By Gavin Kentch
We are down to the final week-plus of racing for the 2023/2024 World Cup season. There is a small, low-key race happening this weekend at an obscure venue called Holmenkollen, then city sprints outside the iconic church in Drammen on Tuesday, then World Cup Finals in Falun next weekend. And that is all.
Jessie Diggins comes into this weekend guarding a 162-point lead over Linn Svahn in the overall World Cup standings. She will be looking to, how can I put this, return to performances more aligned with her historical levels of performance over the season’s final five races. (“The giant fiasco: Diggins eliminated directly in the qualifiers” was the somewhat more pointed take from the Swedish media on Sunday, according to an auto-translation. The paper also blurbed “The Wrath of Jessica Diggins,” but I think that just means that she hurried through the mixed zone after her qual without taking questions.)
Rosie Brennan sits in fourth in the distance standings, well within reach of third depending on how things play out over the season’s final three distance races. On the men’s side, Harald Østberg Amundsen has the overall title effectively locked up, unless he forgets how to ski for the next week. And Klæbo will win the sprint globe, for not the first time (the sixth time, in fact, in the last eight seasons).
This weekend sees the women race in Holmenkollen on Saturday, then the men on Sunday. City sprints are in Drammen on Tuesday. Sophia Laukli, pictured above, is unambiguously excited for 50km tomorrow.
Here is when the races will be. Doublecheck my math for Sunday and Tuesday following the shift to Daylight Savings Time, which we observe starting this weekend but Norway and Sweden do not observe until three weeks later.
World Cup (local time at venue: Eastern European Time. This is currently 6 hours ahead of the East Coast and 10 hours ahead of Alaska, but that will change by an hour for Sunday and Tuesday’s races.)
| date | race | time (Alaska) | local time | results |
| Saturday, March 9 | W 50km classic | 12:30 a.m. | 10:30 a.m. | here |
| Sunday, March 10 | M 50km classic | 1:30 a.m. | 10:30 a.m. | here |
| Tuesday, March 12 | classic sprint qual | 2:30 a.m. | 11:30 a.m. | here |
| classic sprint heats | 5 a.m. | 2 p.m. | here |
Who is racing for the U.S.?
In Tuesday’s sprints: For the women, the expected trio of season-long starters Rosie Brennan, Jessie Diggins, and Julia Kern. Then also Sammy Smith, Erin Bianco, and Renae Anderson. For the men, it will be Gus Schumacher, JC Schoonmaker, Kevin Bolger, Zak Ketterson, Zanden McMullen, Luke Jager, and Michael Earnhart. Team Birkie and APU fans will want to watch this one.
How can you watch the races?
I have thoughts on this. TLDR, pay Ski & Snowboard Live (link) $8 to $9 per month throughout the season if you would like to be assured of being able to watch the races, with good quality, and audio commentary in American English, and so on. For as little as $0/month, depending on VPN cost, get a VPN that will let you geo-locate to Canada, then watch the free livestream on the FIS YouTube channel, with commentary in British English. Find out more about that here. You might want to try Windscribe as a VPN; their free version gets you a fair amount of data.
You can also take your chances with what gets uploaded to YouTube after the fact, which is free but not always as reliable, and subject to pesky take-down notices. Find out far more about all of these options, including some VPN how-tos, in this article:
I’m going to be off the grid at the family cabin for the weekend so there will be no race-day reporting on Holmenkollen, but, as always, I hope the Americans crush.
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.
