The race season is largely over for North American pro skiers. Jessie Diggins is off surfing on one coast. Julia Kern is off surfing on another coast. Gus Schumacher is backcountry skiing in Alaska. Scott Patterson is backcountry skiing in Alaska.
Rest and relaxation may look a little different depending on the athlete — Rosie Brennan relaxed by finishing second and fifth in a 40km and a 70km in far northern Norway on successive days last weekend, closer to the Arctic Ocean than to the Arctic Circle — but it’s safe to say that few skiers are following a formal training plan this month.
All of which is to say, it’s time for season-ending content: presenting the First Annual Nordic Insights Readers’ Choice Awards! By any standard one of the most prestigious awards bestowed by an English-language nordic ski site anywhere!
Here’s how it will work: Voting will be open for each of the following categories:
- Best American Female World Cup Performance (Jessie Diggins division)
- Best American Female World Cup Skier (non–Jessie Diggins division)
- Best American Male World Cup Performance (Ben Ogden division)
- Best American Male World Cup Skier (non–Ben Ogden division)
- Best American Female Domestic Skier
- Best American Male Domestic Skier
- Best American Female Junior Skier
- Best American Male Junior Skier
Come back and visit this site throughout this week. Read the blurb about each athlete or performance. Vote. There should be polls embedded on this site, if I can make WordPress do what I want it to; if not, you’ll have to click a link to briefly go to a third-party site, sorry.
This is going to be a fastidiously democratic process: I *will* write about the person who receives the most votes, and crown him or her as the recipient of the First Annual Nordic Insights Readers’ Choice Award. This is not supposed to be an invitation to stuff the ballot box for “Skier McSkiface,” but we’ll see what happens.
(That said, yes, I did make the I think relatively noncontroversial editorial determination that Jessie Diggins and Ben Ogden were the best American World Cup skiers last year (cite: scoreboard). There are therefore two separate categories here for each gender: Best skier other than Diggins/Ogden, and best single performance last season by Diggins/Ogden.)
Voting opens tomorrow. I’m going to do one category a day for each of the next several days, then will write up the winners at some point soon after that, while also saying something interesting about every nominee. Thanks for reading, and please come back daily to vote. Thanks.
— Gavin Kentch
