I wrote last week, to open my coverage of the 20km skate mass start in Ruka, that there are a lot of Norwegians out there who are very good at distance skiing, but also that young American distance star Gus Schumacher was having a robust start to his season after a few years of (relatively) (for him) diminished performance, with a strong 16th place on the day.
Standards are less stringent for sports journalism than for appellate litigation, so let me just incorporate a lot of that by reference here: go back and read the start of last weekend’s article if you would like. Maybe also take the previous day’s discussion of Norwegian dominance (no non-Norwegian man had won a World Cup distance race since Iivo Niskanen in February 2022) into account. Keep the part about Schumacher finishing 16th, and add another race or two to the ever-growing streak of Norwegian men winning distance races.
Put all that together, and you get today’s headline: Pål Golberg was the fastest of a deep bench of Norwegian men, taking a narrow win in Saturday’s 10-kilometer interval-start skate race in Gällivare, Sweden, ahead of Harald Østberg Amundsen and Iver Tildheim Andersen. Norway claimed the entire podium, and seven spots in the top 10 (7.5 if you count Andrew Musgrave). Gus Schumacher was 16th to lead the Americans, continuing his resurgent start to the season. These things write themselves!
Here’s the pacing line graph for today’s top five men. (In order at the finish, from first to fifth: Pål Golberg, Harald Østberg Amundsen, Iver Tildheim Andersen, Simen Hegstad Krüger, and Andrew Musgrave.)
This was no Diggins domination, as had characterized the women’s race that morning. Rather, the ultimate winner, Golberg, does not take the lead until the 6.3km mark. The leader at 5km, Krüger, fades slightly over the second lap, dropping only 5.9 seconds over 5km, but also slipping off the podium in the process. All three podium spots are very much in play with 1.1km yet to go, with Golberg ultimately holding steady in first even as Krüger slips from second to fourth, Andersen stays in third, and Amundsen closes well to move from fourth up to second.
Put another way, the five men portrayed on this chart trained, I am certain, a cumulative 5,000 hours last year. Think of this less as a dry math problem, more as a crucible in which to bring to bear a staggering amount of work in the service of finding literally a single second over one kilometer out there — the difference between first and fifth on this chart is just six-tenths of a second per kilometer. Tough crowd, albeit a crowd made up largely of Norwegians.
Turning to the Americans, Gus Schumacher led the way for the U.S. in 16th, again, this time 41.8 seconds back of Golberg. He was followed by Ben Ogden in 25th (+57.1), Scott Patterson in 35th (+1:09.5), Zanden McMullen in 36th (+1:10.2), John Steel Hagenbuch in 45th (+1:23.2), Luke Jager in 54th (+1:42.4), and Zak Ketterson in 58th (+2:01.3). That’s a lot of red, white, and blue light blue and pink; add in the sprinters also on site and the U.S. will start two full men’s teams in tomorrow’s relay, a rare but not unprecedented event.
“I’m feeling really happy with where I’m at!” wrote Schumacher after the race to multiple media outlets.
“It’s been four really solid races now, and I feel like my body hasn’t really gotten to full race mode yet, so I hope to keep it rolling! My goal moving forward is to just try to make the right training decisions and start to reframe my mindset to be ready to really fight for those top positions! At halfway I got a split that I was 10 seconds out of the lead, and I honestly wasn’t really ready for that feeling, but going forward I will be!”
While I’m trying hard not to make this entire website be about how great Alaska skiing is, today or other days, it is nonetheless demographically striking that all of Schumacher, Jager, and McMullen grew up in Anchorage youth skiing at the same time. Jager nosed out Schumacher by 0.2 seconds for the win in the Chugiak Classic middle school race of February 2014, for example, and probably hasn’t let him forget it since. So I asked all three men what it’s like to now be racing at the highest levels of the sport with friends whom they’ve known for so long.
“It’s definitely cool,” Schumacher wrote (this and every other quote in the rest of this article is in writing to Nordic Insights), “but also we’ve all been racing as a U.S. team for long enough now that I think we forget about the different backgrounds a lot of the time. That being said, once in a while high school skiing comes up and we reminisce on how it was to win races. ;)”
And here’s Schumacher’s longtime friend, Jager (that’s the two of them above in high school in 2016, racing for Anchorage’s Service and West high schools, respectively), on this same question:
“It’s really fun to get to have people I know so well and have known so long on the World Cup! Makes it feel like a little family and makes the good days more fun and the bad days not so bad.”
Saturday seems to have been more of a good day for Ogden (25th), after some not-so-good days of distance racing to begin the season. I asked Ogden how his “other” discipline — he was 10th in the Sprint Cup last year, but “only” 26th for distance — was feeling so far this year. Here’s Ogden:
“Distance racing has been a mixed bag so far. I was unimpressed with how I felt in Ruka but that almost made me want to distance race more. I hoped that with some races under my belt I could do better and wanted to make It happen.
“Today I was happy with how I skied. I think I could have been better at points but generally happy with the pacing and how my body felt. Certainly excited for some sprinting coming up as well, I think Östersund will be a fun one.”
For Patterson (35th), Saturday was less a good day or a bad day than simply a building day, characteristic of an athlete with a ferociously high training load who typically takes some time to work into the season.
“Period 1 has always been a time for building race fitness and this year is no different,” Patterson wrote. “Usually it takes me a bit to shed summer training load and sharpen into race form. I had a very busy fall and knew that might even be more the case this year. As always, I want to be racing faster now, but also know my form will come in and can be patient with how I’m doing now.”
Saturday was probably not a great day for John Steel Hagenbuch (45th). “It did not all come together in the interval start race,” Steel Hagenbuch wrote to Nordic Insights. “Skis were really good, but it felt like I was lacking sharpness in the top end of my effort. Where I normally am able to ski really well in the last kilometers of skate distance races, I felt like I was going backwards in the last three kilometers. Legs felt heavy and like I couldn’t really push the way I would like to. It’s still quite early in the season, so I’m hopeful the good feelings will come soon.”
Finally, I try really hard never to put words in an athlete’s mouth by classifying a race for them as “good” or “bad,” but Ketterson (58th today) had written on Instagram that Ruka was “a much slower start than expected” and on Strava pre-race that he was hoping for “less of a corpse body [today] than last weekend,” so if you want to draw some conclusions that tend toward the negative that would probably be justified.
I asked Ketterson, in advance of the race, how he mentally reset to head out there yet again.
“Mentally, I have just been trying to focus on the process and keep doing the things that have always led me to success,” he graciously wrote after another rough day. “It’s really tough when they result in such bad results and bad feelings during the race, but I have to believe that it will turn around. It’s still really early in the year so I’m trying not to make any big conclusions yet. Just trying to be patient because I’ve done the work.”
I also queried, “How would you characterize your feelings today on the corpse-like scale?”
And here’s Ketterson on today’s cadaver quotient: “Today was definitely on the corpse side of the scale unfortunately, but again, no choice but to keep the head up and focus on the journey!”
* * *
Speaking of long journeys in skiing, Saturday marked the World Cup debut for Alvar Myhlback, the 17-year-old Swedish wunderkind. Myhlback finished a healthy 37th among the men, in what is probably not even his strongest event.
In the women’s race, meanwhile, Riitta-Liisa Roponen became the oldest World Cup racer of all time when she finished 35th. Myhlback was born in 2006. Roponen was born in 1978, and made her World Cup debut in 1998, when Myhlback was negative eight years old. I sort of hope they got a picture together on Saturday.
Racing continues tomorrow with a 4 x 7.5km relay. Ben Ogden and Gus Schumacher lead things off for the Americans on Team mostly APU USA I, handing off to first Scott Patterson and Zanden McMullen. Team USA II sees Luke Jager reprise his role from the Olympic relay (and multiple World Juniors relays) on the scramble leg, followed by Zak Ketterson, John Steel Hagenbuch, and JC Schoonmaker. It is very far from a hot take to opine that Norway should be favored.
— Gavin Kentch
Financial real talk: I worked my butt off for the first year of this website, and took home a net profit of all of $1,500. Inspiring stuff I know. And that was only thanks to the $3,000 that I took in from readers through my GoFundMe. On the one hand, I’m not going very hard on soliciting donations right now, because this is fundraising week for the NNF’s Drive for 25, deservedly so. On the other hand, the money from the GoFundMe is the only reason that I had a profit instead of a loss for the first year of Nordic Insights, and is in turn why there is a second year of Nordic Insights that you are currently reading — I was on board with doing this for very little money out of a love for American nordic skiing, but didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing this.
So. If you would like to support the second year of Nordic Insights, last year’s GoFundMe is still up here. I will update this with a new fundraiser soon/once Drive for 25 ends; for the time being, just mentally substitute in “World Cup” for “Houghton” (basically the same venue tbh). All the money still goes to the same place. Thank you for your support, and thank you, as always, for reading.
