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A Very Special Caturday: Skiers and Their Cats

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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 ā€œcatsā€ 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): ā€œMy kitten also goes to training (eats a lot).ā€ And, ā€œIt is unclear, either Yana is small or the cats are big.ā€

Athlete: Vilma Nissinen, Finnish skier

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

Photo: screenshot from @vilmanissinen Instagram story.

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: ā€œLumi (means snow in Finnish) is the white and gray one, and Guinness (yes the beer) is the black one.ā€

Cat: Kuzco (ā€œMy name is Kuzco after my mama’s favorite movie The Emperor’s New Groove.ā€)

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

Skaưi in the snow. (photo: Anna Engel)
Skaưi with some ski boots. (photo: Anna Engel)

Cat: Skaưi (the Norse goddess of skiing)

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

Marit on a chair. (photo: Gavin Kentch)

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 JanatovĆ”, 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

Would you like to read more articles like this? Is this the best ski-themed listicle you have ever read? Would you like to help cover the site’s expenses to send Gavin on in-person reporting trips to both Houghton and Whistler for U.S. Nationals and World Juniors? Find out more about our GoFundMe (terms and conditions: we’re donating anything in excess of actual expenses back to NNF), and consider donating,Ā here. You may have noticed that there are not, currently, any ads up on this site; your support truly makes a huge difference to the financial viability of this startup website. Thank you for your consideration.

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