If you’re reading this article then you just got through 3,300 words on the men’s race (sorry) (I was excited), so this piece is going to be a little more straight news and a little less What It All Means. To wit: Rosie Brennan and Jessie Diggins led the women on what was a strong day for the entire American team, finishing fourth and fifth in the classic sprint in Östersund, Sweden, earlier Saturday in the third weekend, and second sprint, of the 2023/2024 World Cup season. It was a classic sprint career best for Brennan, although she was also left wondering what might have been after being impeded by Swedish coach Lars Öberg when Öberg strayed egregiously far into the tracks in the final 70 seconds of the women’s final.
Conditions were decent for classic skiing — but also, according to the athletes, trickier than it looked from the outside — with air temperatures a humane –2° to –3° C (mid-20s F) and a firm track. Brennan has said in recent interviews that she enjoys classic skiing on firm snow, and that she has made great, uh, strides over the past few years in working with her tech and with Rossignol to dial in classic skis that work well for her. Those trends were on display today, as Brennan finished sixth in qualifying. Diggins, third in qualifying, and Julia Kern, 15th, also joined her in the heats.
Brennan and Diggins each won their quarterfinal to advance to the semis. Kern was gapped in her quarterfinal and could never quite make up the difference; she finished fourth in her quarterfinal, 0.78 seconds from advancing. Kern ranked 17th overall on the day.
When Brennan and Diggins (and, clearly, the rest of the field; these rules are applied evenly to all athletes) set out in their semifinal heats, the glide wax application on their skis was not on its first heat of the day. Gone are the days of, say, Jason Cork heroically brushing out and re-powdering skis under time pressure between heats of the 2018 Olympic women’s team sprint; current rules, aimed at implementing the ban on fluorinated wax, state that adjusting the glide zones between heats is no longer allowed. Kick wax can still be finessed, but these refinements now occur within plain view in the fluoro control zone, and subject to a strict list of permitted tech tools:
You can find more information here in this year’s FIS Equipment Control handbook if you are really curious. The short version is that a more rigorous approach to testing skis for the possible presence of fluoros means that once skis have been sampled for testing by race officials, no one is going to be touching their glide zones after that.
When Rosie Brennan and her fluoro-free ski bases set off in the day’s first semifinal, she was at the front of the field 50 seconds into the heat, driving side by side with Emma Ribom of Sweden. It was still Brennan and Ribom neck and neck well into the second minute of the race, with Brennan leading the field into the downhill. But she fell into third up the top of the penultimate climb, and was in fourth, on Kristine Stavås Skistad’s tails, as they descended back to the stadium.
Skistad’s skis and descending skills were superb as she came into second. Ribom won the heat, with Skistad second and Linn Svahn third, clearly back in form after returning to World Cup racing late last season following a years-long hiatus due to injury. Brennan was fourth, a full 2.73 seconds out of second, and would have to watch the clock to see what happened next.
Thankfully for Brennan, the winning time in her heat was four seconds faster than in the second semifinal that followed. Both lucky losers came from her heat.
There was less drama for the Americans in the second heat. Tiia Olkkonen of Finland broke a pole in the opening seconds, making it effectively a five-athlete race for the rest of the heat. Diggins proceeded to lead basically the whole way, first skiing alongside Moa Lundgren of Sweden and then pulling away for good in largely a repeat of her quarterfinal heat. It was a technically and tactically astute showing from an athlete who is needing fewer and fewer caveats about her classic skiing. The below tweet discusses Diggins’s classic skiing last weekend, but it is not irrelevant today:
(Maja Dahlqvist was third in this heat and did not advance to the final, but she may well have gotten Lundgren had the race been another 20 meters longer. It was a strong return to form for the veteran Swedish skier after a fairly rough start to the season by her high standards.)
The final saw Brennan, Skistad, Diggins, Lundgren, Ribom, and Svahn, from left to right on your broadcast, at the start. It was snowing lightly.
The Americans took their time off the line, with Brennan last in the heat at the base of the first short climb. Diggins pushed hard to stay nearer the front. It was Ribom, closely followed by Svahn, Diggins, and Skistad, around the first corner and into the downhill roughly 90 seconds into the nearly 4-minute-long final.
It was still anyone’s race one minute later as athletes came up the largest climb. Ribom and Svahn were at the front, but Diggins, Skistad, and Brennan were all charging hard behind them. A strong move here could decide the race.
Then, this happened (watch the far right of your screen):
That’s Rosie Brennan, an American athlete, and Lars Öberg, a Swedish coach, both trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Inasmuch as that space is literally on the race course, it’s not really editorializing to state that Öberg should not have been there.
Brennan was on the far outside approaching the turn, and took a wide, very wide, line around it. She tucked in ahead of Skistad and behind the two leading Swedes in third overall. Diggins was slightly off the back of this group in fifth.
Brennan was in third coming off the downhill and into the finish, but ended up with another wide line here and had the longest distance to travel. Skistad came past her like she was standing still, rocketing past Svahn and finishing second overall. Ribom’s win was never in doubt. Svahn was third, Brennan fourth, and Diggins fifth.
Okay, now I have to talk about Öberg. On the one hand, it was, by any objective measure, a grievous example of obstruction. No coach should be there or should obstruct an athlete like that, and you will not find anyone who will argue to the contrary. On the other hand, I am going to very gently push back against some of the people who have been DMing me about this race. I do not, personally, believe that this was part of some grand conspiracy to obstruct Brennan at the expense of Diggins. Personally, I also believe that it was unintentional, and believe Öberg when he says it was an accident. You may debate among yourselves what effect it had on Brennan’s race; I don’t think it’s controversial to conclude that it was a negative one.
Here’s what Brennan had to say in the mixed zone after the race (I’m transcribing from her video found at the top of this article):
“He stepped in my track as I was coming up the hill, so I had to stand up and scream,” Brennan told Expressen. “What’s happening?” was her first thought when she saw this. “And screamed. That’s not what you expect when you’re moving fast and you’re tired and you’re trying to make every part of the course count.”
And the $64,000 question, how did it affect her and her race?
“I mean, I had to stand up and slow down,” Brennan noted, “so that’s not good. It could have been worse, I could have fallen or broken a pole or something, so I did the best I could with what it was. But it’s not how you want a ski race to go.”
Brennan did not disagree with a Norwegian coach’s assessment that it was poor sportsmanship. “Coaches should be the most aware on the track,” she noted. “They know how a ski race works, and how hard we’re trying. So they should be the last people you expect to step in front of you. … You can’t have coaches doing that; that’s not okay.”
The Expressen article linked above contains more thoughts on this. It quotes Norwegian coach Eirik Myhr Nossum as expressing his displeasure: “I was pissed off when he destroys the practitioners. It doesn’t matter if it’s for me or someone else. But they have spent eight months preparing,” said Nossum, according to an auto-translation.
The same article quotes Öberg as saying, according to an auto-translation, “It was incredibly rude of me. I got too close to the track. It’s really sad but I can’t rewind the tape. I have to take responsibility for it and have apologized. It was a pure accident.”
Öberg was fined 6,000 Swedish krona, or roughly $570, according to Expressen. (It was more precisely 500 Swiss francs, the currency of Swiss-based FIS, per NRK.)
U.S. Head Coach Matt Whitcomb struck diplomatic tones after the race.
“What happened to Rosie in the final is really what I fear most as a coach,” Whitcomb wrote to Nordic Insights earlier today. “Coaches are human, and we get excited and can have tunnel vision when we cheer for our athletes. It can be easy to lose sight of another team’s athlete as we cheer for our own, and to inadvertently impede their race. It happens, and thankfully it’s somewhat rare.
“This particular coach is in charge of the Swedish Ski Team, and you can be assured that the media will hold him accountable more than the FIS fine or loss of his weekend credential will. He’s a fantastic guy who apologized to me, and even called Rosie after the race to apologize directly to her.”
NRK reports that Öberg “has been stripped of his coaching accreditation for the rest of the weekend,” in addition to the fine.
In her post-race comments to Nordic Insights, Diggins praised the work of her tech team, noting that, appearances on TV notwithstanding, conditions were in fact “incredibly tricky out there,” as the tracks glazed and started to break down in the fresh snow. She lauded the tech team for finding “the elusive unicorn” of both great kick and great glide. And she identified her uphill striding as a strength, “which is not something I think I’ve ever said about classic skiing before,” Diggins candidly noted, “but I was really proud of myself for just going for it, trying to stay relaxed, but powerful in striding.”
You can, and should, listen to the full audio above. Spoiler alert, Diggins ends it by talking about the American men today, and how, like the rest of us, she cried watching the final.
And finally, here’s Brennan, in comments to multiple outlets:
“In general, I’m pretty excited about my race today. I am pretty sure that was my best ever classic sprint, so that’s hard to complain about. Obviously I had a little mishap in the final, and that’s not ideal. It’s hard to know how much that impacted the race or not, but that’s just never something you even want to wonder about.
“But aside from that, I am feeling good, and I’m excited to have some sprint in me; that makes me really happy and optimistic. And then watching our men just like absolutely destroy the final was so incredibly inspiring and heartwarming and exciting and really uplifting. So things are good right now.”
Racing continues in Östersund tomorrow with a 10km interval-start skate, for the second weekend in a row. Alayna Sonnesyn, Novie McCabe, Julia Kern, Sophia Laukli, Rosie Brennan, and Jessie Diggins are scheduled to start for the U.S. Diggins will again start the day in the yellow leader’s bib, by a single point ahead of Emma Ribom; Brennan is third in the overall standings. The U.S. is also currently third in the Nations Cup standings.
— Gavin Kentch
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