ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The 2023/2024 SuperTour season kicks off tomorrow with a skate sprint at Kincaid, the first of four races to be held there between Tuesday and Sunday (formal viewing guide coming tomorrow). The current sprint course at Kincaid Park is by this point well established; it first hosted sprints at 2018 U.S. Nationals. It has since hosted Besh Cup (Alaska’s JNQ series) sprints nearly every winter, RMISA sprints a few times, and a handful of other high-end competitions.
But in December 2017, as Nationals loomed and poor snow conditions in Anchorage kept the course from hosting even a high school race as a test event before a national championship, none of this was yet known. There was enough snow to ski the course, and local athletes were doing so, but no formal sprint race had yet to be held on it.
I spoke with Matt Pauli, chief of competition for those races and longtime operator/groomer with the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage, in early December 2017 about the history of the original sprint course at Kincaid, and about the considerations that went into designing the new one. An edited version of that conversation is reprinted below. I have elided some of the interview that was specific to 2018 Nationals. I have not altered Pauli’s statements. Some modern-day updates are appended at the end of the interview.
TLDR if you want the executive summary:
Sprint course v.1.0 was more spectator-friendly, but had smaller hills and was susceptible to being doublepoled in its entirety in a classic sprint. Sprint course v.2.0 takes athletes up the main climb entirely out of sight of the stadium, but is more challenging and has a steep 24-meter B-Climb that realistically no one would choose to doublepole, but that can be designated as a classic technique zone just in case.
Legal fine print: The original version of this piece was published on FasterSkier, or I think more precisely on a blogs.fasterskier.com subsite that is now offline. The copyright of this article inheres in and is claimed by the original author, Gavin Kentch, who wrote it for FasterSkier on a volunteer/non-employee basis, and who now reprints it here.
Me: So let’s start at the beginning. When was the first sprint race at Kincaid?
Matt Pauli: Actually and formally, at 1999 JNs [Junior Nationals]. They initiated the first prologue, which was a short event, but not quite a sprint. I think Rob Whitney was racing then; I think he cleaned up that day. But the way the sprint rules evolved, you started seeing them in early World Championships in 1999, probably 2001, and then the first Olympics in 2002. So it evolved from there.
So it’s the Kikkan Era, basically.
It’s that, and maybe it’s a specialization era, too. I think that’s what I notice. … It’s just evolving, the way I think the sport has always evolved.
Can you tell me about the history of the initial sprint loop at Kincaid?
You look at [the hill to the immediate northeast edge of the main Kincaid Stadium] — some people call it the Junior Nordic Hill, I call it the Play Hill, and I think it’s more or less going to be taking the name of the Gong Hill — that all used to be trees. The only trail going through it was Margaux’s Loop. And that was it.
Then shortly after that we started getting snowmaking for the area. I can’t put an exact date on when the area was cleared out, but certainly it had to be in 2005, 2006, because that’s when the first piping started going up there for snowmaking. That was the vision, to go up that way.
When you say, “Let’s design a sprint loop,” I’m taking it as a given that you pretty much have to start from the stadium. That’s where all the infrastructure is, like the timing building and the scoreboard, not to mention that it is by definition a large open area with space for full start and finish lanes. And I assume that you have to finish in front of the timing building, presumably coming in from the north for the uphill finish. So you’re sort of constrained to start with.
Taking all this as your starting point, and then assuming that you’re looking for a loop that’s probably in the 1.3- to 1.6-kilometer neck of the woods, what else do you think about in setting up the sprint loop?
Certainly for the athletes, you think about technical challenge, testing all the different techniques, turning techniques, ascending, descending. Providing areas where athletes can overtake each other. Ensuring that it’s a sprint loop that falls within a time frame that it doesn’t become a distance course.
What I’ve heard, and information passed on to me, and just what I’ve observed when I’ve got to serve on juries at World Cups and such, is you’re looking at 3 to 3 1/2 minutes [time for an athlete to ski the sprint course]. And that way it gives the spectators something to see, it gives the athletes good recovery time before the next heat, and it keeps the competition, particularly World Cup, World Championships, anything that’s televised, within a certain time period. Spectator-friendly — they’ve got to see it. That’s the whole reason, I think, behind it. Another big reason is that you want to be close to the spectators, you want people to see the competition.
There’s probably a myriad of other things that you can throw in there for homologation, but the general theory is: competitiveness, fair, safe, spectator appeal, and in some instances TV appeal, too.
So that was the first sprint loop, and we all skied on it for a decade or so, and there were two national championships held on it (in 2009 and 2010). Did it work? Was it a course that did the things you just described?
I think it worked, up until getting some comments last year [i.e., 2016] about doublepoling. And deep in the back of my mind, I already knew that — every fall I used to attend the FIS meeting in Zurich, just to get an idea. And I remember last fall, 2016, the FIS hierarchy, Vegard Ulvang, just producing all these videos of youngsters starting to doublepole just about everything, and how classic technique “needs to be preserved.”
And knowing that here at Kincaid we just have — we’re a nonprofit, in a public park, you just can’t do what you want. It has to be feasible, and it has to meet whatever plan they have for the park as well. So I knew right away that I wasn’t going to be cutting new trails. I might be working on some trees — or, as we like to call them, “shrubs” — to make it a better course, make it a safer course when you throw the safety aspect in there.
The whole aspect is that we’re not going to be doing wholesale trail work. So I think, from the Zurich meetings, and knowing that watching [the classic sprint at] Besh Cup last year, watching actually Besh Cups throughout the last three or four years, watching college races that decide to run a sprint — I never thought our sprint course was a bad course, ’cause I got anecdotal good feedback saying, “Hey, this is really spectator-friendly.” I think for the most part, our sprint loop is pretty much visible during the competition.
So if the course works well, why change it? Is it safe to say that this is largely responsive to changes in classic skiing over the past decade?
Yeah, that has a pretty significant bearing on it.
So let’s talk about the new course. Can you just walk me through what it looks like, and what it’s designed to do, and how it came to be?
As for the climbs that are associated with this one, I met with [USST Development Coach] Bryan Fish and [then–U.S. Ski & Snowboard official] Robert Lazzaroni after 2017 Spring Nationals. I said, “This is what I think would work pretty well.” And that meant starting higher up on the plain [in the central Stadium area] by the Lekisch tunnels, and cutting up in front of the Gong Hill, toward the Bunker Tunnel. And then dropping down to what we call the low point, or the Frog Pond.
And then climbing out of there again — that climb sets it up that, number one, I’m trying to limit doublepoling the entire thing. Throwing that dogleg in there for the final, you take that left-hand turn and you still have to climb to the top, you’re going to lose all your momentum there in a doublepole. And there’s no way, on some of those 17 to 19 percent grades, you’re going to be able to pick up that momentum.
Certainly you can herringbone up it, that’s a diagonal technique. But I think from a standpoint of pushing your way up it in a doublepole — maybe in another couple of years. (laughter) It’s only going to evolve. But that’s, I think, one of the main reasons to switch things around.
It still follows the same line of coming back off the top, the men going behind and the women coming across what I call the Saddle, where the gong is, and then dropping down back into the north end of the Stadium. And doing a really good 180 at the bottom. There’s a big arc right there. It’s wide, it’s not off-camber. There’s some narrow bits coming back into the main race trail, where the old sprint loop used to finish.
But it just follows the regular path in. Which is a good finish from the standpoint of, you know, you have a 1.5, 2 percent grade to the finish [up the final straightaway through the Stadium to the finish line].
And you know, I would like to see 3 percent, actually. But I’ve been in stadiums at championship venues that had 5 percent. I think that, for having a 100-meter straight stretch, it just so happened to work out. And certainly the grade’s kind of changed with the artificial snow on top, when we push that out — but at the same time, we still keep the original finish zone [in front of the timing building].
Is it quote-unquote “good” or “bad” that you have to change the course like this to react to changes in classic skiing, or just neutral?
I think it’s neutral. Certainly any time you go through a homologation, there’s a cost involved. I have to get an inspector out here, and that’s a $600 fee. And each certificate application, each certificate, has a fee. So there’s always those costs that can be borne by the event, borne by the Organizing Committee. I’m not getting paid, but I still gotta collect the data. And then at that point it becomes time. Because I have to — I’m not a map guy, so I go to my friends at CRW Engineering, and I can bug the hell out of them, and they go, “Oh, I’ll put someone right on it.” So there’s certainly people’s time involved.
We’ve talked about changes in classic skiing over the past ten years, and why that was a main reason for changing around the sprint course. This is getting sort of inside baseball, but are there different considerations for a skate sprint than a classic sprint? Would there be anything stopping you from running two different sprint courses in one championships?
The parameters for a freestyle sprint are more liberal, because we know we’re not going to be doublepoling. So that’s why you see city sprints — you can basically have a freestyle sprint on a flat course, because the parameters say so. As the [homologation standard] tables indicate, there are some differences in what we would look at for classic and freestyle.
For right now, it’s just convenience. I would gladly go back to the old sprint for the freestyle. But then it means that the teams and the athletes are going to lose a ski depot. Because that’s what I designed at that south end of the Stadium by the Lekisch tunnel — none of the courses go over that anymore, unless of course we’re going on the snowmaking loop for all races. But it’s an area where athletes, coaches, and technicians can set up their ski depot for testing skis, switching out skis, because it has direct access to the waxing areas. So that’s the main reason we’re using the same course [for both techniques].
* * *
So that was then. With the benefit of hindsight: Both sprint days at 2018 U.S. Nationals went off without a hitch, even though they were the first two sprint race days ever hosted on this course. Athletes liked the new course.
“It was a great course,” Reese Hanneman told me for my race-day article. “Really hard — I would say probably the hardest sprint course we’ve had at Nationals in a while. It rivals Fairbanks last year. But there’s a big hill, something you would see on a World Cup, or [World] Championships, so that made it hard. Super-fast downhills. … I think it’s one of the best courses we’ve had in a while. There’s some gradual terrain, there’s a hill, an A-climb, one of the biggest climbs I’ve seen on a sprint course in the U.S., probably ever. I think it’s a great course. It’s fair, everybody likes it, it’s fun. But it skis really well, it’s fast. You can’t get too much better than that.”
“It’s a good course,” echoed Kevin Bolger. “It’s really fun. Good hills, good downhills, good cornering. I think it kind of gets at, you’ve kind of got to be a good all-around skier to kind of be able to go from the qualifier to the final.”
Tyler Kornfield was also on the podium that day. “This is an incredibly fair course; it’s incredibly wide, and it was a lot of fun,” he echoed.
And as for now? I interviewed an ebullient Luke Jager in the Kincaid stadium after his win here in a RMISA sprint in February 2023, in a race he called “one of the most fun days of skiing here I’ve ever had.”
“This is legit,” Jager said of the course at the time. “If it were just a little bit wider, this would be a legit World Cup course.”
Indeed, added a man who had started the 2022/2023 season in Europe, “This is very comparable to some World Cup courses I’ve done this year. Davos is at altitude, but it’s a lot flatter than this. And Lillehammer, where we’ve been racing the last two years in the biathlon stadium, is also a lot flatter. I mean, there’s not that many World Cup courses where you’ll have a good 30 seconds of sustained V1,” as is the case here.
(For perspective, the max climb on the last two Olympic and four World Champs courses ranges from 18 to 35 meters (Oberstdorf and Seefeld, respectively), and total climb from 43 to 57 meters (Pyeongchang and Seefeld). The current homologated sprint course at Kincaid has a 24-meter max climb and 48 meters of total climb. This is admittedly a sort of brute-force way to quantify the far more holistic question of how a course skis, but it seems fair to say that the climb statistics of the current Kincaid sprint course place it squarely at the World Cup level of courses, if not quite of global championship courses.)
Racing here starts tomorrow with the skate sprint qual at 11 a.m. local time (3 p.m. East Coast time), with heats scheduled to run from 1:30 to 3 p.m. (5:30 to 7 p.m. EST). Check out the viewing guide, going up on this site tonight or tomorrow, for results and more details.
— Gavin Kentch
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