By Gavin Kentch
This article was last updated on January 28.
2025 World Championships will be held in Trondheim, in central Norway, from February 27 to March 9. The U.S. can enter up to four athletes per gender in each of six races there, or five in the women’s 10-kilometer interval-start classic if Jessie Diggins starts because she is the reigning world champion in this event hells yeah and so does not count against the quota there.
There is no minimum team size, U.S. Ski & Snowboard has stated. In general, look for USSS to seek to fill all available start spots in Trondheim, but also not to nominate extra athletes just for the sake of being sure to fill otherwise unused start spots. In practice, the American team for Oberstdorf in 2021 had 17 athletes, all of whom had at least one start in Germany, while Planica in 2023 saw 18 athletes nominated (but only 13 accepting and racing in Slovenia). In this vein, USSS writes in this year’s criteria document, “total team size across men and women is anticipated to be approximately 16 athletes.”
But enough theorizing; you probably just want to know who is going to be named to the team.
So: If the team were named today, here is who would be selected. This analysis is based off of the USSS criteria document, which you can find here, and the 2024/2025 SuperTour and world champs points lists prepared by USSS, which you can find here.
Effective January 28, 2025, here is who would be going to Trondheim if the American team for 2025 World Championships were named today:
Criterion no. 1: Objective selection based on strong finishes in specified World Cup events
There will be four individual events held in Trondheim: a skate sprint, a 20km skiathlon, a 10km interval-start classic, and a mass start 50km skate.
Athletes who post a top-eight finish in any of four analogous events on the World Cup between November 29 (Ruka) and February 2 (Cogne) will be selected to the team: the skate sprint, 20km skiathlon, 10km interval-start classic, and 20km skate. The sprint result looks to an athlete’s finish in the heats, not in the qual. The 20km skate may be either an interval-start or a mass start race. No, there is no race longer than 20km on the entire World Cup calendar before they race a 50km at World Champs.
As of January 28, the following athletes have recorded a top-eight finish in one or more of these events and so will be named to the team:
- Jessie Diggins (first in 20km skate in Ruka; first in skate sprint in Toblach; third in 20km skiathlon in Lillehammer; fifth in 20km skiathlon in Val di Fiemme; sixth in skate sprint in Davos; sixth in 20km skate in Toblach; etc./she has racked up even more top-eight finishes than this but at some point I just got tired of logging all of them)
- Julia Kern (seventh in 20km skiathlon in Val di Fiemme)
- Gus Schumacher (fifth in Lillehammer skiathlon; eighth in Ruka 20km skate)
- Ben Ogden (sixth in Davos skate sprint; sixth in Toblach skate sprint)
- Zanden McMullen (seventh in Ruka 20km skate)
Criterion no. 2: Discretionary selection
Even though this is the second category in a sequential list — USSS could, in theory, select ten athletes here via discretion and call it good, all while complying with at least the letter of the law — I am going to table this one for the time being. My reasoning is that the third criterion, q.v., infra, is extremely likely to capture all athletes who should reasonably be selected for the team, and so this second criterion is relatively unlikely to come into play. History is on my side with this approach; USSS has not selected an athlete to a world championships team on a purely discretionary basis for several championships now.
Update, January 23: If Rosie Brennan qualifies on an objective basis but feels she would be unable to compete, I would not be surprised to see USSS name an additional athlete via discretion to take a slightly larger team. Stay tuned.
Which brings us to:
Criterion no. 3: Objective selection based on top-45 rankings in the World Cup sprint or distance standings
“If there are remaining quota slot(s) after applying Selection Method No. 1 and No. 2,” USSS writes, “then athletes ranking in the top-45 in the Distance World Cup or Sprint World Cup standings on February 2, 2025, shall be selected to the team.” You can make this a little more complicated if you want — there are tiebreaker procedures in case the athletes selected under this criterion cumulatively exceed the USSS quota for total selections, and/or in case more than five sprinters per gender are or would be selected — but that’s the gist of it.
As of January 28, the following Americans are ranked in the top 45 of one or both of the women’s World Cup sprint or distance standings:
- Jessie Diggins (sprint and distance)
- Julia Kern (sprint and distance)
- Sophia Laukli (distance)
- Rosie Brennan (sprint and distance)
- Alayna Sonnesyn (sprint and distance)
Diggins and Kern were already selected under objective criterion no. 1. You can therefore slot in Laukli, Brennan, and Sonnesyn as also making the team under objective criterion no. 3.
As of January 28, the following Americans are ranked in the top 45 of one or both of the men’s World Cup sprint or distance standings:
- Gus Schumacher (sprint and distance)
- Ben Ogden (sprint and distance)
- Zanden McMullen (distance)
- Jack Young (sprint)
- JC Schoonmaker (sprint)
Schumacher, Ogden, and McMullen were already selected under objective criterion no. 1. You can therefore slot in Young and Schoonmaker as also making the team under objective criterion no. 3.
Criterion no. 4: Discretionary selection based on top performances in domestic races
The final criterion here is both discretionary (“may be filled”) and applied only on an as-needed basis (“should there be any remaining quota slot(s) after Selection Method Nos. 1–3 above have been applied”). Don’t get me wrong, both history and my sense of the specific athletes involved would leave me quite surprised to see not a single domestic athlete selected for the world champs team on the basis of their performance at U.S. Nationals… but I do have to flag this as at least a theoretical possibility. #lawyered
Assuming that one to four athletes are indeed chosen on the basis of their domestic race results, USSS will look to an athlete’s two best performances in domestic races this season, in either sprint or distance.
On the one hand, the period of qualifying races here includes all 11 high-level races opening the 2024/2025 domestic race season, Race to the Outhouse not included: the four SuperTour races in Birkieland in December, the three national championship races and one SuperTour race held in Anchorage the first week of January, and the three SuperTour races in Bozeman in late January to close out Period 3 (full SuperTour schedule here fyi).
On the other hand, the bonuses given for top performances at U.S. Nationals are such that you can expect the top-ranking domestic athletes to emerge based on their race results at Kincaid in the first week of January, no matter what previously happened in Cable or subsequently happens in Bozeman.
Also note that, while the World Cup top-8 results criterion looks only to an athlete’s final finish position in the heats vis-à-vis sprint results, scoring for the internal USSS 2025 Championship Selection List looks only to their position in the sprint qual. Note also that the USSS points system heavily favors strong performances at Nationals: a second- and third-place finish in the two Anchorage sprint quals would be worth more (61 points total) than first-place finishes in any two other “normal” SuperTour sprint quals combined (60 points total).
Finally, note that foreign nationals are excised from the results for purposes of this calculation; this is not to be xenophobic, but rather to rank American skiers against only American skiers for purposes of selection to American championship teams. Yes, Erica Lavén might win everything in sight this season, but the first sentence of the criteria document notes that it applies only to USSS members with a valid U.S. passport and a USA-coded FIS license. Even then, as Ben Ogden jokingly (?) predicted in his look at top storylines for the upcoming season, “Klæbo marries an American woman to gain a spot on the U.S. cross country ski team, but Grover says he needs to race the Super Tour in Duluth first.”
Putting all that together, here is who leads the domestic-athletes selection list in each of four categories as of the close of the selection period:
- women’s distance: Kendall Kramer
- women’s sprint: Erin Bianco
- men’s distance: John Steel Hagenbuch
- men’s sprint: Murphy Kimball
Check back here for more as the season progresses.
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