Cross-country skiing at the 2024 Winter Youth Olympic Games concluded Thursday morning local time with a 4 x 5-kilometer mixed relay. The American team was eighth at the first handoff, spent much of the race duking it out with the main chase pack, and ultimately finished fifth following strong skate legs by Neve Gerard (Mount Bachelor Ski Education Foundation) on leg three and Tabor Greenberg (Green Mountain Valley School) on the anchor leg.
The closing ceremony followed a few hours later as this year’s Games wrapped up in the Gangwon province of South Korea.
Rose Horning (Ski & Snowboard Club Vail) took the classic scramble leg for the Americans, who were seeded fifth out of 24 teams. (If you have pined for the moment when the likes of Greece, Brazil, Thailand, or Mongolia field a relay team in international competition, today was your day.) Horning skied with the lead pack through the first of her two 2.5-kilometer laps before falling off the pace slightly. She came into the first handoff in eighth, roughly ten seconds back of Switzerland in seventh and six seconds up on Canada in ninth.
Benjamin Barbier (Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club) skied leg two for the U.S. He toiled valiantly, and ultimately successfully, over the course of his lap to bring the Americans back in contact (this is all per my reconstruction of live splits, fwiw). By the halfway mark of the race, places five through ten were all within 12 seconds of one another. The U.S. at this point sat in seventh, five seconds back of fifth and sixth and four seconds up on Canada and Italy in eighth and ninth.
The first skate leg went to the second woman on the mixed-gender relay team, Neve Gerard. Gerard, judging by the live splits, took off like she had been shot from a cannon, making up five seconds in less than a kilometer to close down Estonia and the Czech Republic and pull the U.S. up into fifth by the 11.4-kilometer mark.
Gerard was at this point leading a five-nation pack of the U.S., Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, and Italy. The gap up to the podium was 34 seconds, presumptively too large for any athlete to close over 4km barring large-scale calamity ahead of her.
Only Aramintha Bradford of Canada was able to keep pace with Gerard over the rest of leg three. Gerard handed off to Greenberg in fifth, one second up on Canada in sixth. The next team on course, Switzerland, was still 34 seconds ahead. Finland lurked 10 seconds back at this point, with Estonia, Italy, and the Czech Republic all having been shelled off the back by Gerard’s surge.
Greenberg for the U.S. and Cedric Martel for Canada skied together through the first of Greenberg’s two 2.5-kilometer laps. Martel was still there with 2.5km to go, and then he suddenly, catastrophically, wasn’t, losing 17 seconds over the next kilometer.
(I’m not trying to make fun of a U18 athlete when I write that; I promise that I’ve been there, albeit never on anything near so grand a stage. Martel clearly dug deep to hang with Greenberg for that long, which is presumptively exactly what I would have done when presented with a ride in front of me and a massive gap behind me on the final leg of a relay. Sometimes you hang in there and it works; sometimes it doesn’t, and you proceed to question your life choices over the longest 2.5km of your life. That’s ski racing.)
Greenberg skied in alone to sew up fifth for the U.S. Martel persevered over a likely trying final lap to secure sixth for Canada, ahead of a fast-closing Italy and Finland working together.
At the front of the race, Germany took the gold, followed by France in silver. Swiss anchor Maximilian Alexander Wanger skied well over his anchor leg to move Switzerland up from fourth at the final exchange into bronze at the finish, pushing Sweden off the podium. Norway did not send a team to these races.
How brutal is cross-country skiing, Wanger was asked at the finish by internal IOC media.
“A 10 (out of) 10,” was his answer. “No, 11 (out of) 10. It’s really mental because when you can’t, when you are dead, you have to push and push. You have to be really strong in your mind and you also have to be really fit. It’s the combination.”
There are only two photos of the Americans on the YOG photo service wire for this race, both of which I already embedded above in this article. You can see a few brief clips of footage, concentrating on the leaders, here:
The six American cross-country skiers who raced in Pyeongchang this week, all of whom were born in 2006, return home to, presumptively, their club and high school ski teams. Look for them again at JNs in Lake Placid in March.
— Gavin Kentch
