ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Julien Locke had never raced at Kincaid Park before this week, but he is quickly figuring out the lay of the land here. The 30-year-old Canadian (Black Jack Cross Country Ski Club/Nordic Pulse) was second in the classic qual earlier Saturday, then won both his heats to advance to his second sprint final of the week as the 2023/2024 SuperTour kicks off in Anchorage. He promptly made it a brace of victories, taking the win in the 1.4-kilometer classic sprint to go along with his win in Tuesday’s skate sprint over the same course.
Logan Diekmann and Reid Goble, both of Bridger Ski Foundation Pro Team, were second and third in the final, a strong showing for the Bozeman-based club. Michael Earnhart (APU), Christopher Kalev (University of Alaska Fairbanks), and Murphy Kimball (Alaska Winter Stars) were fourth through sixth, respectively, buoyed by a partisan hometown crowd.
So what has Locke learned from his now eight trips around the Kincaid sprint course at race speed?
“I knew from my quarterfinal, and semifinal, and even the qualifier, that there’s a big wind and drafting effect on the last downhill” Locke said, speaking to Nordic Insights in the lee of the paltry shelter that the two-story timing building afforded from the ever-present north wind slicing through the Kincaid stadium. (All quotes in this article come from in-person interviews at the venue.)
“But I just wanted to go over the top with as much of a lead as possible. And that worked out pretty well.”
It did, inasmuch as Locke doublepoled to the finish to win off the front, never more than a second ahead of the BSF boys in second and third but his win also never truly in doubt.
Locke’s success here this week belies some rough times over the last several years.
“I was on the national ski team for four years, in Canada, and I was progressing along,” he said. “And then I had a string of health issues — first a concussion, viral issues, just kind of a big smorgasbord for two or three, four years. And last year was a good step back; I felt like I was able to train somewhat hard again. There was always something that was holding me back. And this year is the first year that I’ve been able to just work hard all summer with very few setbacks, and just feel like myself again.”
Locke is, as I noted, currently 30 years old. On the one hand, this is less over the hill in endurance sport than it is squarely in the prime of one’s career; of the ten men currently leading the overall World Cup standings nine of them are between the ages of 27 and 33, and five of them are older than Locke is now.
On the other hand, funding is always hard to come by, and the root of the word athlete is an Ancient Greek verb meaning “to suffer,” and it can be hard to sign up for more years’ worth of suffering when the results aren’t there and one’s friends and coevals move on to jobs and careers and actually contributing to retirement accounts. (I’ve currently put aside a lucrative J.D. to crowdsource my writing about nordic skiing on the internet at age 42; ask me what I know about this.) And, well, there are a lot of reasons why David Norris was one of very few athletes over age 30 at U.S. Nationals this year in a field of 450.
And so I asked Locke, looking back over the past few years — again, keep in mind that he last raced on the World Cup in March 2019, and has been grinding away in the minors ever since with the knowledge that he is capable of being a top-15 World Cup skier — what he would say to anyone looking at Instagram who thinks that pro athletes’ lives are always perfect, that no one is ever injured and it’s always Extra Blue days and drinking coffee with your friends in the sunshine.
“Well, I’d be skeptical of social media in the first place,” Locke observed.
“You know,” he continued, “sport is hard. I think people are inspired and they want to pursue sport. I think it’s a wonderful thing.
“Sport has given me so much. It has not been a smooth road, at all, but it’s hard. It’s not a step-by-step path — for some people it is, but for a lot of people it’s not. … If you look at Rosie Brennan right now, she’s skiing incredibly well. She’s been an incredible skier for a long time, but I think sometimes the stories of people who have just stuck with it for a long time and trained really well for years and years are overlooked a bit, and those are the people that inspire me a lot.”
[read more: Rosie Brennan and the power of persistence]
Logan Diekmann (BSF), second today by 0.59 seconds, had similar thoughts on life and process. Diekmann is 26. He’s won SuperTours and been second on a skate sprint national championship podium, behind only some rando named “JC Schoonmaker.” He’s been third in qualifying in deep OPA Cup fields, and has been the overall season-long SuperTour sprint champion. He’s engaged to Grayson Murphy and has a cat named Kuzco, both of whom have a strong Instagram presence.
Diekmann has also started ten World Cup sprints, qualifying in precisely one of them (so far). In five of them, he was an ohsoclose 32nd to 38th, as little as 0.39 seconds away from qualifying.
I’m straight-up editorializing here, sorry, but I can’t say how much I admire this. I think about what it must be like to be one of the 32 best people in the entire world at this extremely niche thing that you do, an objectively negligible distance away from being 30th, paying hundreds of dollars a day to slog through Europe and live in anonymous hotel rooms, training and tapering and doing everything right, waiting for the one three-minute window each week in which you get to practice your craft, hoping that you will be 30th in the world at it this time rather than 32nd, the results output of a thousand hours of training last year coming down to just 0.39 seconds one way or the other. I respect this.
All of which is to say, how was your race today, Logan?
“I think I am happy with the way I skied today,” Diekmann said. “It’s nice to remember that, despite maybe some self doubt, or things like that, I think everybody goes through that on a daily basis. And it can be hard to avoid that. So despite that I still raced well. And I’m happy with that. It was a tough day mentally, but I think it’s nice to see that I can fight through that. So I’m happy with that.”
(Diekmann had previously said that he was “just not feeling it” after a personally lackluster day in Tuesday’s skate sprint, especially when approaching a classic sprint discipline that has “always been a little bit up and down” for him.”)
So I asked Diekmann effectively the same question I had put to Locke: What do you say to junior skiers who look at the pros, particularly their social media personae, and conclude that life is always perfect?
“I think the big thing I can say to those kids is, everybody’s gonna have self doubt,” Diekmann mused. “And that’s just a part of the game. And being able to, from like a meditative standpoint, focus on allowing those those negative self thoughts and negative talk to flow past you is important. I think finding a way to do that can be really challenging, but if you can do that, that’s the best way to handle it. I think everybody’s gonna have those thoughts. And trying to remember why you love skiing and what what you like about it is also really important. Those are the things that I remind myself.”
Back to the editorializing one last time, those two answers alone justified the discomfort that I experienced in a truly adversive Kincaid stadium today.
And on the other end of the experience spectrum: Sixth in the final, but first in the hearts of many local spectators today, was Murphy Kimball. Kimball, who is a senior at West High here in town, is still just 17 years old. He made sure to speak with me in the presence of an adult, per USSS policy for minor athletes interacting with media.
“I had a great start,” Kimball recounted of his last race of the day. “And I was able to stay right in the front up the first hill, and when we got to the A-Climb, the big Gong Hill, they were all fighting to go for the lead; I started to pull back a bit. But it was a great final.”
Did he expect to outright win the qual today, I asked Kimball, hopefully not too obnoxiously (for perspective he was fourth in the classic qual on Tuesday, so this result was not a complete surprise).
“I wanted to just be present in the race that I’m in,” was the mature response. “To get to the start line and be present the whole way, and just push hard. And then there’s no expectation for me — except I do want to make top-30, make the heats. That was my goal. And I had an amazing qualifier.”
The athlete dutifully present for this interview was Kimball’s mother, Jenny Kimball. As Jenny Naylor she won the 50km skate Tour of Anchorage, the flagship citizens race in this state and typically the second-largest ski marathon in the country, in 1998 and 2000. So I asked Kimball fils to what extent his parents have been low-key leading by example, and to what extent they just had to drive him to the race and he could take it from there.
“It’s definitely started with telling you what to do, teaching me, letting me learn on my own,” he said. “And now it’s a bit more I’m leading myself a bit. Now that I’ve started driving my mom’s gone back into coaching, so she does the coaching part and I kind of wake myself up in the morning, get myself ready, drive myself to the race. I now have my own warmup routine I do myself now. And then Jan [Buron, longtime Alaska Winter Stars doyen] is also the coach so he’s helping just as much as everyone else. But I think now it’s a bit more just me learning to do things myself.”
Final word here to mom: What was it like for Jenny Kimball watching her son out there today?
“I’m just really proud that he’s doing great,” she said. “I’m happy that he likes it as much as I do. It makes for a good bond between us.”
Racing at Kincaid wraps up tomorrow with more distance racing: There will be a 10km skate held over two laps of the course used for Wednesday’s 10km classic. The men start at 10 a.m., and the women at 10:45. There are a healthy 133 athletes entered in the open men’s race (U18/U20/Senior/Masters), and 84 in the open women’s field. Watch out for broken poles.
You can find start lists for tomorrow here, and a general viewing guide here.
Results: open men and women | junior, U16, and U14 brackets | qual
— Gavin Kentch
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