It’s taken 23 years, one global pandemic, one Jessie Diggins, and seven figures’ worth of sponsorship support from Share Winter, but the World Cup is finally coming back to the U.S. for the first time since 2001. I’m not saying that was a long time ago, but only the top 16 athletes qualified for the heats in the sprint race held back then, not the top 30. Jessie Diggins was nine years old. And the field included such nation’s group starters as Jeannie Wall, who is now 56. It’s been a while.
How long has it been? This Instagram post from earlier this week, from, well, Jessie Diggins, is gold:
Races will be held at Theodore Wirth Park, in central Minneapolis, IN THE U.S.A., on Saturday and Sunday. Here is when the races will be.
World Cup (local time at venue: Central Time, IN THE U.S.A. This is three hours ahead of Alaska and one hour behind the East Coast. All these time zones are IN THE U.S.A. What jetlag?)
How can you watch the races?
Your options here are different than they have been all season long, because, again, these races are IN AMURIKA. Here is a screenshot from a recent USST Instagram post that sets this out for you.
That’s Outside Watch for live coverage on both days; you can find that here. Also, and I cannot believe I am saying this, both days’ worth of racing will apparently re-air on broadcast television on Sunday, which is helpful for people who are older than my geriatric millennial self and who have TVs in their house. If this is anything like NBC’s coverage of the Ironman expect roughly equal parts ads, soft-focus pieces on athletes overcoming adversity, and heavily edited actual race action, but I would love to be proven wrong here.
Reports from Saturday are that the Outside Watch app was an abysmal failure, even for people who were already subscribers to this. Be warned.
Who is racing for the Americans?
So many athletes! Twelve per gender per race each day! You can find complete (anticipated) start lists here:
Who is starting when and has which bib number?
Here are start lists for Sunday’s 10km interval-start skate race: men (start at 10:30:30 a.m.) | women (start at 12:45:30 p.m.).
How do interval-start races work, anyway?
Kris Hansen wrote a great article about this, but now the link to it on the Loppet Cup website is down and I can’t find it otherwise. Here’s my TLDR version: athletes start at 30-second intervals; each athlete is timed individually; the winner is the athlete with the fastest total time, not the first athlete to cross the finish line; there is a complicated seeding system based on athletes’ FIS points (i.e., performance in other races), but generally speaking the fastest athletes start closest to the end (so that they can have the most information about the skiers in front of them); athletes will typically get on-course splits from their coaches telling them where they stand; look for athletes to spend some time skiing with other racers as they all do three laps of the same 3.3-kilometer course and end up in the same place at the same time; if a slower athlete is in the way they will probably sense the faster athlete overtaking them and move of their own accord, but if not the overtaking athlete gets to yell “Track!” and the slower one has to move, which is actually pretty satisfying.
That’s interval-start racing in a nutshell. In my experience, not that mass start racing is easy, but there are moments in a mass start race that are easier, because sometimes someone else is doing the work in front of you and you can like coast or chill out for a moment on a downhill or flat. In an interval-start race, literally every second counts out there, so athletes will ideally be thinking about how best to ski the course for the entire race. Notably, this is *not* to go as hard as you possibly can immediately off the start line, because the race is, in fact, 10 kilometers long, not 1 kilometer long, no matter how amped you may feel when you hear those three beeps and the timer goes off. Ask me how I know this.
As it happens, the single best athlete in the world at the 10km interval-start skate format is currently… Jessie Diggins.
I just want to know when Jessie Diggins is racing on Sunday.
That’s not a question, but: 1:14 p.m. local time, second to last among seeded athletes, technically in starting position no. 58 but wearing a yellow bib rather than a numbered bib. Based on the crowd reaction on Saturday, you… should be able to hear her coming.
How does Jessie Diggins feel about all this?
She is, justifiably, really excited to be racing at home and proud of the not-small role she has played in bringing these races here, but she is also feeling a lot of pressure this weekend. Like Olympics-level pressure. She spoke with me, and other reporters, about this in Canmore earlier this week, in what very much felt like the calm before the storm. You can read that surprisingly revealing interview here:
So do they have snow there now?
They do! This fine data visualization shows you the effect of recent snowfall in the area:
We will have a photographer on site all weekend. Stay tuned here for lots of photos, and some print media as well. Enjoy the races, everyone.
— Gavin Kentch
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love project dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. 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.
Outside Watch apps did not work today. Horrible.