ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The 5km mass start course at Kincaid Park is great for ski racing, with wide trails and space to pass throughout. It is maybe not quite as great for spectating, as it passes through the edge of the stadium only once, at approximately the 4.7-kilometer mark.
When Michael Earnhart (USST/APU) came through the stadium 4.7 kilometers into Sunday’s men’s 10-kilometer mass start skate, the final race in this week’s Anchorage stop of the SuperTour, he was in 21st place, but it felt farther back than that as a huge lead pack surged past.
When he reappeared again a scant 12 minutes later at the 9.7km point of the race, coming down through the stadium tunnel and screaming across the flat under the bridge, fast skis on fast snow with a strong tailwind, he was leading the race, coolly looking back at Sasha Masson over his shoulder and setting up for the sweeping righthand turn into the finish.
When the athletes returned to view 20 seconds later, coming into the final 100 meters of the race, there was Earnhart leading out the three-up sprint. He kept his position all the way to the line, taking the win with authority in a speedy time of 24:27.8 for 10.2 kilometers. It was the 21-year-old’s first trip to the top of the SuperTour podium this week, after previously finishing third, fourth, and fifth in the first three races. It was his second career SuperTour win, following a victory in a classic sprint in Birkieland in January. Kid’s got some range.
Reid Goble (BSF) and Sasha Masson (Canadian National Team) were close behind in second and third, 0.3 and 0.4 seconds back, respectively. The rest of the six-deep SuperTour podium, and prize money, went to Walker Hall (USST/Utah), 3.8 seconds back; Sam Hendry (Canadian National Team), 5.1 seconds back; and Peter Wolter (Sun Valley), 6.3 seconds back.
The lead pack of 10 men finished within 11.3 seconds of each other, after skiing much of the race together on a rolling course with fast conditions that did not permit anyone to break away.
I was not alone in marveling at Earnhart’s climb up through the field over the race’s second half. Which is to say that my first question to him, post-race, was the deeply respectful and formal, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but where did you come from, dude?!”
“To be honest, I don’t know,” was Earnhart’s gracious reply.
“I wanted to win today,” Earnhart expanded, “but I woke up feeling pretty tired. I was starting to get a little bit of self-doubt in the first lap; I was just too passive, and let way too many people around me. It was just really busy out there. And I didn’t want to break gear, but I took that just a little too far.
“So I found myself pretty far back going onto lap two. And then it was kind of about, well, Let’s just try to recover some positions, let’s get top 20, maybe top 15, maybe top 10. And then all of a sudden I’m like, Hey, I see the lead, and I’ve got 2km left. And then I started to go for the win.
“But for a while there it was just like damage control. I was like, Ah, I messed this up, learned my lesson. Don’t do that.”
Again, this is the man who won the race, against a deep American and Canadian field. Never count yourself out, kids.
“For mass starts especially, things can change so quickly,” Earnhart concurred. “Especially on that first lap, I can see someone who’s never beaten me in a race before be 10 spots ahead of me. You’ve gotta just let that not get to your head, like, ‘Oh, they’re going out hard, I’ve got energy, it’s going to be okay.’ And sometimes in mass starts you feel terrible for the first 6km. But you feel good in the last 4km, and that’s all that matters. So you’ve just got to hang in there.”
Similar sentiments came from Reid Goble in second, who continued a textbook example of skiing into the season by moving up from 33rd to 21st to third to second across the course of four races here this week.
“This is a lot of times how guys races go,” the BSF skier said. “It doesn’t start to get hard until around 7.5km, and then it gets really hard. The guys are just gonna try to kill each other in the end.”
Goble expanded on this theme when recounting how a large lead pack got whittled down to a much smaller lead pack over a final few kilometers of painful high-end racing.
“For a 10km, there’s a lot of guys that can be in it,” he said. “There’s maybe 20 dudes out there all trying to [inaudible due to strong stadium wind sorry] first. For the first lap and a half especially,” through around the 7.5-kilometer mark, “it was pretty bunched together, a lot of guys in it. And it was pretty hot, just passing them and stuff like that.
“Braden [Becker] made a move on the back hill that broke it up a little bit. And I stayed with in the top three or four. And Sasha [Masson] had broken apart a little bit; he looked like he was hurting a little. But I was able to make a little bit of a move, trying to catch back up. Then I felt like I was dying pretty hard. Like, a lot of us were not looking great out there.
“And then Michael [Earnhart] moved past. I hadn’t seen him all race. I think he was just having a lot of people pass him in the beginning, and didn’t have a great start. But he looked really good when he passed, and I was just like, Okay, I’m just gonna stay with Sam [Hendry], who was right next to me. … He looked really good, but I knew Sasha had been leading the second half of the lap the whole time. So I was like, well, the speed is good; if I can just say within range right in the finish, I know that, after a little tuck, I can ski fast. And I was able to catch him. It was pretty fun.”
This is a longer direct quote, with fewer interruptions or paraphrases, than I typically use in a post-race recap. I am in no way whatsoever trying to make fun of Goble when I write all that out like this. I am instead trying to use syntax to convey what mass start racing is like at this level, particularly in fast conditions (temps around freezing, glazing snow, and only 29.7 meters of climb per kilometer on a largely V2-able course): It’s a rush, and it comes at you fast, and you don’t really know what’s happening until it’s over, and even then maybe you don’t really know. Racing, man.
So speaking of snow conditions, what did Goble experience today, and/or in his last several days of racing, at a deeply humid venue where the stadium is well under a kilometer from the Pacific Ocean, and today’s race course at one point passed within 300 meters of the water?
“I’m definitely not a snow guru like some people,” Goble said. “But I feel like with Alaska you can have all conditions. Like it was powdery and cold a few days ago. It’s sea level and it’s humid here, so when it warms up, I think the snow just gets really snowball-type snow. It makes it a little tricky when you’re choosing skis and stuff — but it’s good snow, and it’s better than Bozeman, where there isn’t snow right now.”
And back, briefly, to Alaska: Michael Earnhart grew up here (specifically in the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River, very specifically in 99577 if you want to get zipcode-level about it). Earnhart raced at Kincaid in a Besh Cup in December 2015, finishing 135th in a sprint qual. He presumably raced at Kincaid even before that in middle school races. He did scads of high school ski races here. He did scads more for cross-country running. He did 2019 Junior Nationals here. He did 2018 Senior Nationals here. He did RMISA races here. Briefly put, Michael Earnhart has some experience racing at Kincaid Park.
“Home course always makes a difference,” Earnhart said of this background. “It always surprises me how much of a difference that makes, just knowing the course. But also having all my family and friends show up — especially yesterday for the sprint heats I had friends that had never skied before, and they came out and cheered for me.”
I am certain that Earnhart added another sentence appreciating that local support, but a 20mph gust of wind came through the stadium at that point, and my audio here just becomes white noise. #Kincaidthings
* * *
The official SuperTour standings from USSS currently show Earnhart in the lead by a healthy margin — BUT they only contain three of the four Anchorage races at present, with results from yesterday’s classic sprint not currently included. My unofficial math suggests that Earnhart’s fourth place finish there puts him squarely in the lead as the top-ranked American man at this point in the season, but I can’t stress enough that I am not USSS and that this is all very unofficial.
Subject to all those caveats, I can report that, if this math is correct, Earnhart will have a serious discussion with his coach about whether or not to accept World Cup start rights for Period 2, i.e., the Tour de Ski. You can find this season’s World Cup selection criteria here if you are curious.
High-level domestic racing in this country resumes with U.S. Nationals at Soldier Hollow roughly two weeks from now. I will be on site at SoHo all week to continue my in-person reporting. Expect a little less home-course Kincaid lore, and a little more me trying to breathe at 5,600 feet (for reference the stadium at Kincaid is at roughly 200 feet above sea level, depending on where high tide is that day). Stay tuned.
— 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.
