Weekend Viewing Guide for November 29–December 1: Ruka World Cup, here we go again

By Gavin Kentch

Cue Eminem, because guess who’s back. World Cup ski racing, that’s who. (Pretty sure that’s the subtext of “Houdini.” Is Northug still a white jerk? Discuss.)

Anyway. Welcome back to the first viewing guide of the third year of Nordic Insights. I will run a version of this guide throughout the season in advance of each race weekend. Just the World Cup for now, but I will add in the SuperTour once that comes online.

The SuperTour doesn’t start till mid-December so for now the only thing on tap is the Ruka Triple, the opening three-race series of the World Cup season for roughly the last decade now. It is dark and cold at 66° N latitude, and the sun will set in Ruka tomorrow at 1:55 p.m., and Zanden McMullen says that the Ruka course “is just Mount Everest up every hill.” Ski racing is fun.

Anyway. Here is when the races will be this weekend.

World Cup (local time at venue: GMT +2. This is 7 hours ahead of the East Coast and 11 hours ahead of Alaska.)

How can I watch the races?

I haven’t actually written this one up as a standalone article yet this year, awkwardly; I’ve been spending all my time hiring an awesome new staff and getting them up to speed. TLDR, here are your viewing options if you are tuning in from the U.S.:

• Paid and reliable: 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 English audio commentary, and so on. Who will be commenting there? Ryan Sederquist has broken this down for you on his increasingly invaluable site, SederSkier (disclosure: Sederquist will sometimes be the commenter, which means that he is well qualified to speak to these logistics).
• New quantity: FIS TV, which you can find here. Again, the SederSkier article linked above has more thoughts on this.
• Free but take your chances: See what gets uploaded to YouTube after the fact. If you search for the race name and date, you can sometimes find a full broadcast online for a day or two after the race. Try also transliterating the venue name into the Cyrillic alphabet to loop in Russian users. Best to watch this with alacrity if you do find it; they tend to get taken down pretty quickly, because lawyers.
• This worked last year but I don’t yet know enough to necessarily be able to sign off on it again: Last season you could download a VPN (Windscribe should give you enough free bandwidth each month to stream all races), set your location to Canada, and stream races for free on the FIS cross-country page (link). I’ll know more after this weekend about the viability of this option.

Who will be racing for the U.S.?

Good question. American starters for Friday’s distance race are, in bib order, Haley Brewster, Julia Kern, Sydney Palmer-Leger, Rosie Brennan, Sophia Laukli, Alayna Sonnesyn, and Jessie Diggins for the women. For the men, it will be Ben Ogden, John Steel Hagenbuch, Zanden McMullen, Gus Schumacher, Michael Earnhart, Zak Ketterson, and Hunter Wonders. Expect a fair amount of overlap in Saturday’s sprint, but also the addition of some sprint-specific starters such as JC Schoonmaker, Renae Anderson, and Lauren Jortberg. These should largely be the American sprint and distance starters through all three weekends of Period 1, but that is just a general sense rather than sourced reporting on my part.

Start lists go up on the FIS site 24 hours in advance of each race fyi. Search under live results to find them.

How can I find out more about these people?

Here are recent World Cup previews from FIS (men), FIS (women), SkinnySki, SederSkier (subscription required, but literally as little as $2 gets you access to all articles here and it is clearly worth it), and FasterSkier, and an APU-specific preview from the Anchorage Daily News. This site also had pre-season articles on, yes, Jessie Diggins and Therese Johaug, but I promise that we will cover more than just those two athletes as the season progresses.

How can you support these athletes?

A superb question. I would suspect that, with a few high-profile exceptions (Jessie Diggins certainly, likely also Rosie Brennan, probably Sophia Laukli but that’s only due to trail running, truly not sure after that), almost no athlete in this country is making money off of this sport. I mean, check out this piece; Gus Schumacher literally won a World Cup last year, and took home a total of 24,550 CHF (about $28,000 American) in prize money winnings for the entire season. Yes there are some other income sources out there, but keep that in mind when your favorite athlete comes to you asking for financial support.

You can support the athletes’ teams through their individual clubs. You can support American skiing development more broadly through the National Nordic Foundation’s Drive for 25, which is going on right now. Find out more about that initiative here, or just donate directly here.

How can you support this website?

A pretty self-interested question tbh.

That said: I worked my butt off all last year out of a love for American skiing, destroyed most winter weekends to cover the World Cup in inconvenient time zones, stood courseside for a lot of cold hours of in-person reporting at both U.S. Nationals in Soldier Hollow (literally the only journalist in the mixed zone?) and the World Cup in Canmore (one of three independent North American journalists on site), and took home a net profit of roughly $4,000 to show for it. Impressive stuff.

I’m not going to stump for donations much this week, because this is really NNF/Drive for 25 time. That said, if you are still inspired to support this site, last year’s GoFundMe is still up, and the money all goes to the same place. You can find that page here. I will start making a stronger case next week for the value of supporting American ski journalism. But if you are only going to give money to one skiing cause this week it should unambiguously be NNF, and I really mean that.

Thanks for reading. Go team.