By Noah Eckstein
GRANÅSEN ARENA, Trondheim — What sort of near-freezing precipitation was the sky spitting out in the hills above Trondheim today, you ask?
According to Alayna Sonnesyn, “It was a good zeros day.”
More specifically, the thermometer was hovering within an absolute degree of zero Celsius and enormous, saturated dendrites were positively nuking down. The consistency on the ground — of wet snow over slush — was the kind that sends small children careening uncontrollably down large hills and goads drunken college students into gleeful snowball fights.
Unbowed by the conditions, Ebba Andersson, Swedish queen of championship skiing, strode to the win in Tuesday’s 10-kilometer individual start classic, taking her second victory in three days and the fourth World Championships individual gold of her career. Joining her on the podium were Therese Johaug, just 1.3 seconds back in second, and Frida Karlsson in third, 12.1 seconds back.
For viewers back home, the major point of intrigue today was the dearth of American women on the start list. With Kate Oldham now in Hanover, New Hampshire preparing for NCAA championships on Thursday, five American women remain in Trondheim: Jessie Diggins, Julia Kern, Sophia Laukli, Rosie Brennan, and Alayna Sonnesyn (Team Birkie). Diggins and Kern opted to prioritize rest ahead of Wednesday’s team sprint, while skate-specialist Laukli is presumably saving her matches for the relay and/or 50-kilometer skate.
The absence of more women, either drawn from the athletes named above or potential additional starters that could have been named so as to spare the Americans from spending the final week of racing here with just five women on site, did not go unnoticed. For Jordan Fields, former Williams College skier and FKT god out cheering on the course with a group of old teammates, it felt like a bit of a slight.
“It’s definitely a bummer,” he said before the race. “I mean, we came all the way over here to cheer on the U.S. There are only two women starting, and not the ones that have the best chance of high finishes.”
As for those two, they did not end up exactly fighting for the medals. In only her second race in weeks after battling complex and undisclosed health issues to start the season, Rosie Brennan finished 22nd, while Sonnesyn followed in 33rd.
So how did the race itself go down? A very good question, and one this reporter is not terribly well-prepared to answer. As it turns out, spending racing hours gallivanting through the Trøndelag forest getting sopping wet, taking mediocre photos, and admittedly partaking in some gonzo journalism vis-à-vis Norwegian trailside drinking culture is not the best way to know what on earth is happening in the timing booth.
Photo: Noah Eckstein
With the help of FIS’s trusty live timing app, here’s a cursory summary:
Johaug, two bibs behind Andersson but still among the early seeded starters, took it out quickly. Just behind at the 3.2km checkpoint, though, was Teresa Stadlober, who pushed on hard and — with the benefit of a late bib and abundant splits — proceeded to lead the field through each time check over the next three or so kilometers.
All within 15 seconds of the leader, Johaug, Andersson, Heidi Weng, and Karlsson traded seconds through the middle part of the race, but by the 7km checkpoint Johaug and Andersson had firmly supplanted the Austrian at the top of the leaderboard.
In the end, it came down to a finish straight so deep and slow that a number of athletes — Johaug included — resorted to striding. Johaug, Andersson, and third-party commentators would later all voice their displeasure over grooming choices, though Johaug also made clear that this was not the reason for her result.
Andersson looked on with equal parts shock and joy as her now-twice vanquished rival once more crossed the line just over a second behind.
After the race, Andersson said that she had considered herself a contender coming into these championships despite having just a single World Cup win to her name this season. “I thought that maybe medals is something that is realistic for me,” she noted in her post-race press conference. That said, “two golds after two races” was still a pleasant surprise.
Johaug, a ten-time individual World Champion, didn’t return to top-flight ski racing after two years of semi-retirement for second places. “It’s crap, to be honest,” she said in her press conference. “When you’re at the start and the starting gun goes off, you go out to win. But I tried and I’m hungry for revenge, and I’m ready to grit my teeth in the next races.”
This race was never her primary target this week, anyways. “I have a dream of winning an individual World Championship gold medal for the 50-kilometer skate,” she went on. “That’s my main goal.”
Results aren’t everything, though. “Regardless of whether there is gold here at the World Championships or not,” she clarified, “I have had a fantastic career, and I have had a fantastic comeback.”
In the battle for third, with 0.8km to go Stadlober was still holding the bronze medal position with a 7.6-second buffer to Karlsson in fourth. Her hot start proved too much, though, and the Swede clawed back more than ten seconds in the closing meters to claim a bittersweet podium.
Karlsson, also having surely circled this race on her calendar at the beginning of the year, was nonetheless satisfied with her result. “It is much more fun to be third than to be fourth,” she told the press, having experienced the latter on Sunday. “It’s really cool to be here [at the press conference]. And it’s cool to be able to attend the medal ceremony later too.”
Our two intrepid American starters, riding their trusty zeros, both found the sloppy tracks something of a motivator.
“I actually love skiing in these conditions,” Brennan told Nordic Insights in the mixed zone. “It was good skiing, and I had good skis, but yeah, my body’s just not where I had hoped it to be.”
Sonnesyn, too, didn’t flinch. “When I’m feeling good, I’m ready to face it,” she said in the mixed zone. “Not gonna lie, there are times when it’s really hard if I’m not mentally ready to go or fired up or maybe I’m physically fatigued, but today I was ready to face anything. I think we all kind of knew coming to Trondheim we were gonna have to be ready for any type of weather. So that’s what we brought here — our game face.”
She also weighed in on the difficult dynamics at play in team selection and start spot allocation. “It’s always a bummer to not fill all the starts,” she affirmed. “I respect the decision that all the athletes made. That being said, I’ve been back at home seeing unfilled starts and that’s really hard to see.”
Matt Whitcomb, U.S. Ski Team head coach, agreed on the difficulty of threading the team-selection needle when prodded about whether the team should have brought an additional skier or two to fill the hole created by Oldham and Kendall Kramer opting for NCAAs.
“We had enough women to start today’s event,” he said in the mixed zone, “and as of two weeks ago, it looked like this start was going to be filled. But we always know that because of the [density of races] there’s a chance that we could have some open start spots.”
As for the handful of bubble-sitting women at home watching rather than racing: “They will be frustrated with us. We know that,” Whitcomb plainly stated. But, he said, “having athletes that are sitting around without starts is really miserable for those athletes — it’s something that we really try to avoid.”
Hear more: Matt Whitcomb speaks at length on team naming considerations, overall team mood, staying dry in these conditions, and much more:
This all could have been avoided with a little funny college math. For Rosie Fordham, racing here for her native Australia and domestically for the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the choice between Trondheim and Hanover was an easy one. “I saw the dates of World Champs and we decided early on that I was going to redshirt,” she said. “NCAAs next year, obviously!”
Out in the woods, none of this matters. For Herman, a student in Trondheim, ski politics is beside the point. “Nah, we don’t care. We go out, we drink, we cheer for the Norwegians,” he said before catching himself. “No, we cheer for everyone! It’s once in a lifetime for us to come out and do this.”
Racing continues tomorrow with a classic team sprint. The American duo will be Jessie Diggins and Julia Kern, with Diggins on leg one and Kern as the anchor.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in years one and two of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year three 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, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
