By Gavin Kentch
After everything that was not a ski race — the waiting, and the planning, and the fundraising, and the ticket rush, and the snow woes, and the sudden last-minute snowstorm — a ski race was held at Theodore Wirth Park, in central Minneapolis, earlier Saturday.
It was a skate sprint, which Johannes Høsflot Klæbo won for the men, ahead of Federico Pellegrino, in an impressive but completely unsurprising development given the last seven years of World Cup sprint racing. A Swedish woman won on the distaff side, with another Swedish woman and Kristine Stavås Skistad rounding out the podium; the only surprise here was the identity of the particular Swedish woman who emerged victorious, with Jonna Sundling taking the win over sprint leader Linn Svahn, as Skistad finished third.
Jessie Diggins was fourth today in the women’s final, which, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, was also unsurprising this season, in which she has generally prioritized burning her matches early on sprint day so as to advance into semifinals and finals, going for the consistent accretion of points over more occasional home-run swings for the podium. Diggins is also currently leading the overall World Cup standings, by 252 points over Svahn with just eight scored races left this season, so, scoreboard.
There were 24 Americans who raced today, 12 per gender, in an event that was sort of just a ski race and was sort of so much more for the ten to fifteen thousand (!) people who showed up.
One of the two dozen athletes, Adam Witkowski of Michigan Tech, spent eight hours driving south yesterday to claim a last-minute start spot after Logan Diekmann had to drop out. Today was not the World Cup debut for Witkowski, though it was only his third career World Cup start. It was the first race at this level for Walker Hall. It was the third or fifth career start for several nation’s group athletes, following their debut last weekend in Canmore.
Eight athletes qualified for the home team: Diggins, Rosie Brennan, Sammy Smith, and Julia Kern for the women in the morning’s first qualifying session, then Gus Schumacher, Kevin Bolger, Zak Ketterson, and JC Schoonmaker for the men soon after.
Notably, Diggins was second in the qual, Schumacher fourth, and Smith ninth; there was a not small amount of crowd support out there, and I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that the athletes may have been pretty amped today. My photographer on site, Anna Engel, who has finished 17th and 27th in the women’s elite field in the last two skate Birkies, likened it to the reception on Main Street in Hayward, over and over, for every American.
Speaking of the Birkie, Team Birkie had two athletes in today’s race, Bolger and Ketterson; in a nice bit of kismet, both men made the heats. Diggins, you may or may not know this, was born and raised in Afton, a 45-minute drive to the east of the venue; she also made the heats. Heck, technically speaking Gus Schumacher was born in Madison while his father was finishing a medical residency there, but the family moved to Anchorage weeks later so we’re claiming him for The Last Frontier. Strong day for the Midwest nonetheless.
There were few surprises in the quarterfinals on the women’s side; Sweden started six athletes today and all six advanced out of the quarters, because that is what the Swedish women’s sprint team does these days. (Yes, fully half the athletes in the semis were from Sweden, with the same ratio present again in the final as well.)
Brennan and Smith, awkwardly, were in the same heat, quarterfinal no. 3; the mandate of Outside Watch to provide “high-quality, compelling storylines” apparently does not encompass such minor details as “successfully broadcasting all parts of a race,” so I can’t tell you much more than that, sorry. I’m with Steve Fuller (see below) on this one. Brennan and Smith were fifth and sixth in their heat, only a second off of Johanna Hagström’s lead time but also not in a position to advance. If you’d like to know more, take it up with Outside.
Outside Watch also did not see fit to let me view quarterfinal no. 4. I can piece together that Diggins skied it very quickly, as is currently her wont in the sprint heats, en route to taking the win here. I suspect she did so on a wire-to-wire basis.
My feed returned for quarterfinal no. 5, where Julia Kern was the final American woman in a position to advance today. She was ultimately unable to do so, skiing off the back for most of the heat and finishing in sixth.
The above is what I was treated to for the entirety of the first women’s semifinal, as Outside Watch thought that the middle of a live sprint heat was a good time to go to commercial. Outside Inc., if you’re reading this, I did *not* enjoy your free content. And I stand by my snark from a pre-season media piece last November, in which I wrote, “Outside Watch is the online streaming service of what used to be a well-regarded print-only magazine called ‘Outside.’” More like used to be a well-regarded online streaming service, amirite?!
The ad, and the snark, had dissipated in time for the second women’s semifinal, which was… led out very quickly by one Jessie Diggins. Diggins skied hard the entire way, and led effectively every meter of the race. By the halfway mark, her lead was approaching 10 meters. Things came back together somewhat over the downhill return to the finish, but her win here was never in doubt. Diggins won by 0.28 seconds to advance to her fifth sprint final this season.
Here is the tail end of the sprint final. Outside Watch doesn’t do replays (there’s the snark again!), so the second slide here may be about the best you can get, sorry.
The crowd reactions for the sprint-final introductions were all-time. Even through the computer screen, I could hear the chants of “Jess-ie, Jess-ie, Jess-ie!” reverberating around the venue. If this was not the best day of Diggins’s life, it’s got to be way up there.
Emma Ribom of Sweden got tripped up and fell immediately off the start. Diggins slotted into fourth in what was now a five-women final. A minute-plus into the race, Sundling was leading, with Skistad second and Svahn third, Diggins fighting valiantly in fourth but also getting gapped and looking a little harried.
And that was… pretty much how things stayed over the rest of the final. That’s where things pick up in the embedded video above, and that’s where things end at the finish: Sundling first, Svahn 0.95 seconds back in second, Skistad 2.68 back in third, Diggins 4.89 back in fourth. Victoria Carl of Germany faded heavily in fifth, finishing roughly 10 seconds back of Diggins. Ribom, after her early fall, skied in alone another 30 seconds later.
On to the men. There were four Americans in the heats today, but two of them were in heat two and two of them were in heat three, and by the close of the third quarterfinal there were no American men left in the heats.
In quarterfinal no. 2, Schoonmaker and Bolger were in fifth and sixth a minute-plus into the heat, not in the lead but still in the mix. But at this point Schoonmaker lost a pole basket in a stumble, continued poor luck for the Tahoe kid after a broken pole in Canmore.
Schoonmaker got a new pole with alacrity from a trailside coach but still had to unstrap the old one, and his day was effectively done at this point. He skied smoothly over the remainder of the heat and did not panic, but was also unable to close the gap. Ahead of him, Bolger was spit out into fourth, and largely remained there. He was fourth at the finish, and Schoonmaker sixth.
In quarterfinal no. 3, Ketterson and Schumacher both greatly enjoyed their pre-race introductions. Ketterson, the pride of Jefferson High School in nearby Bloomington, basked in the crowd’s adulation; Schumacher shook out his flowing locks, and formed a heart with his hands.
Midway into the race, Ketterson was third and Schumacher fourth as Håvard Solås Taugbøl of Norway led the heat; with few exceptions, the leader one minute into a heat today was also the leader at the finish.
This heat was not such an exception. Schumacher looked for space going up the final hill, but was largely unable to find it; Ketterson was tripped up slightly here, losing precious momentum at a key time. Schumacher kept it close till the end, but was ultimately fourth, 0.46 seconds back of Taugbøl and 0.43 from advancing. Ketterson was fifth, 1.23 seconds back.
There were few surprises in the semis, so I’m going to skip ahead to the final here. Spoiler alert, Klæbo won it, looking impossibly smooth while he did so. He was content to sit in second for roughly the first two-thirds of the race, while, I would imagine, the rest of the field thought to themselves, “How is Klæbo going to win this race today?”
A minute forty-five into the race, effectively the whole field was all together. No one was in duress, though Even Northug broke a pole as the pack coalesced. Taugbøl was in the lead 2:00 in, with Klæbo second and Pellegrino right behind in third. “Klaebo SOOOO chill here” read my race notes at this point.
Taugbøl led out Klæbo and Pellegrino coming back down to the finish. Then it was time for the moment in every race where Klæbo shows that he is the class of the field. That moment came on a free skate in a high-speed section in the close of the race. If even I knew this was coming, I have less than no doubt whatsoever that both Taugbøl and Pellegrino knew it was coming, and yet neither man could do anything about it. A victory is perhaps even more impressive when everyone in the field knows what you’re going to do and still can’t stop it.
Pellegrino may have been closer to Klæbo than the Norwegian realized, but it was never close enough. Klæbo was first at the finish, in 2:54.24. Pellegrino was 0.27 seconds back in second, and Taugbøl 1.21 back in third. Janik Riebli of Switzerland, Northug of Norway, and Simone Dapra of Italy, in that order, made up the rest of the final. As in the women’s final, there was a gap of over two seconds between the podium and fourth.
Other Americans who raced today were Erin Bianco (37th), Ava Thurston (40th), Haley Brewster (41st), Alayna Sonnesyn (44th), Renae Anderson (48th), Sydney Palmer-Leger (49th), Margie Freed (50th), and Michaela Keller-Miller (51st) for the women, and Jack Young (33rd), John Steel Hagenbuch (37th), Will Koch (38th), Michael Earnhart (44th), Zanden McMullen (46th), Adam Witkowski (53rd), Luke Jager (62nd), and Walker Hall (67th) for the men.
I’ll have a separate article with thoughts from a few of these folks up later today. I may or may not have more quotes from the Americans, to be honest; there’s a lot going on in Minneapolis today, and this is a difficult day on which to report from a distance. (I’m not there in person because I ran out of money and I miss my kids, so I came home after filing 20,000 words from Canmore. Plus, like, here is the Star-Tribune’s article on today; this is the extremely rare cross-country ski race in this country where my attendance does not have a huge effect on the amount of in-person coverage.) But do check back later for some thoughts from the qual.
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.
You seem to have gotten more from Outside’s stream than was available here (thanks later to @JungleBoy). In any case, you may not have seen that in the last quarter final heat Julia Kern was skiing strongly in second or third when at 0:55 she was run over hard and stride broken by Frida Karlsson, in one of her apparently (or hopefully) mindlessly determined moves. I wonder if the jury favored Karlsson over Kern, as the former only got a warning — and advanced to the semis.
Yeah, definitely news to me. Thanks for this additional context. Final results definitely show a verbal warning under ICR 343.9, obstruction. My somewhat informed sense is that simply a verbal warning is most consistent with a jury determination that it was negligent rather than intentional, but that said (a) I’m not on the jury and (b) the FIS rules do not actually explicitly incorporate mens rea classes from the Model Penal Code.