SOLDIER HOLLOW NORDIC CENTER — I was actually able to watch nearly all of the men’s classic sprint final in Sunday’s SuperTour, a relative rarity for me this week given the vagaries of finals starting one after the other, and needing to chase down and talk with athletes, and the inconvenient fact that you need to run around a building if you wish to move from watching the start/finish zone to the entire rest of the sprint course.
So, with all the weight and majesty and insight that I can bring to bear, speaking as an award-winning nordic ski journalist (no really), here is my extremely in-depth analysis of what occurred here early this afternoon: Luke Jager ran away from the five other men in the final as if they were standing still. If the race wasn’t over when it began, it was certainly over by the halfway point, when Jager ran up the final hill of the horseshoe with a power and authority that no one else could match. He skied in alone to the finish, his win utterly uncontested.
Honestly, though, that’s about it. Jager has finished as high as 18th in World Cup classic sprints. At his best he is among the foremost domestic men in this country at running up steep hills. He was certainly the best at it today. He led most of the final up to that point, then put his stamp on the race with that charge up the hill at the 850-meter mark.
“They” say that you typically don’t want to go over this hill in the lead, but that doesn’t really account for the possibility of an athlete having such a lead that the draft effect behind him is of no avail. Jager ultimately won this final by 4.31 seconds, after slowing down slightly to celebrate his win as he approached the line. It was somehow still a smaller margin of victory than in the qual, which he won by 5.81 seconds. Luke Jager was skiing really well today, is what I’m trying to say here.
Jager was followed across the line by his former Utah teammate Tom Mancini in second, his current APU and USST teammate Michael Earnhart in third, Florian Knopf of Denver in fourth, Magnus Bøe of Colorado in fifth, and Peter Hinds of Alaska Anchorage in sixth. Jager–Earnhart–Hinds is your “domestic podium,” although because this was a SuperTour and not a national championship that is not really a thing. All six athletes in the final did get SuperTour prize money, though, which is nice.
“I felt really good,” Jager said, in what seems from here like an understatement. “Our skis were awesome the whole day, and held up in kind of weird changing conditions. … I was really happy. I was happy to feel good after a couple pretty, pretty heavy skate days.”
I had seen Jager at the finish of the 20km skate race on Friday, standing at the edge of the finish pen for a loooooong time, looking off into space before finally taking off his bib and graciously handing it to a volunteer. I try very hard on this site not to put words into athletes’ mouths, but it looked to me like nothing so much as a man who was thinking very hard about his life at the moment, and the choices that had got him there.
Jager did not disagree.
“I was bummed for sure” at that moment, he said. “That was totally just, like, Damn, I just wasn’t good enough. Like I had such sick skis, they were so fast, and I really had every opportunity to succeed. And when the going got tough, I just took on so much lactate and couldn’t do anything about it.”
Jager was frustrated, and briefly engaged in some self-pity, but two days later was out there crushing. He reminded himself, “You know, it’s like such a blessing to be out here, and there’s so many nice people. And I had some good talks with my coach and my family and stuff. And I was able to get my head turned around a little bit, and just focus on positivity and feeling good for today.” It seems to have worked.
Jager had plenty of time today to enjoy feeling good. His winning time in the final was 3:45.60; three athletes advanced to the men’s final with a 3:53. The winning time for the women, meanwhile, was 4:37.14, although most earlier distaff heats ran about five seconds shorter. These are the best athletes in the country. That’s a long time for a sprint race.
Jager alluded to the unusually long duration of the sprint course, though for him it was part of a self-effacing comment about not skiing either longer races or “really short” races well at present, and today’s course being a perfect storm for his current form and fitness.
I asked Jager about the difference between, say, a 4:00 sprint and a 2:30 sprint. Here’s his answer, or most of it, quoted in full, because I think this is a really interesting perspective that addresses both the race in front of him today and the role that domestic racing plays in preparing athletes for World Cup racing:
“I think the pace I started out at today would not have been a very competitive starting pace in a World Cup sea-level, two-and-a-half minute sprint,” Jager said. “And obviously that changes how it skis, how it feels. And then it’s definitely a bit on the long side. Especially the women’s race especially — you know, the men were already pretty dang long. And then, in slow conditions, I almost wish they had all of us just skip the last hill, because I think it would be a little more representative maybe.”
Jager also acknowledged that changing courses at the last minute is hardly feasible, and he made it abundantly clear that he was not criticizing race organizers or volunteers, for this or anything else.
But subject to all that, he did muse, “I think in general, it’d be good for the U.S. to maybe start moving toward shorter sprinting. Just because it’s hard to prepare for the fast and furiousness of sprint qualifying on the World Cup, unless you’re doing exactly that. Because especially when you’re in a field that’s not a World Cup field and you’re on a longer course, you just kind of have more time to settle in and like and just think about it.
“And in my experience of World Cup sprinting, it’s really like you have to be totally on it from the beginning, and there’s not a lot of time where you could just be ditzing around out there. So it was nice that that wasn’t the case today… but having a good day on this course I’m definitely, in the back of my head, still like, All right, that doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods. You got to make sure that when the time comes again, you know you’re ready to actually fight.”
So what happens on the World Cup if you ditz around and think and sort of chill out out there, I asked Jager, who is perhaps the best interviewee on the circuit.
“Well, you probably get 52nd through 60th place,” he said, “which I’ve done countless times.”
Michael Earnhart’s views on course length complemented those of his teammate.
“It’s completely different,” he said, when I asked him about the difference between a 2:30 sprint and a 4:00 sprint. “It’s a separate sport. Let’s not even compare the two. … You might be like, ‘Oh, it’s only a minute, minute-and-a-half difference.’ But when you’re talking about the percentage of that, it’s just ridiculous.
“Today, I the way I skied my qualifier, and especially being at altitude as well, the way I felt during the qual was like, There’s no way I’m gonna qualify for heats going this slow. But it turned out I had a fourth-place qualifier, right. So it’s just — it doesn’t feel like a real sprint at all. It’s a very different race. It’s a unique event. It feels like a 3km.”
Earnhart similarly took great pains to clarify that he was not blaming race organizers for this choice. He also noted that he fancies himself as a well-rounded skier who had the opportunity to work on skiing this type of course, and that, at the end of the day, everyone had to ski the same course.
Earnhart, like everyone else out there today, was tired. “It’s day four of racing,” he noted. “So I felt tired. And I had to wake up early this morning, so that made me even more tired. And in the heats, it started out feeling just like I was trying to survive. But by the final, I found some energy and some fight, and so it worked out all right.”
The last man in the final, Peter Hinds of UAA, was probably the happiest, and certainly the most speechless. (Disclosure: I train with Hinds père in APU Masters, because there are 17 people in Alaska and we all know each other.)
“I’m kind of beyond words,” Hinds marveled. “I don’t know the kind of bone I’ve been thrown here. But after a pretty marginal start to the week, I kind of pulled out the best sprint race of my life here. This is my first time ever making senior heats, and I made it all the way to the final.”
You read that right: “This is my second year out of the junior bracket,” Hinds said. “Last year I didn’t make it, and then, yeah, this year, I didn’t make it until now.”
Having belief in yourself and never counting yourself out is a drum that I’ve beaten pretty strongly in my reporting this week. But also you cannot resist asking that question when you are confronted with a composed, well-spoken, multilingual (Hinds speaks fluent German) young man who is still in shock at what he has just achieved.
So, Peter Hinds, SuperTour sprint finalist, what do you say to that junior out there who’s putting in the work every day and trying hard, but just not breaking through yet?
“I gotta say, I was that kid up until today,” Hinds replied. “The first part of this week I kind of was having a bit of a crisis wondering, like, Is my fall training not really working. I was sick a lot this fall; I had about a month-long bronchitis sickness there.
“And I feel like my distance ability, my aerobic ability is kind of low right now. But I was able to hold it for the sprint, which is really good. I feel like my strength capacity is there, and my ability to go anaerobic is better than it’s ever been.
“So I would say my word of advice is, just never count yourself out. And always, always picture yourself up there with the big dogs, you know, because you don’t realize it until it actually happens. And then you’re like, I’m one of them. You know, it’s possible. So that’s really powerful.”
— 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 to travel down here from Alaska for a week-plus reporting trip. 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.
