An Extremely Timely Preview of the 2023/2024 World Cup Season, with Matt Whitcomb

Matt Whitcomb, head coach of the U.S. Ski Team, graciously spoke with me for an hour in late November about what was at the time the upcoming World Cup season. I moved fast to get his thoughts on the NNF Drive for 25 up as a standalone piece that same day, but, well, *gestures in the general direction of the nine American podiums (on the World Cup) and 100,000 words of content (on this website) that then occurred over the following month.*

Accordingly, without further ado, here are Whitcomb’s preseason thoughts as of November 21, three days before the classic sprint in Ruka kicked off the whirlwind that is Period 1. Thankfully (?), I tend to ask boring wonky questions, which Whitcomb kindly answered, so this reads far more as “big picture thoughts about training philosophy and what makes a team” than “specific season preview that is now hopelessly out of date.” 

Seriously though, and bear with me as I editorialize through this and the following paragraph, I actually find this to be a really thoughtful look at some of the principles that go into making the U.S. Ski Team what it is today. Read it now with the ex post facto knowledge that this concern for caring about skiers as people first and athletes second has helped lead to all those successes we just celebrated in Period 1, to be sure, but also read it now because this week is one of the last true dead periods of the 2023/2024 race season, and maybe your last chance to read a longer article and really have the time to think about its lessons before you’re doing season wrap-up in April.

Put another way, you’re reading this interview on this website because I care a lot about high-end American skiing, but in my personal life I’m also a citizen racer who trains voraciously and wants to get better, and achieves any modest success he does only with the help of a coach and team. Whether you are racing yourself, or are in the position of helping others to race, I submit that you will find something in here that helps you to do this more conscientiously.

Back to this piece: Whitcomb’s answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length. My questions have been edited from what was originally asked, to provide context for a standalone article, and because I am nowhere near as well-spoken as Matt Whitcomb.

Nordic Insights: This is a preseason piece [sic], so let’s start by talking about summer training. I don’t need you to tell me something that every single national-team athlete did last summer; that would be boring. But I am curious if there are any overall trends that you’ve noticed or that you can speak to. Obviously on a day-to-day basis the SMS athletes train with Perry Thomas, the APU athletes train with Erik Flora, and so on. But from a more 30,000-foot perspective, are there any noteworthy themes or trends you saw from American skiers’ summer training?

Matt Whitcomb: I think that there are. And the one that really jumps out to me is that more and more, this has become a team sport. And that is to say, cross-country skiing has always attracted people that love to just go out and run in the forest by themselves. And those people can still thrive and do that.

But what I think all the success of our clubs has done, and the prevalence of many training camps throughout the development pipeline, throughout the national team curriculum, throughout the year has done, is create these team-driven, group-oriented environments that will allow people to work together to share strengths, to utilize other strengths where they might be a little weaker, and then, in another session, to use their strengths to help somebody else.

And that’s really how, as a nation, I see us beginning and continuing to improve: the fact that we’re no longer siloed, we are great partners with one another. And so that’s a huge trend.

And you see it right there in Alaska, with frankly many teams that are training together. But on our team, at APU, we have a bunch of athletes training there, and just grouping up and really valuing one another. There’s nothing that I love more than teammates valuing the strength and the support of their fellow teammates.

We’ve also — with our national-team philosophy — we are a decentralized program, which is to say we don’t take the 23 best athletes in the nation and force them all to come to Park City. We want them to train from home, to be involved in a club, to have this family and team away from their national team. So that when the season ends, or between summertime national training camps, they go back to a very robust team and coach and system that, put together with our program, creates an annual program that is supportive.

I want to ask about the flip side of that when it comes to introducing technique stuff, like the “new V1” we saw on the World Cup in the second half of last season, or even just talking about technique more generally. On one extreme, you would send out like a papal bull and say, “This is how you shall V1 now.” Obviously you’re not doing that, but in all seriousness, what can you say about the more organic process of bringing technique from the World Cup level out to other athletes in this country, and maybe also vice versa? I know you have the utmost respect for club coaches in this country, but also I suspect that you have access to insights directly gained from being on the World Cup circuit full time, when most other coaches do not. How do you mediate between these principles?

That’s a great question. I think the first thing when we think about technique is, we try to acknowledge how different everyone is. If you look around the room and you look at everybody, everybody is a different shape, size, length, strength; their muscles are composed of different ratios of different fiber types. [I.e., everyone has a different ratio of slow-twitch vs. fast-twitch muscle fibers; the specifics of this makeup can greatly bear on athletes’ performance and the most appropriate training for them. – Ed.] And it would only make sense that everybody should thus also ski differently.

And I think a mistake that we can make as coaches is to choose one athlete on the team, or one athlete on the World Cup, and essentially demand that everybody on the team ski exactly like that person. Sometimes our elbow positioning, our humerus simply doesn’t fit in our shoulder socket in a way that will allow me to do what this other example is doing.

Our philosophy is, we really try and embrace technique differences on our team and throughout the nation.

And while, yes, there are these broad fundamentals that are important to nail, everybody *should* ski differently.

And I think that takes pressure off when you’re watching video of yourself, when you’re striving to improve, to not look exactly like Sophie Caldwell did, or Sadie Bjornsen, or Kikkan Randall, or Andy Newell. You can look like a similar version if you want. But this should look like the best version of yourself. And I think that’s the key to technique.

To go with that, if a new technique comes along in V1, I say, Great, go try it out, go learn it. But consider, within the gear of V1, there to be many different ways of skiing V1. And so if it’s within your gear of V1, add that new style.

I actually remember a ski in 2003, 2004 when we ran into Thomas Alsgaard. My team at Burke Mountain Academy had a chance to go for a ski with him, and a couple other athletes from other teams jumped in. And the one thing he said was actually, “Don’t listen to your coaches so much. Listen to your intuition. Listen to your creativity. Be an artist, be a rebel with your technique.” Because he was known for a fairly unique style of V1, and won an Olympic 30km.

[That’s Alsgaard in the lead, below, at the Nagano Olympics.]

So I had another question cued up here, but I feel like I should follow up on how literally the head coach just said, “Don’t listen to your coach.” Can you say a little bit more about this? Obviously Thomas Alsgaard was the man at the time — or maybe Dæhlie was the man and Alsgaard was the second-place man. But why do you remember this anecdote nearly 20 years later, and what effect has that had on your coaching?

That’s a great question. You know, I was a young coach, and I probably, frankly, at the time did want my athletes to listen to me. But it jumped out instantly as being the right thing.

And I think we can all recognize these training paradigms that exist. And if we just assume that they’re right, and they’re going to work for us, we are essentially shutting off our brains and deciding not to think any more about that subject.

What he was doing is saying the opposite: Always be thinking. And don’t be thinking about what everyone else is doing. Be thinking about what makes you fast, what makes your human body move effortlessly down the trail, like water just sort of flowing via the easiest path of least resistance.

And I love that. He was essentially saying, Be an artist. Be creative. Leave your brain on. And I think that’s something that coaches — the biggest gift, I believe, that a coach can offer their athlete is the gift of encouraging them and teaching them and requiring of them to continue to think for themselves. It feels so great as a coach to impart answers, and to control what our teams are doing. But if we really want to make a difference, if we really want to create athletes that are happy and motivated, and ultimately fast, then they must have agency over their training, over their lives.

And in that sense, they’re the head coach, and all of us are the assistants helping them along the way. Because at the end of the day, if as coaches we control everything in the athlete’s life throughout their athletic career, they’re going to retire when they’re 35 years old, and they’re not going to know how to do anything. Instead, what we can do is, we have the opportunity to teach these athletes how to have agency over their lives. Sure, we use skiing as the example. But this just creates powerful humans that go on to do amazing things after our sport, too. And that’s what’s so incredibly rewarding.

Moving a little more towards traditional season overview territory now, I could ask you, say, “Coach, what are some results goals you’re looking for this year?” And you’ll say that you really want a podium in x or y race, and either that will happen or it won’t, but I guess I don’t find that as interesting, frankly. So instead let me ask the non-results version of that: With regard to process goals, or team cohesion, or growing together, what are some goals or hopes you have for this season that are not results?

If we only focus on races that we want to be on the podium in, that means we’re only talking about one-sixth of our team, or maybe on our best year a quarter of the team, that might have access or the good fortune to get on the podium.

And so for me — yes, podiums are great. I love to win. But what I really love is just seeing anybody have personal bests throughout the season. And that might be getting into the top 30 for the first time. And watching that happen can, I swear to you, be just as exciting as watching somebody get on the podium.

Take a step back: Watching somebody have their first World Cup start is such a highlight of my job. We make a huge deal out of it. Any time an athlete comes over to the World Cup and they’re about to start for the first time, they lead the team cheer the night before the race. Because we all remember the first time that we stepped foot on the World Cup as a coach or an athlete, and you just have a great appreciation for the excitement of what it means to begin over here. So the short answer is personal bests.

I can expand on that a little too: “personal best” is still talking exactly about the results in ski races. And in order for us to achieve those, we have to take a step back.

Again, in order to race fast, you have to feel support. And sure, this support comes from coaches; it comes from wax techs; it comes from great training all year. But a lot of this work comes from one’s own teammates.

There’s nothing more rewarding to me than when athletes feel engaged, because they know that the 20 athletes around them, or the 15 athletes that they share this space with during this period of World Cup racing, that they support them. They truly believe that. And there’s almost no way to succeed if you’re an athlete over here, or anywhere in the world, and you have a team who doesn’t support you.

And so we spend a ton of time, of course, focusing on training and getting that right and getting the recovery right. But we spend so much time talking about what it means to be a good human to one another. What it means to have and sustain a culture of kindness. What it means to focus on all of our mental health. And that doesn’t necessarily just mean the athletes’ needs; we need to have a staff that is supported with regards to mental health, too.

So I feel like once we have that foundation, then the training starts to have a more significant impact, and the race results start to improve. But so often we focus on it from the other way. And that is just backwards. You have to start with the wellness of the human being first, then you add the training, and then the race results come.

I just wrote 2,000 words yesterday about Jessie’s thoughts on mental health; I think it’s clear that I found that very powerful. But I also have to ask, looking back on what you’ve just said here, do you think that you would have said the same thing 20 years ago?

No.

I think I would have agreed with it; I don’t think I would have come up with that on my own. I would have needed to have heard it from somebody else.

And when I think back, all the coaches that I ever had in my life, I am so fortunate — now that I am looking through this expanded lens, I recognize that I had coaches that were first concerned about me as a person, and then about our results as a team. I just thought that’s how all coaches were, and it just isn’t that way.

Switching topics somewhat, I’m curious how you present or talk about results goals for someone who is early in their career. I don’t think it’s offensive to suggest that someone who is, say, in their early 20s or is making their World Cup debut has different results goals than Rosie or Jessie currently do. On the one hand, racing fearless is a pretty powerful thing; on the other hand, do you feel any need to help manage expectations when it’s one of the first times an athlete has raced at this level?

That’s a good question. And it’s actually something I’ve been thinking about. We have our first pre-race meeting in just under 48 hours, and I’ve been thinking about what the content of that should be. One of the things I was discussing with our press officer recently was that the level of U.S. skiing is as high as it’s ever been, and if it’s not that on paper, it’s at least close to that. I think our ski culture in our community is as healthy and as robust for sure, and as large, as it’s ever been.

And here we are at the World Cup. And these sixteen athletes who are here with Team U.S.A. for this first period of racing have qualified for the World Cup in the United States of America — which for much of the season last year was ranked third [in the Nations Cup] — and they have qualified under those circumstances. And so already we’re sitting here in this room having accomplished something considerable, not starting from zero.

And we will not be a team that really ever talks about results in a team meeting. What we will be more likely to talk about is belief that results can happen, belief that a great day, even if you’ve been feeling tired, can happen tomorrow at 11 a.m. And the likelihood of having the race of a lifetime, or even just something as simple as a good race, is much more likely to happen if we believe in ourselves. And so that’s where we can start.

And I think athletes on our team — certainly there are certain personalities that are more result-driven, that want a certain, you know, a top-20 or top-30, or a top-five. But I think for the most part, our team is looking to go out there and go through the process of testing their skis, of getting the warmup that they intend, and going out and executing their pacing and the application of their effort between the starting line and the finish line in a way that makes them proud.

And that approach is something that everybody in the room, everybody on the team, everybody on the World Cup that starts on Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday, has access to. And so the things that are in our control are surprisingly  so often neglected, because things like stress and disorganization can distract us from just checking the boxes that are there for us to win.

Sure, you can’t just overnight go from not believing in yourself to believing in yourself. So this is something that we work on at every camp, and that has a lot to do with your teammates believing in you, too, because that makes belief in yourself much more accessible.

But are you organized to test your skis with enough time that allows for you to also get the warmup accomplished that’s required for the race effort that you intend to have? Those are things that are in our control. And so we’ll start there.

Not to make this about me, but it has to be noted that if you take out the words “World Cup” from what you just said, this all sounds like something that anyone can do. These are all things that someone racing the Birkie can do, that a seventh-grader in her first JV ski race can do. Is this just a really basic observation on my part, or is this at least slightly more profound because it’s just getting things back to what you can control?

Exactly. I mean, so much of the foundation that leads to a great race is absolutely up to us. And it’s there for us to accomplish; we just have to be prepared and be organized and have a plan.

At the end of the day, when one is going to start their first World Cup, one of the main differences between the World Cup and every other race that you’ve done is, it’s just a better-organized race, with a wider trail, with smoother grooming. In some cases. But it still has a start and a finish line, a clock that’s measuring you, people out there cheering for you. So much of it is the exact same.

— 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.