By Gavin Kentch
2025 Junior Nationals kick off at Soldier Hollow, in Midway, Utah, on Monday morning. 400+ junior athletes from across the country are converging for four days’ worth of racing: two distance races, one sprint, and one relay. Here’s what’s going on when.
Where are results?
Here’s day three (skate mass start on Friday). Direct link for Saturday’s relays is not up yet as of 8:30 p.m. Friday Alaska time, sorry. Just go here any time on Saturday; it should be the top result link on this homepage.
Is there live streaming?
There is no official streaming this year. Not awesome. I don’t want to unduly criticize race organizers, but, yeah, not great. Be like Fairbanks, here as elsewhere, and put up a livestream if you can.
Where can you find other information not contained within this preview?
Here is the general race website.
When are the races?
Briefly put, there is an interval-start classic race on Monday (5km for U16, 7.5km for U18 and U20). Wednesday is sprint day, skate this year. Friday is mass start distance day, also skate. This is the longest race on the program: 7.5km for U16, 10km for U18, and 15km for U20. Then Saturday is a 4 x 3.33km mixed-gender classic relay.
Equal-distance racing is here to stay; both genders are contesting the same distance each race day.
Here are detailed race-day schedules. All times are Mountain Time. This is two hours ahead of Alaska and two hours behind the East Coast. The rest of you can figure it out from there.
Saturday, March 15: relay day!
Also: JOs dance Post-event celebration, Soho Nordic Center, 4–8 p.m.; including team awards, 4:15 p.m.
Who will be racing?
Please see here for details:
Who’s going to win?
New England, until proven otherwise. They have won the Alaska Cup for the last three years in a row, and, more broadly, 16 times out of the last 20 (make that 15 out of 19 if you don’t count Alaska in the Covid-shortened 2020 JNs as a win for The Last Frontier). You shouldn’t bet against them unless you have a very good reason to.
I personally think that it will be far less of a runaway than last year; Intermountain will be racing at home, also at altitude, and Alaska’s team this year is stronger than last year.* But I also foresee, subject to the extremely imprecise science of predicting year-over-year junior performance across five time zones of a not-small country, New England coming out on top yet again. I do think that those three regions, in some order, will be top-three once more; the gap from them to the rest of the country last year really was not small.
(* If my daughter’s Junior Nordic coach is reading this, she hopes you win every race. If the Nordic Insights staffer on this team is reading this, I hope you win every race. Awkwardly, you are in the same division. Maybe you can go 1–2.)
Update: This is aging pretty poorly, but I’m obviously not gonna go back and surreptitiously change what I wrote before racing started, even if events on the ground are proving it incorrect.
Here are last year’s Alaska Cup points, for perspective (link). New England won by a lot in Lake Placid, is what I’m trying to say.
What are the courses?
Please see this PDF. If you raced the sprint here at 2024 Senior Nationals, note that, compared to then, the JNs course is shorter; is sited entirely south of the nordic center; does not ascend as high on the second climb; and has a more dynamic descent to the finish. Here is the JNs course:
And here is the 2024 Senior Nats course (* it’s not, actually; the course as skied was less of a straight shot into the finish and had more of a bump at the 1.25km mark. The ongoing effect of these changes has been to reduce the significance of the historically notorious draft from the high point down to the finish. You can read more about that dynamic in this race article on the skate sprint at those U.S. Nationals.)
What is the highest point on these courses?
1738 meters, or 5,700 feet. Good luck with that, everyone other than Intermountain, Rocky Mountain, and Far West.
Congratulations to all athletes who qualified to race this week!
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 toAmerican 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.
