By Gavin Kentch
CANMORE NORDIC CENTRE, Canmore, Alberta — What did the Americans think of today’s 20-kilometre mass start classic, the third race in a six-race North American swing?
“It was a fight,” said Rosie Brennan. “A battle, for sure.”
“Today was a chance to get really mentally tough,” said Jessie Diggins.
“I think everyone was having a hard time,” said Julia Kern.
“I’m not sure that I felt good for a minute of that race out there,” said Margie Freed.
Skiing is fun.
At the front of the race, Frida Karlsson of Sweden won, finally claiming the Canmore-podium-finisher cowboy hat that she had long been coveting. Karlsson distanced herself from Kerttu Niskanen of Finland over the final half-kilometre of the race, the stadium stretch in particular, as she doublepoled away from the Finn for the win in 57:08.2. Niskanen was 1.6 seconds back.
Six seconds behind them, Heidi Weng and Astrid Øyre Slind dueled for the final spot on the podium, with Weng taking it over Slind by 0.3 seconds. Slind looked furious as she crossed the line. The last member of their five-athlete final-lap lead pack, Ebba Andersson of Sweden, came in five seconds later for fifth.
“Tough race,” said Karlsson afterwards. “But I felt pretty good in my body and I felt like I had some spares for the finish. … I’m really happy with today’s race.”
Karlsson was a fan of the course, six times around a 3.3-kilometre lap, more moderate-altitude grind-y than technical.
“It’s rare that it’s like this,” she said, “so tough. … It’s fun to ski when people are really tired.”
(In a callback to Kristine Stavås Skistad’s theatrics at the finish of yesterday’s skate sprint, Karlsson was hardly offended. “I think it’s funny,” she said. “It’s mostly for the show. … I think it’s good that we have some rivalry with the Norwegians.”
Karlsson denied any ill will between the two nordic ski powerhouses, non-U.S.A. division. “I was like, ‘Maja, why didn’t you kiss back yesterday?’” she good-naturedly said.)
“I’m really happy that I’m on the podium today,” Niskanen told reporters. “We had a hard race with Frida. … I did a lot of work [in the race today]. I wanted to ski good speed on the top, and so I’m happy that I’m on the podium.”
“This was the best race for me,” Niskanen said. “I really like classic races, and 20-kilometre is the best one for me. For me, the sprints are not so good. But I will do all the races here.”
Slind, who finished fourth today, was plainspoken about the frustrations involved in losing out on a podium spot to an athlete who had, shall we say, done much less of the work over the previous 19.95 kilometres to animate the race.
“It’s not a good feeling to lose that last five metres there, but she’s smart, she’s done this before, she does a good race, so nothing I can do about it,” Slind said of her veteran teammate. “It’s still fun racing, it’s just a huge disappointment to lose the podium, but still it’s a good race.”
Slind said of her final kilometre today, “I wanted to keep a high speed and then in the finish there I knew it was your stupid thing to go first into the last [corner]. But you can’t afford to stop either because the first place is right there and then people are coming from behind you.”
Turning to the Americans, Jessie Diggins’s take on her race on Instagram, embedded above, rather set the tone for today.
“It was probably the first race all season where I felt like I really did not have kick or glide,” said Diggins, who nonetheless finished tenth today.
“And you know what, that’s amazing. The fact that, you know, we’re in February and I’m like, Oh, this was the first race where I really had to fight the skis. That just means our wax team has been really excelling and they’ve been working really hard and we were bound to have a tough day at some point.
“And so for sure it was tough. You know, it’s hard to ski 20km with that much herringbone, but that’s why I went down in New Zealand and worked on it a lot this summer. And so that last lap, I just kept thinking like, Just deal with what you got, leave it all out there. And so I was just trying to draft behind Linn [Svahn] and just finish with everything I had.”
Diggins spoke candidly about the need to show up every day, and to fight hard to the finish, in order to preserve her (currently not-small) lead in the world Cup overall standings.
“If you’re playing the game for the overall, you can’t just drop,” she said. “I mean, you can, but there’s consequences. … I think that’s what’s hard and what makes you feel a lot of pressure, is you can’t have a truly bad day. And so if my bad day I can still scrap out a top-ten, then I want to fight like hell for it. But it’s worth fighting for.”
Diggins did not hide her gratitude at having a day off tomorrow. She mentioned that some cute kids “have been sliding chocolate bars through the fence to me, so I’m gonna go eat those, and rest, and hopefully sleep a lot tonight.”
Finally, it has to be said that the Jessie Diggins classic skiing of the 2023/2024 season is not the Jessie Diggins classic skiing of the 2022/2023 season, which is in turn light years different from the Jessie Diggins classic skiing of a decade before that. Coming into last season, Diggins stated that the desire to “Get better at classic skiing” was one of the things she still hoped to accomplish in the sport; to my lay eyes, she has made a heck of a lot of progress here.
So I asked her, What are some things you’re doing in classic skiing this year that you weren’t last year? Here’s her answer in full, since it feels to me relevant to anyone struggling with classic striding, let alone any other large and largely intractable problem:
“Man, it’s funny, because — if I knew, I would have done it so long ago. If I knew how to have better classic technique, I totally would have done it when I was like 20 years old. So I wish I had like a concrete answer. Because also then I’d go tell all my teammates right now, but I don’t.
“A lot of it is honestly having good kick. And like today when I was slipping, slipping, slipping — I wasn’t skiing that well. And so a lot of it is skiing with confidence when you feel like, Okay, I put all my weight out there, I trust it, and it’ll connect. And I think I’ve been given the gift of that. Like this season I’ve had really amazing skis, and that’s helped me ski with confidence and more relaxed.”
Segue: Rosie Brennan, who finished 13th today, said, “My skis were definitely a little slick. They were pretty fast. But yeah, not quite as much kick as I would have liked to, like, be a little more relaxed on the big climb.”
Brennan said more broadly that she spent today “trying to kind of ski my race and be as relaxed as possible, and give myself a chance to get a second wind if it came, or catch some people that were falling off the front pack.”
Brennan again alluded broadly to a range of small life things that have not been catastrophic, but which have collectively “made it hard to maintain the form I had in Period 1.” She politely declined to give more details than that.
You will sense similar themes from Julia Kern, 26th, on why today was hard for her: “It’s a long climb. Really challenging courses, and tricky snow here today. So I think everyone was having a hard time. You couldn’t really get on your skis to kick as it sugared out there.”
“I think our techs did a really good job,” Kern clarified. “I think all around, everyone in the field seemed to be slipping. I think it was one of those tricky days; every lap it got a little more sugary and more abrasive. But I thought our skis held up relatively well. And when you get tired the kick starts to go because of technique, but yeah, it was a fun and challenging course.”
Kern later described the course as “kind of greasy sugar out there.”
In conclusion, skiing is fun. And waxing for skiing is also fun. And, in all seriousness now, when one or both of those things is difficult, you might learn something.
Other Americans in today’s race included Sophia Laukli (whose recent embrace of classic skiing likely deserves its own article) in 14th, Sydney Palmer-Leger in 31st, Margie Freed in 33rd, Alex Lawson in 35th, Mariah Bredal in 36th, Renae Anderson in 37th in a late start, and Emma Albrecht in 39th. Michaela Keller-Miller and Lauren Jortberg both had to drop from the race. They had some company today on what was clearly a tough day on a tough course; five athletes in a field of 44, or over 10 percent of the field, were DNF today.
Tomorrow is an off day for all athletes. Racing in Canmore concludes on Tuesday with classic sprints. Light snow is currently forecast for parts of tomorrow, but not past 6 a.m. on race day. Announced starters for the U.S. are the same as they were for yesterday’s skate sprint: Rosie Brennan, Jessie Diggins, Julia Kern, Sydney Palmer-Leger, Emma Albrecht, Renae Anderson, Erin Bianco, Margie Freed, Lauren Jortberg, Michaela Keller-Miller, Alex Lawson, and Alayna Sonnesyn.
— Gerry Furseth contributed reporting
There are more reporters at these races than in Soldier Hollow for U.S. Nationals, but not that many, and I am probably the only one reliant on a GoFundMe to get here. Travel for in-person reporting is not cheap, and travel to anywhere from Alaska is particularly not cheap.
Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
Been interesting to hear from Sophia Laukli, what she was trying to do in the 20K and what she’s learning. Seemed similar to the 15K in her attempt to try to bridge to the lead group, but failing and not seeming to have as much left.
It would be, and sorry for not having those thoughts from her here. I’d never specifically throw an athlete under the bus for not talking with me, but let me just say that mixed zone attendance here has been… spotty. (Hardly just the athletes’ fault, to be fair; the finish line flow of traffic takes them straight to ski handoff, to changing tent, and away from media. They have to make a conscious effort to circle back, and not everyone does so.)
I was getting just bits and pieces of the race courseside, so you have a better sense than me of what Laukli was trying to do, to be totally honest. An irony of in-person race coverage!
Thanks for the reply. I understand and appreciate the limitations. If you do get an
opportunity to speak with Laukli, it’d be nice to hear what she learned from these races. During the 15K stream, Kikkan Randall noted that athletes with the thin physical stature of Laukli and Claudel can
have an advantage on uphills, but their lower body mass works against
them relative to others on the flats and downhills (muscles, momentum).
I sense that both of them have world champion level potential if they can deal with that limitation, as well as continue to build aerobic capacity. They both seem to have a champion’s head.
The other thing I thought about in reading your interviews was how great it would have been to hear the thoughts of the Swedish and Norwegian women after the 15K. That’s not a criticism of your covering the Americans and Canadians first. It’s just that there’s a whole realm of insights about the WC circuit we North Americans who don’t speak a Scandinavian language, for example, miss out on. Faster Skier doesn’t
really do much in that regard. Many thanks again for your site and reporting.