Some things don’t change at the top of the results sheet for a men’s World Cup distance race ca. 2023: Harald Østberg Amundsen came into this race weekend in Östersund, Sweden, leading the men’s overall standings; Amundsen left Östersund leading the standings. Norway came into Östersund having won the approximately one zillion last men’s distance races; make it a zillion and one now after Amundsen’s victory in Sunday’s 10km skate. Plus ça change.
But if you look farther down — not even that much farther down! — then things start to get pretty exciting pretty quickly. John Steel Hagenbuch came into Östersund with an old World Cup career best of 45th. He leaves with a new World Cup career best of 13th. What a difference a week makes.
The front end of this race was all Norway, again. Norway had eight men entered in this race; seven of them finished in the top nine. (Sjur Røthe, still clearly working his way back from Covid, was slumming it in 24th.) Amundsen, Simen Hegstad Krüger, and Didrik Tønseth, in that order, made up the podium. Emergent star Jan Thomas Jenssen was fifth — and was the fifth finisher on his team. Klæbo was only seventh. Pål Golberg was only ninth. Andrew Musgrave, who is Norwegian-lite, was interspersed in sixth. There are a lot of good skiers in Norway.
But there are some good skiers in the U.S., too. Steel Hagenbuch saw some positive signs following a 45th in the 10km skate in Gällivare last Saturday, then was over the moon after he recorded the fastest leg-three time in Sunday’s relay.
“Finally happened today!” he said then. “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.”
Success builds on success. Starting today in the relatively early spot of bib 22, Steel Hagenbuch had relatively few athletes on course ahead of him for purposes of receiving splits. Undeterred, Steel Hagenbuch smoothly built into his race: 43rd at 2.1 kilometers, 32nd at 4.3km, 22nd at 6.1km, 13th at 9.4km, 13th at the finish. He crossed the finish line and was immediately escorted to the leader’s chair.
Steel Hagenbuch finished this race a fraction of a second behind one Iivo Niskanen. He skied it with the confidence of someone still throwing down on the Carnival Circuit against his peers. It was a huge day for the Dartmouth junior who is still just 22 years old.
“Today’s race felt great,” wrote Steel Hagenbuch in comments shared by USSS — “a continuation of the form that started to come around in the relay in Gällivare. I executed my pacing really well, and it’s very gratifying to have a such a good result also! Hopefully I’ll be able to carry this momentum into Trondheim, U.S. Nationals, and the rest of the season through NCAAs.”
“The relay in Gällivare was not only really fun and great day for our team, but it was a turning point for me personally,” Steel Hagenbuch added in comments to Nordic Insights. “I hadn’t quite found that form in the races before, and it felt great to ski well in a relay with my best friends. I definitely tried to enter today with the same energy and mindset, and it’s really gratifying to execute well and achieve a great result for me.”
It was a busy day for the American men’s team, which saw six other finishers in the race along with Steel Hagenbuch: Gus Schumacher in 21st (+1:17.8), Zanden McMullen in 27th (+1:24.3), Ben Ogden in 46th (+1:54.0), Scott Patterson in 48th (+1:55.3), Luke Jager in 58th (+2:27.6), and Will Koch in 72nd (+3:04.4). It was also a career-best day for McMullen, eclipsing the 22-year-old Alaskan’s 28th in Ruka. The U.S. Ski Team’s fearless youth contingent is doing a lot more dreaming than sleeping at this point in the season.
Gus Schumacher was 21st, a result he bettered only three times in all of the 2022/2023 World Cup season, and was already looking for more today.
“I feel like I’m getting a little impatient for better results,” he wrote through USSS, “but I also know I gotta take my time and be happy with it being really stable solid feelings and results right now. As long as it stays basically like this it won’t take much to have a really good one I think. Sweet to have the team doing well too!”
“The boys doing so well yesterday was definitely a mental factor for me today,” McMullen told USSS of the effects of yesterday’s sprint. “The bad thoughts never really creeped in because I could always think about racing hard for my teammates.”
McMullen expanded on his race in more detail in comments to Nordic Insights.
“I think as a whole I paced the race almost exactly how I wanted to,” he wrote. “I wanted to ski into the race and progressively get faster. I think I executed well but didn’t have a hard enough last 2 kilometers. I was sitting in a draft and didn’t have the confidence to move around and finish hard. Lesson learned and hopefully won’t happen again :)”
Yesterday’s co–man of the hour, Ben Ogden, was the only one of the Ogden–Schoonmaker pair to put a bib back on and get out there today. I asked him how he worked to come down from that high yesterday and get back into race mode again today. It’s a good problem to have, obviously, but also it does take time and work to recalibrate after a day like yesterday.
Here are Ogden’s thoughts on this process, in writing to Nordic Insights. I’m gonna editorialize for a second here and say: everyone read this. It is imho great real talk on what happens after the sprint final and the celebrations and the champagne and the hugs:
“Last night I was still pretty amped up when my head hit the pillow. I had to force myself to stop replaying the race in my head. Usually, to do this, I try and visualize the process of completing some project that I have wanted to do at home. I think about the tools and parts that I will need, the challenges and the order of operations. That usually helps me fall asleep and then once you wake up it’s just like any other race day except you might be more tired than some.”
I asked Luke Jager — you’ll sense a theme here — how a day like yesterday affected the whole American team when they went out to race today. Here’s Jager, to Nordic Insights:
“Obviously insanely stoked for them! They are inspiring in their belief in what they can do and they are just really nice guys who are easy to root for. Makes you realize there is no substitute for hard work and belief, and that’s a nice thought to have for all of us going into every race.”
And finally, I noted that this was Will Koch’s second career World Cup distance start; his first, also a 10km skate, came in Les Rousses last season. I asked the 21-year-old, more widely known as a sprinter, what he has learned so far about World Cup distance skiing.
Here’s Koch: “I feel very very fortunate to have gotten these unexpected opportunities, and they are excellent times to learn!
“The biggest lesson for me is to be patient, both during the race and with training. In a race, it’s tempting to try to catch a ride on some Norwegian and hang on for dear life until a bonk, when the right thing to do is to wait for a sustainable ride from a more similar speed skier. In training for distance racing, it’s important to realize that it takes many years of hard training to build that capacity, and to be patient with the inevitable ups and downs of racing and focus instead on the long term.”
I’m tempted to moralize here about the importance of process, but after reading these thoughts from Steel Hagenbuch to Koch, and everyone in between, you can probably figure that one out for yourself. Go team.
Racing continues next weekend in Trondheim, Norway, in a preview of the 2025 World Championships venue. There will be a skate sprint on Friday, a 20km skiathlon on Saturday, and a 10km interval-start classic on Sunday to wrap up Period 1 of the 2023/2024 World Cup season. It will be the first skate sprint of the season, and the only skiathlon.
— Gavin Kentch
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