat: Marit (the other Norse goddess of skiing)

Athlete: This reporter, who before leaving his last post eulogized his contributions to legacy ski media in this country as follows:

This concludes the inaugural Caturday post. Kateřina Janatová, in the vanishingly unlikely chance that you’re reading this, please consider posting photos of your two cats (mentioned here) on your public Instagram some time. Thank you.

— Gavin Kentch

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