By Gavin Kentch
If you enjoyed Minneapolis in February 2024, get ready for Lake Placid in March 2026.
“Recently we were awarded the World Cup Finals for 2026,” began Rebecca Dayton’s presentation at USSS Spring Congress earlier Tuesday.
Dayton, who works for New York state agency Olympic Regional Development Authority, or ORDA, was joined by Kris Cheney-Seymour, also of ORDA, as they walked through some of the logistics and capabilities of Lake Placid as a host venue. Dayton is General Manager of Mt Van Hoevenberg and the Olympic Jumping Complex; Cheney-Seymour is the head of Sport Development at Mt Van Hoevenberg.
The pair’s presentation was largely focused on practical concerns such as hotel rooms and transportation, reflecting the document they had recently prepared for the International Ski Federation. FIS representatives were “fairly confident in the trails and all those things,” Dayton noted, but wanted more details on the lodge, team areas, accommodations, and so on. “That’s why this presentation is a little more outside the field of play focused.”
So I can’t tell you much yet about race formats or dates for World Cup Finals — no one can for certain until after the 2025/2026 World Cup schedule is formally adopted at FIS spring meetings next May — other than that it is intended to be a three-day race weekend, Friday through Sunday, in mid- to late-March of 2026.
“We don’t have a final format or schedule,” said Dayton. “That all will be coming, and we’ll get obviously much more into the competition details of things. But it’s an amazing opportunity, and we think we’re well-positioned to to pull it off. Obviously it is late March which will provide the challenges we’ve all been talking about here [earlier in the day’s meetings regarding trail conditions at 2024 Junior Nationals]. So we’re continuing to practice our late-March snow management.”
Looking at the end of the 2025/2026 race season more broadly, the 2026 Winter Olympics will have been held in Milan–Cortina, in the Italian Dolomites, from February 6–22, 2026. That leaves time for a post-Olympics break, spring classics such as Holmenkollen, and then travel over to the new world.
Speaking of travel: Cheney-Seymour noted the venue’s longstanding experience with using Montreal as their host airport, noting that it is just a two-hour drive away across the border. For athletes who could potentially encounter visa issues with a two-country trip transiting through both Canada and the U.S., Cheney-Seymour said that JFK airport, a 4.5-hour drive away in New York City, is also an option.
Bryan Fish, Cross Country Development Director for USSS, shared what he characterized as “a word of caution in a way, and optimism as well,” in response to the pair’s presentation.
“Having had the World Cup races in Minneapolis,” Fish said, “people showed up. In big numbers. And that was a huge part of the atmosphere, and it’s what teams in Europe are going to be expecting to come back to in the U.S.”
(That’s why they’re chartering a plane from the Midwest now, was the joking response from the Lake Placid side.)
“Just be aware of how important that’s going to be” for the future of having races in the U.S., Fish noted. “People need to show up.”
“Which I think is going to be a challenge to everybody in this room, in all of the regions,” answered Dayton.
“Lake Placid and New England have a vibrant community, and I think we can — we’ll draw a lot of people to those events. I think the Eastern Canadians will come,” she said.
“But Lake Placid is certainly a much different environment than Minneapolis,” Dayton noted. “I was there as well. So that was a pretty easy transit for most people, to be able to come out and enjoy the event.
“This will take a little more work for sure. And I think we need to manage those expectations, that those numbers are downtown city numbers and not rural Lake Placid numbers.”
All that said, Dayton added, “But we have pretty high expectations. … Just for comparison, we held our first World Cup ski jumping in 33 years last year. We had anticipated our normal crowd of 2,500 that we would get for the standard ski jumping event, and 18,000 people showed up for the course of the weekend. So it does work in this environment, but it does take work.”
Cheney-Seymour also pointed out that the venue will host two UCI Mountain Bike World Cup events between now and March 2026, which will give them additional practice with helping large volumes of fans efficiently move around the region.
Correction: Due to errors in the editing and factchecking process, this article originally attributed most quotes to Rebecca Northrup, with NYSEF, rather than to Rebecca Dayton, with ORDA. I sincerely regret the error. Additionally, one version of this article referred to NYSEF in the headline; that was also inaccurate.
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