SOLDIER HOLLOW NORDIC CENTER — There were six athletes lined up for the start of the men’s skate sprint final at 2024 U.S. National Cross-Country Championships on Tuesday afternoon: Logan Diekmann, Michael Earnhart, Florian Knopf, John Steel Hagenbuch, Kristoffer Alm Karsrud, and Will Koch.
Clouds were scudding across the sky for the first time all week. A wind arose, spitting a few flecks of snow into the athletes’ faces. The skiers came to the line, set, and got off to a clean start, Koch quickly flashing to the lead in a fluid V2 before the pack had left the biathlon stadium.
I’m going to turn things over to Diekmann to narrate what happened next; he had a much better view of things than I did. (Spoiler alert: Koch won, with Diekmann just ahead of Steel Hagenbuch for second and third, respectively.)
Here’s a look at the course profile [subject to a small but significant change discussed below], and overall map, to help you follow along at home:
“The last hill is really where it happened,” Diekmann said, referring to the 18-meter B-climb beginning roughly 800 meters into the course.
“The middle climb after the bridge [at 400 meters], people went hard, but not insane,” he continued. “Then we went hard over the top, and it just came down to a sprint up the last hill. Will had the best speed, and I went over in third [this is at roughly the 900-meter mark now]. I got a good draft, and was right with him around the finishing curve [at 1.35 kilometers], and was able to pass [Florian Knopf of the University of Denver]. I tried as hard as I could in the finish, and Will just had a little better legs today.”
The last time that a skate sprint national championship was held here, two years ago this week, I spent hundreds of words talking about the tactics governing the final half-kilometer of this course, from the top of the B-Climb to the start of the finishing lanes. I’m not going to reprise all that now, but you can find my reporting from the 2022 skate sprint at this venue here, and Cory Smith’s reporting from the 2002 Olympics skate sprint at this venue here. TLDR, you either don’t want to be leading at the top of that hill, or you better have a pretty well-considered reason for doing so.
The majority of the course remains the same as it was two years ago, but there has been a small tweak to this specific section that may have large consequences:
“They added the bump near the end this year,” Diekmann noted, referring to a stretch in front of the scoreboard at the 1.25-kilometer mark.
(My very strong sense from my course preview ski yesterday is that the course also jogs slightly to the southeast at this point before setting up for the final lefthand curve; it’s not quite the perfect straight-line shot shown on the course map screenshotted above. Steel Hagenbuch later spoke to some added curvature here in his quotes today, so while I am not on the same planet as Steel Hagenbuch as a skier, at least I did accurately sense the difference between a straight line and a curve.)
“It’s not the straight downhill that we used to do,” the BSF skier continued. “It really breaks up the draft a bit. And it kind of makes the finish harder, because you don’t have all of that straight downhill rest. Now you got to go around the bump, which gets tactical, which I like, and from there it’s a sprint to the finish. And I think that improved the course; it made it a little more fair. The draft wasn’t as important this year.”
For a complementary perspective on this, the end result of the change was to move from one chance for a slingshot effect on the downhill to two, was Alayna Sonnesyn’s characterization of it to me following her domestic championship in the women’s final minutes later.
Back briefly to Diekmann, he has been plainspoken over the years about the importance of the mental aspect of skiing, in a way that I really admire. So when he noted facing Luke Jager, Andreas Kirkeng, and Magnus Bøe all in a single heat — along with Diekmann, that’s four World Cup skiers in one quarterfinal — I asked him what he told himself in that moment. Like, he’s a great skier who ultimately made the final and then the podium, but how did he keep his focus on the race in front of him, rather than the palmarès of the athletes next to him?
“The biggest thing I can try to do is let those scary thoughts or negative self talk flow through me,” Diekmann explained. “I try to acknowledge it and let it go. And that’s all I can do. So from there, it’s just, try to stay neutral and fight as hard as you possibly can.”
One last word from the BSF camp before I step back to look at the rest of the podium. I caught up with Diekmann’s coach, Andy Newell, moments later and asked him how he was feeling about his athlete today.
“I feel great about Logan,” Newell replied. “He’s so good at this venue; he’s so cool under pressure. I don’t know how many podiums that is for him here at Soldier Hollow at national championships, but it’s quite a few. So we’re happy for him. And most importantly, our crew had some decent qualifiers. That’s really what we want to focus on to get these guys into the remaining World Cup spots for Canmore and Minneapolis. So yeah, we’re happy. There’s a mixed bag in our team right now, a couple injuries, but just focusing on the folks that are racing well, and looking forward to World Cup hopefully.”
John Steel Hagenbuch (USST/Dartmouth) is not not looking forward to potential World Cup starts — he joins essentially every other domestic athlete in this field in hoping to race in Minneapolis next month — but is otherwise thrilled to be skiing for Dartmouth right now, and is generally focusing on strong performances at U23 Championships and at NCAAs.
“At this point in my life, I’m prioritizing the college racing a bit more,” Steel Hagenbuch said while walking from the finish line back to the wax compound. “And I think that my career will be longer and more fruitful because of that.” Steel Hagenbuch noted that he is “really grateful to be there [at Dartmouth] as a student and as a skier, and kind of cherish my time for the three more years that I have.”
Steel Hagenbuch was also pleased with his race today, following a less than auspicious beginning. He had felt sick yesterday, and wasn’t sure he would even race today. “But after talking with my coaches, and a bunch of other people who know more than I do about skiing,” he said, “I kind of reached the conclusion that I might as well do the prelim and then kind of see based on that whether I should continue the day. And I had a pretty good prelim, and then I figured I might as well continue. I kind of worked back into feeling better again, and I kind of felt better throughout the day.”
Steel Hagenbuch joined Diekmann and Sonnesyn in concluding that the course changes since 2022 Nationals “added a bit more curvature and distance on the downhill, which kind of lessens the draft effect.” He continued, “But honestly, this course is really hard. Obviously, it’s at altitude in a skate sprint. And I think it really rewards people who finish really strongly. Which I think as more of a distance guy is more my strength in a weakness that is sprinting.”
At the top of the podium, Koch (USST/Colorado) felt plenty of strength on Thursday. “I think today I just had a kind of energy that I don’t normally have,” he said. “And it felt similar to my race here two years ago.” Koch characterized that win in the 2022 skate sprint qual as a “breakout performance,” but said that since then, “I’ve just gotten better at tactics. A little older, stronger, and wiser.”
Koch has also spent two more years living at altitude; he attends school at CU Boulder, which is at essentially the same elevation as this venue. “I don’t notice this altitude anymore in a sprint,” he said, “And I think that’s a big advantage that I get here. You can see today that a lot of people from Colorado tended to be doing well.”
Another advantage that Koch brought to today was his time on the World Cup to start Period 1 of this season. I asked him what he had learned from his time on that circuit.
“I think you really learn how to ski qualifiers well,” Koch said. “Like, there’s a lot to be said, I think, for getting to ski a qualifier against the best guys, watch them, then afterward, look at the splits from the qualifier. And you can see where they’re putting time on you; you can see where you’re good. And then you can work on those weaknesses. I think qualifiers — they’re as strategic as a heat. And you have to pace them properly. And that’s what I’ve learned.”
They were now calling Koch for the podium ceremony, and by this point the interview had strayed far from “tell me about your race today” territory, but also the man who had just stomped the qualifier observed that a qualifier was “as strategic as a heat,” and I really had to follow up on that. Here’s Koch’s thoughts in this vein, quoted in full because you don’t always hear an athlete’s cerebral approach at this level, and I thought this was really interesting:
“So my big breakthrough with qualifiers was realizing you shouldn’t go all out the whole time. And I would always do that. The advice I kind of got was like, You just you need to go faster, like, it’s a sprint.
“But especially in the ones that I’m good at, the long ones at altitude, you have to pace. There was one particular sprint where I really realized that. It was a classic sprint at SilverStar, a long one at high altitude, and it had 16 splits. And I really looked at all the splits. And I found that of the people in the top 10 at the first split, most of them didn’t even qualify, and alternatively pretty much everybody in the top 10 at the end was not in the top 10 in the first 100 meters. On World Cup most sprints are shorter, not at altitude. So it’s not that dramatic, but it’s definitely interesting.”
Racing continues here tomorrow with a 20km mass start skate for the senior/open men, and a 10km skate for U20 and under. Speaking of which, here is a photo of today’s U20 podium before I go: From left, that’s Finegan Bailey of SMS, Trey Jones of Colorado, and Murphy Kimball of Alaska Winter Stars.
Results?
Awkwardly, the results site has been down all afternoon. Here is a screenshot that I presciently took earlier today, because this is what you do in ski reporting (when you remember). I cannot stress enough that this hours-old screenshot of a mobile website labeled as “UNOFFICIAL RESULTS” in capital red letters is just that, but also this corresponds to the podium ceremony that I witnessed and photographed, so here it is:
Photos? Here are some photos from Tryg Solberg
— Gavin Kentch
So far as I can tell, I am the only media outlet interviewing athletes at this year’s national championships. This coverage is happening only because I paid my way down here. If you would like to support these efforts, you can find my GoFundMe here. (This is still last year’s fundraiser, sorry, because I’ve been busy; the money all goes to the same place.) Thank you for your consideration, and thanks for reading.
