Let’s take a moment and remember some American men’s relay teams from recent global championships. There were 2023 world champs in Planica, where the Americans finished eighth. There were the 2022 Olympics in Zhangjiakou, where the Americans finished over eight minutes back in ninth. There were 2021 world champs in Oberstdorf (eighth), 2019 world champs in Seefeld (ninth, four minutes back), 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang (eleventh of eleven, nine minutes back).
Candidly, my most enduring memory from that 2018 relay is of Noah Hoffman* heroically going L6 as he approached the stadium two-thirds of the way through his final leg, thereby narrowly avoiding being lapped by Norwegian anchor Johannes Høsflot Klæbo as he sailed in for the win and allowing the Americans to stay on course to finish the race. DFL > DNF, as they say; as someone who has been dead last plenty of times, I like to think there’s something to that.
* Update: It would be more accurate to say that first Scott Patterson on leg three, and then Hoffman on leg four, both pushed very hard in order to keep the Americans in the race. You can find Hoffman’s contemporary account of what went down here. I appreciate the reader emails on this point (no I really do).
I’m not, actually, trying to be snarky to any of the athletes involved in the above races, all of whom skied their hearts out for their team in literally international competition, which is a major thrill and not something I would ever criticize. And some observers have argued that the men’s relay has not always been a priority for the U.S. Ski Team as a whole, as witness the below meme discussing the 2018 Olympics:
That was then. This is now. Racing on Sunday in the men’s 4 x 7.5km relay in Gällivare, Sweden, the first team event of the 2023/2024 World Cup season, USA I scramble leg skier Ben Ogden came through the first handoff in fifth, 1.2 seconds in the lead and squarely with the lead pack. USA II scramble skier Luke Jager was in sixth, a fraction of a second behind him.
When that 2018 men’s team was finishing last in the Olympic relay, Ogden and Jager (along with Hunter Wonders and Gus Schumacher) were finishing an at-the-time-surprising second in the relay at World Juniors in Goms. Schumacher took the handoff from Ogden for USA I on Sunday. These kids know how to contend in relays.
At the second handoff, Schumacher to Scott Patterson to start the skate portion of the race, USA I was in fifth, 10 seconds off of Sweden and Norway in first. The U.S. was also skiing in a pack that contained third through sixth places — put another way, it was just over a second off the podium halfway through the race. USA II was all of nine seconds behind as Zak Ketterson handed off to John Steel Hagenbuch, USA I and the podium still very much in sight.
Ketterson has been on a World Cup relay–winning team. Patterson was on that same team, at World Cup Finals in March 2022. By my math, of the eight men racing for the U.S. on Sunday across two teams, a healthy six of them (Ogden, Schumacher, Patterson, Jager, Ketterson, and Steel Hagenbuch) had previously stood on the top step of a relay podium on either the World Cup or at World Juniors. Winning begets winning.
Over leg three, the race began to take shape in earnest. Simen Hegstad Krüger skied surprisingly poorly for Norway. Leo Johansson skied well for Sweden, buoyed by the home crowd. Steel Hagenbuch had the breakout race he’s been waiting for all season, smoking the day’s fastest leg-three time (sorry, Krüger and your boatload of medals, Steel Hagenbuch was 13 seconds faster than you today) to bring USA II into the final exchange in fourth.
Let me emphasize that: With one leg to go in an international relay, the American men were 2.9 seconds off the podium, and 6.9 seconds off the win. The front of the race at this point contained Sweden, Norway, Germany, Finland, Italy… and the U.S. Just some of your traditional men’s skiing powers.
(USA I was at this point in eighth. Scott Patterson will tell you, in his comments below, that he didn’t ski as well as he’d wanted to… but also USA I was still within 15 seconds of USA II at this point.)
Things came down to earth slightly for the Americans over the final lap. Edvin Anger pushed hard for Sweden early in his anchor leg. Jan Thomas Jenssen of Norway and Anian Sossau of Germany soon closed the gap that had formed, but the damage was done.
Midway through the final lap both USA I anchor Zanden McMullen and USA II anchor JC Schoonmaker were skiing in a large pack that contained fourth through eighth places, roughly 28 seconds off the lead. Norway was starting to pull away for the win, with Sweden second, and Germany dangling off the front in third.
Judged within the context of Sunday’s race, this was almost disappointing: The Americans were now racing for fourth at best.
Judged within the context of twentieth-century American men’s distance skiing: Holy crap! The American men haven’t finished fourth in a relay this century! This was amazing!
With 2 kilometers to go in Sunday’s race, both USA I and USA II were in the main chase pack of an international relay, setting up for a sprint for fourth. I hope I can say this while fully respecting the careers of all the athletes (and coaches, and techs, and parents, and supporters, etc.) who worked their butts off for the past twenty years to get American men’s skiing to where it is today, but that is a staggering sentence for me to write.
Jenssen dropped the hammer off the front to lose Anger within the final kilometer, ultimately soloing in for yet another Norwegian men’s relay win that was far closer than the final score indicates. Anger came in untouched for Sweden in second. Sossau started going backwards fast for Germany in third, but held it together to reach the finish line ahead of the chase pack.
About that chase pack: Elia Barp of Italy, Zanden McMullen of USA I, JC Schoonmaker of USA II, Miro Karppanen of Finland, and Karl-Johan Westberg of Sweden II were all skiing together. The last time McMullen anchored a World Cup relay team, the American men finished ninth, a minute off the podium. The stakes were higher this time.
Barp started pushing hard from four minutes out, trying gamely to chase down a fading Sossau for the final spot on the podium. McMullen immediately shifted gears and followed. Schoonmaker fell off the back.
The broadcast focuses solely on the leaders for the rest of the race, so it’s a little hard to tell you precisely what happened over that final kilometer. TLDR, Barp never caught Sossau for third, but he got himself a one-second cushion over McMullen, Karppanen, and Westberg to ensure fourth for Italy. Those three men came into the finish together. McMullen undressed them in a three-up sprint to take fifth for the U.S. just ahead of sixth and seventh. Schoonmaker came in soon after in eighth for USA II. McMullen could see third place cross the line as he set up for the sprint. The gap is suddenly that small now.
It was the best American men’s relay finish in decades. The U.S. was fifth in the Olympic relay in Salt Lake City in 2002 (team roster: John Bauer, Kris Freeman, Justin Wadsworth, and Carl Swenson), which you can and should read more about in the link below. They were sixth in a World Cup relay in Falun a month later (roster: Freeman, Andrew Johnson, Wadsworth, Swenson).
I spent a lot longer than I want to admit last night trying to piece together relay results from the dark ages of the twentieth century. I will hopefully present that research later this week, but the short version is that the Americans took multiple relay podiums in that time. So I am calling this the best American men’s World Cup relay result of this century, and their best high-level relay result since that fifth in Soldier Hollow nearly 22 years ago.
“Don’t look now,” Cory Smith wrote in his writeup of the Olympic relay, “but the United States is a force to be reckoned with.”
That race occurred on February 17, 2002. Ben Ogden had celebrated his second birthday earlier that week, and McMullen had yet to turn one. It’s been a while.
[Read more: Norway Beats Italy in Sprint to Finish (again), US Men’s Relay Teams Post Best Results Ever, by Cory Smith, on proto-FasterSkier, February 17, 2002]
I normally lead with the athletes, but Chris Grover (current job title: Program Director) has been associated with the U.S. Ski Team since a few years before that fifth in the 2002 Olympic relay, which Smith characterized, accurately, as “no fluke.” Here’s Grover’s perspective on Sunday, in comments to multiple media outlets:
“Today we got yet another glimpse of the true potential of this men’s team in relays,” Grover wrote. “We’ve known the talent is there given their World Junior Championship relay medal pedigree, and we know we need patience as these men make the step to World Cup and build critical experience. In the next seasons, these men will clearly challenge for the podium. We’re likely on the cusp of a period of truly inspiring USA men’s success. It’s also very exciting to see the team in 3rd place overall in the Nation’s Cup after two hard weekends of racing in Scandinavia.”
Okay, now on to the racers. I somehow missed Ogden for comment on leg one; that’s on me, sorry. But here’s Schumacher on how he skied leg two:
“My plan was to stick in that group with minimal effort and be ready for the inevitable push for the finish,” he told Nordic Insights. “I think I did well at that, except I really found it tough to move up through the group when we were getting closer to when the surge was going to happen, so when it did happen I had some distance to cover to even be able to fight for the gap. Not super ideal tactical execution there but I’m happy with it and it was fun to watch the rest of the race unfold!”
And here’s Patterson on his approach to leg three, to Nordic Insights:
“Gus tagged me off right behind Canada and Italy, so my immediate intention was to latch on to them and ski a relaxed race. However there were a lot of surges and pack changes that put me in the front doing too much work. I paid for that work later and am still building my tolerance for surges. Overall it felt like the team carried a slightly weaker performance from me.”
And finally, here’s McMullen, to Nordic Insights, on how he conserved his energy in order to throw down so hard in the sprint:
“When I got handed off to everyone was pretty spread out so, my first priority was to make a connection with a group. I went hard from the start to catch up with Italy and once I made the connection I tried to conserve as much energy as possible. We ended up picking off the group in front of us going pretty hard but I knew it was going to come down to the last 1-2 kilometers so I tried to ski as easy as I could while staying in the position I was — letting the leader of the pack do the work for me. I think it paid off because I had the kick I needed in the last 50 meters!”
Reader, yes he did.
On the “other team,” Steel Hagenbuch was thrilled to ski like he knows he is capable of, doubly so that he was able to do so on relay day.
“Finally happened today!” wrote Steel Hagenbuch in comments to multiple media outlets. “It all came together. Fastest leg of anyone out there. Hopefully I can keep this momentum going. Today… I had a completely new feeling in my body — it was like the good days of old.”
* * *
Finally, two notes on that opening leg of the relay. Pål Golberg, of the victorious Norwegian team, told FIS afterwards that he found the pace to start to be fairly modest, largely due to fresh snow on the course.
“It was a bit boring with the snow, but that’s life,” Golberg said. “That made the relay even more exciting.” Golberg presumably means by this that the fresh snow in the track was frustrating or annoying because he couldn’t ski away on leg one as he had hoped, but that this led to more excitement later because the field was more tightly bunched.
And speaking of a tight field: Norwegian media did not hesitate to call attention (accurately so, it must be said) to the fact that Ogden had one ski completely outside of the V-boards while passing another skier in lap one. On the one hand, the protest period has been over for roughly 36 hours now, the results are long since final, and the four jury decisions at the bottom of the official results contain not a thing about this, so the result stands. Scoreboard, and all that.
On the other hand, if you compare the inset photo of Ogden in this article (they’ve got a circle around his wandering ski and everything) with the course violations that got Calle Halfvarsson disqualified in Ruka last season or Federico Pellegrino disqualified in a sprint a few months before that (video in the fourth slide of this post), you could justifiably conclude that Ogden got away with something. That said, other teams had a chance to protest, and jury decisions are often inscrutable.
* * *
As the sun set on Gällivare on Sunday (at literally 12:57 p.m. lol), athletes turned their attention to the prospect of a tropical vacation in Östersund, Sweden. Gällivare is not the farthest north of any World Cup destination; Muonio, Finland, which hosted the opening races of the 1998/1999 World Cup season, is nearly 60 miles closer to the Barents Sea. But Gällivare does mark the apogee for this particular World Cup season.
Following the races, athletes traveled roughly 400 miles south to Östersund, where Saturday brings a classic sprint and Sunday a 10km interval-start skate. Harald Østberg Amundsen will go into Östersund as the overall leader in the men’s World Cup standings, and Jessie Diggins as the women’s leader. Rosie Brennan remains second for the women.
— 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.
