By Gavin Kentch
CANMORE NORDIC CENTRE, Canmore, Alberta — Next time, someone is going to have to figure out a way to blow three kisses.
When Kristine Stavås Skistad won Saturday’s skate sprint, she turned to the Swedish competitors behind her and blew a deeply disrespectful kiss with one hand as she crossed the finish line. Tuesday, when Linn Svahn of Sweden won the classic sprint here, by a very healthy two-plus seconds, she punctuated the moment by holding both index fingers to her lips for a two-handed kiss. One wonders what the next stage in this war of ostentatious osculation will bring.
“I can be hot in the middle too,” said Svahn to Expressen, according to an auto-translation. “Nice that she imitates me,” was Skistad’s answer.
“No thanks,” said Skistad, and walked away, when English-language reporters attempted to question her about this farther down the mixed zone.
Anyway, back to the results sheet. Svahn won today’s 1.3-kilometre classic sprint, in 3:12.20. Skistad was second, 2.13 back; Jonna Sundling, who had destroyed the field in the morning’s qual to claim bib no. 1, was third, 2.13 back. That’s not a typo; it was a photo finish that was decided by a fraction of a portion of a boot length, maybe literally millimetres rather than centimetres.
The fact that Skistad is among the tallest athletes in the women’s field is not irrelevant here, as she came from way back down the finishing stretch to draw even with Sundling at literally the last possible moment for a long-legged boot throw that ultimately went to the Norwegian.
There was well over a second back to Kerttu Niskanen in fourth, then nearly five more seconds back to Maja Dahlqvist in fifth and Emma Ribom in sixth. Four of six women in the final were Swedish, for not the first time this season.
“I think we’re such a strong team,” said Svahn afterwards, “and we can go hard for so many times. So we tried to do this today, and it worked well.”
“It was good, but I lost it in the downhill,” was the longest answer that English-language reporters managed to extract from a rather taciturn Skistad.
“My day so far is very good,” said Sundling. “It feels so nice to be back on the podium. It feels like [we] had a really strong team also today, so I’m really happy for that.”
Sundling employed effectively the same tactic all day long: Ski off the front as fast as humanly possible, and dare her competitors to follow her. This worked well in her quarterfinal, well in her semifinal, and a little less well in the final.
“I could follow my tactic and ski as I wanted, so that was really good,” said Sundling of her day. “I’m happy that I had power left in the final because we were skiing fast from the beginning in the quarterfinals too.”
There were three American women who made the heats today: USST A-Team athletes Julia Kern, Jessie Diggins, and Rosie Brennan.
Kern was 11th on the day, and was delighted to be feeling like herself again, for the first time in a long time, midway through a difficult season marked by illness and recovery therefrom.
Diggins was 17th, which was, I am surprised to realize, but I guess also not that surprised because her shape is so good right now, her worst result to date this season by six places. That is, she had finished outside the top ten only twice this season, placing eleventh in the 10km classic in Ruka in November and in the skate sprint in Goms in January. That is how you come to lead the World Cup overall by 260 points less than three-fourths of the way through the season.
Anyway, because you should never assume how an athlete is doing based off of just the results sheet alone, Diggins was all smiles after the race, matter-of-factly noting that her doublepole strength is not currently where it needs to be to let her be competitive on a course like this, and completely at peace with having done the best she could with what she has.
And Brennan was 16th. She… did not have as good a day today as her two teammates did. She was in no way rude or curt in the mixed zone, far from it, but her demeanor was also not that of someone who was thrilled with how her day had gone and who was looking forward to maintaining positive momentum in Minneapolis four days from now. Sport, like life, can be rough.
Kern raced out of the third quarterfinal today, as did Brennan. Kern started in the rightmost starting pen (viewer’s left if you were watching this on TV, or I guess from anywhere at the venue other than the mixed zone located behind the starting area), which, she explained after her third-place finish in the heat, worked to her disadvantage because she had to cut over across the greatest amount of trail prior to the left-hand curve at the top of the first climb on the course.
Kern ended up near the back of her heat relatively early on, seemingly a function of both the simple geometry of where she was relative to the course and her strengths as an athlete at present.
“I’ve been working on my starts and they’re not my strongest,” Kern said. “You have to be really on your game and those girls are really strong out of the start, and I just didn’t quite have that snap yet. But I’m really proud of how I skied today — and it was just fun. It’s fun to ski when the skis — our techs did an amazing job; the skis were kicking so well, so fast. I love classic skiing on these kinds of days, and it was just really fun out there.”
Kern was happy about her skis. Kern was happy about her day overall. Kern was happy about, especially, her current health and fitness after a season when that has all too seldom been the case.
“I’m fired up because this was a really fun day of racing,” said an ebullient kern. “This was the first sprint, maybe all season, that I felt like myself. And there are some things to work on, but the women’s sprint field is insanely competitive. It went out really hot, and the [far] right start lane is quite a disadvantage today, and so I just found myself looking up and being like, Shoot, I’m already dropped; I’m trying to just get over to that lane.”
Nonetheless, Kern was pleased. “I’ve been feeling better every race and I think I’m racing my way back into form,” she said. “I’m pretty sore and tired, but I feel like a world of difference from five days ago. … I feel like myself, and the lungs came around. Now my body’s starting to come around and I think it just makes me more excited for Minneapolis, because all I want is to give it my all there and feel like myself racing.”
Diggins raced out of quarterfinal number five, as is increasingly her wont. She… did not ski slowly off the start, which is also typical for her these days (see last link). She was ultimately caught up in the final descent to the finish, and, especially, the long doublepole section that followed, not the only athlete on the day to suffer that fate.
Diggins clearly would not have minded a better result today — hence line one of her Instagram post, embedded above — but she also had few regrets about the way that she had skied.
“I need to have a stronger doublepole and I know that I feel a little bit weak in the upper body right now,” was Diggins’s candid self-evaluation.
“And so my strategy was go as hard as you can, and then hang on, and I don’t regret that strategy. I think I played the cards that I had. And yeah, I tried really hard and I don’t think it was necessarily a penalty to lead the downhill because there was one glazy track and as soon as you stepped out of it, you’d see people get, like, slowed down by the powder. [There had been fresh snow overnight, as well as, unhelpfully, intermittently throughout the heats.] And so I wouldn’t change anything. I just wish I had a stronger upper body right now, basically.”
If Diggins felt comfortable stating, on the record, that doublepole is a growth area for her, I would assume that this is no secret to her competitors. But given that the World Cup is a circuit, in which largely the same athletes race each other multiple times throughout the season, I asked whether the skiers have a decent sense for each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
“I think people start to get to know” this, she said. “And you can always be surprised, and people might have great skis or poor skis, or there are variables that will change and then the conditions will change. But I do think, yeah, in general, people get to know each other pretty well.”
Brennan actually finished higher than Diggins today, 16th versus 17th, but was not having as good a time out there. She was narrowly unable to keep up at the end of her heat, finishing fourth there and failing to advance.
“I felt fine,” said Brennan. “I’m not very happy with how it ended up. … I didn’t have a good enough finish, and that sucks. It’s frustrating.”
“I had really good skis,” Brennan expanded. “I felt like I was able to use my classic skiing well; that’s been going well. I even felt that way in the heat. It just came down to a sprint finish, and I didn’t have it.”
The track was “very tricky,” Brennan noted. “There’s slow spots and fast spots, and that makes it challenging.”
“It’s been a tough block,” said Brennan.
Nine more Americans raced the qualifier this morning. Renae Anderson led the way here in 36th, followed by Erin Bianco in 38th, Lauren Jortberg in 43rd, Margie Freed in 45th, Alex Lawson in 46th, Alayna Sonnesyn in 47th, Emma Albrecht in 48th, Sydney Palmer-Leger in 49th, and Michaela Keller-Miller in 51st.
“I felt really good about today,” Anderson wrote to Nordic Insights after her qual. “I didn’t pace it whatsoever, so my first splits were quite fast and I think I lost the most time in the finishing stretch. I think with more speed endurance and strength I’ll be able to hold on a little longer in the future. But it’s good to know the speed is in there!”
“I had so much fun this week,” she continued. “It’s been nice spending time with people on the US team and just soaking in the atmosphere. I really feel like I’m living my dream right now and I’m so grateful I got to be here.”
— 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.
