By Peter Minde
MOUNT VAN HOEVENBERG, Lake Placid — John Steel Hagenbuch and Jessie Diggins won Sunday’s 40-kilometer classic mass start races at Mount van Hoevenberg, the final races of the 2024/2025 SuperTour season.
Steel Hagenbuch, of Dartmouth College, won the men’s race, and yet another national championship, in 1:51:06.5. In second place, Gus Schumacher of APU Nordic Ski Center crossed the line in 1:51:07.4, less than a second out. Skiing for Stratton Mountain School (SMS), Rémi Drolet took third in 1:51:24.0, roughly 15 seconds later.
In the women’s race, Diggins and SMS teammate Julia Kern gave a master class in skiing in sloppy snow. Diggins’s winning time was 2:16:45.3. Kern was just 14 seconds back for second place, in 2:16.59.2. A visibly exhausted Erica Lavén of the University of Utah came third many minutes later, at 2:22:30.2.
Fourth overall in the women’s race was Laven’s Utah teammate Selma Nevin. Fifth overall was Renae Anderson of APU. Laven is from Sweden and Nevin is from Norway; Anderson placed third on the domestic podium for her first career national championship podium finish.
Big races call for epic conditions. Conditions on Sunday were epic, but not in the way one might like. Freezing rain overnight led organizers to push the start times back one hour. Ten minutes before the men’s start, it was 33 degrees, with light rain falling from the dead, gray sky. Depending on where one was on the course, the snow surface ranged from frozen granular to mashed potatoes to boilerplate.
all photos: Peter Minde
Men’s race: John Steel Hagenbuch, Gus Schumacher, and Rémi Drolet get away early
The men went out first, at 9 a.m. On their first lap, they were in a tight group, which made for dicey racing in the fast corners. Halfway through the first lap, Gus Schumacher led John Steel Hagenbuch by less than a second. Reid Goble of BSF was a second back in third. Michael Earnhart (APU) was in fourth, followed by SMS’s Rémi Drolet. At the end of the first lap, Drolet held a half-second lead, with Steel Hagenbuch 2.5 seconds back of Schumacher. The rain tailed off around 9:30, and the sky brightened a bit.
men’s start
That’s the way it would remain for the next 35 kilometers. By 12.5 kilometers into the race, midway through lap three of eight, Steel Hagenbuch, Drolet, and Schumacher had a 40-second gap over the rest of the field. Over the remainder of the race, their margin gradually increased as they traded the lead between them.
Behind them, the early chase group included Earnhart, Goble, and Utah’s Brian Bushey. Finn Sweet of the University of Vermont and Xavier McKeever of Alberta World Cup Academy (AWCA) were a few seconds back.
By the 15-kilometer mark, the lead trio’s margin was 52 seconds. Earnhart and Bushey maintained a small gap over McKeever. Over the next five kilometers, McKeever reeled in Earnhart and Bushey. Sweet and Goble jumped in, and the five began working together to chase down the front of the race. Garrett Butts and Zanden McMullen, both of APU, were adrift of the chase group, with their teammate Hunter Wonders just behind.
By 25 kilometers, the leaders had a gap of 1:30 over the five-man chase group. At this point, Butts was skiing by himself, trying to catch back on. Behind him were McMullen and Wonders. Peter Wolter of Sun Valley and Braden Becker of Craftsbury were 1:18 further in arrears.
By the 30-kilometer mark, the course was taking its toll on the athletes remaining in the race (nine skiers would ultimately drop out, from a field of 67 starters). Schumacher, Drolet, and Steel Hagenbuch continued to increase their gap.
On the final lap, McKeever attacked the chase group, which was then down to Earnhart and Bushey, and tried to bridge up to the three leaders. He put time into them, but couldn’t catch them.
Meanwhile, Schumacher and Steel Hagenbuch had dropped Drolet. Side by side, they came down to the final turn. In the drag race to the finish, Steel Hagenbuch pipped Schumacher by 0.9 seconds.
Of his race, Schumacher said, “It was fun. Nice to be done.”
On the conditions: “Little bit of [both fast and slow], I guess. Pretty sloppy, but solidly fast.” On being off the front in a tight group: “Tight is a strong word for three people off the front, but, yeah, sure. It’s not like crazy or anything.”
Gus Schumacher (blue APU suit), Rémi Drolet (red SMS suit), and John Steel Hagenbuch (green Dartmouth suit) on course
“I think it was pretty good overall,” said Drolet in the finishing corral. “There are times where I felt like I was skiing really well, and especially earlier on in the race I feel like I was able to really push the pace and put some hurt on those guys. I think I blew up a little bit kind of after lap five, and after that, I was yo-yoing a little bit. I’m happy that I still stayed more or less in contact until the end of the race, but I think those guys are just super strong today and I didn’t quite have it at the end.”
Asked about his race plan, Drolet said, “This course really suits me, because I’m a pretty strong strider. I wanted to keep the pace pretty high on the uphills, and then just try and rest as much as I could on the rest of the course. But I don’t know, those guys are just stronger today.”
Was it hard the last couple of laps? “We definitely slowed down a little bit at the end there. I think all three of us were pretty tired, but it was still definitely pretty hard going up the last, last climb like I was bobbing off the back and at my limit. But, you know, overall, kept it pretty good.”
Here’s Adrik Kraftson of Northern Michigan University, 17th on the day: “It was fun. It didn’t rain as much as I thought it was going to, so that was a nice surprise. I found a crew, and then had some fun out there. I just wanted to kind of hang with the lead group as much as I could and then fall off and then find a crew to ski the rest of the race with, which I did.”
Women’s race: Diggins and Kern have an SMS time trial out there
As the women were warming up, light rain resumed, even with a brightening sky. The temperature rose to 39 degrees. The track had been, uh, well broken in by 125 male skiers between the senior and junior men’s races. The start was a mad dash, with Jessie Diggins and Julia Kern of SMS and Annie McColgan of Vermont leading up the climb out of the stadium.
At the 1.25-kilometer point, it was Diggins in front of her teammate Kern and Lavén and Nevin, both of Utah. At 2.5 kilometers, Lavén led Kern by 0.1 second. Diggins was in third, a second back, with Nevin in fourth place.
As the four set out on their second lap, Diggins led Lavén by a fraction of a second, followed by Nevin and Kern. Within a kilometer, Kern pulled to within a second of Diggins while Lavén dropped off the pace considerably.
Margie Freed of Craftsbury was in fourth place, notwithstanding that she was a biathlete in a classic race. Nevin was 13 seconds further adrift. Renae Anderson of APU and Kate Oldham of Montana State were tied for fifth, followed closely by Dartmouth’s Ava Thurston and Erin Bianco of BSF.
At this point, Diggins and Kern began a master class in how to control a race. By the 8.75-kilometer mark, they had a 40-second lead over Lavén. Freed was in fourth place. The race was now for third place, a dynamic that changed little over the final nearly two hours’ worth of racing.
Kern, left, and Diggins, with no one else in sight
By the 10-kilometer mark, Diggins and Kern had bumped their lead from 40 seconds up to a minute. Even as the track broke down due to multiple laps in warming temperatures, their margin grew.
At 20 kilometers, the two SMS skiers were 2:04 ahead of Freed and Lavén. The rest of the pack was strung out. Lavén and Freed both skied in no woman’s land, unable to draft. Freed began to slow, drifting back in the pack. She bled time for the remainder of the race, finishing fifteenth.
By the time the 30-kilometer mark rolled around, Nevin of Utah was in fourth, 90 seconds behind her teammate Lavén. Anderson and Thurston were fifth and sixth, 90 seconds further back.
No matter an athlete’s position in the pack, skiing this loop in these conditions required a huge effort. With the slop and the temperature, several downhills were not fast. To conserve energy, some athletes opted to herringbone here and there on the climbs.
looks iffy out there
The perils of race reporting are demonstrable. Standing right at the outside edge of the fishhook, a writer jumped back as one skier took an extreme outside line. One can imagine the headline in the local paper: “Ski journalist stabbed in throat by Rossignol ski. Coroners determined that the ski had a GZD293 grind and Toko glide wax.”
Through the final 10 kilometers, Kern and Diggins were never more than a second apart. Despite a valiant solo effort, Lavén gradually lost time in the last 5km. Nevin was able to maintain the gap to Lavén, but couldn’t close.
On the last lap, Diggins attacked Kern on the final climb, gliding away to finish 13.9 seconds ahead of Kern.
Here’s Diggins on her race: “I had a lot of fun skiing with Julia,” she said at the finish. “It was really slushy, slow conditions, but our team did an amazing job. We had great skis, and to have to have skis that work and kick for 40km with no ski exchange is no joke. And that was just a really wonderful feeling.”
“It’s been a really fun week of being here with my club,” Diggins continued. “It’s been a great club atmosphere, and just having everyone be able to end this season together and hanging out together, that’s been really, really cool and a big highlight for me. And it was nice to get to the trails here and try them in different conditions. And I think that’s been really, really cool.”
Is it too early for you to get takeaways from how things went this year that you can apply for next year?
Diggins: “In many ways, yes, it is too early, just because first you want a break, and then I do my big meeting with [Jason] Cork, where we look back on all the goals, and then we set new goals for next year. But overall, I’m really, really happy with how this season went.
“We have things we are always working on. For example, all the herringbone sections, I was like, This is great. I’m working on this for next year. There’s always things I’m working on continuously. But right now, I’m giving myself at least a week to turn my brain off and just rest and really absorb the season, because it has been a lot of output.”
Were you herringboning for pacing, not from lack of kick?
Diggins: “Not herringbone because of lack of kick, more because the tracks were disappearing. For example, there were no more on this first hill, so you needed a herringbone, which was actually perfect, because that’s something that I need to work on. And so it was like, This is great.”
Diggins added that she was “Really beat up for the win today. And that’ll happen when you have a long day of skiing, that’s just how it is. And that happens on the World Cup too.”
Ava Thurston, who finished in sixth place, said, “I was really happy with it. It was obviously a lot harder, but I got lucky. I had a group to ski with for pretty much all of it, so that made it a lot more bearable.”
The course looked like it was visibly slower for the women today than for the men; how did you think about pacing it?
“I would think it was a bit slower. I just wanted to start and still feel pretty good around 20km, because obviously we’re racing 20km pretty frequently on the college circuit. But [today] you’re doubling it. I just tried to stay relaxed in the pack.”
Margie Freed of Craftsbury on her race: “It was definitely really hard. I felt good for about 10km and then I bonked for the remaining 30km and took a bunch of feeds. So I want to give a shoutout to everyone who gave me feeds on every single lap.”
“I was feeling pretty good off the start,” Freed continued. “But then it hit that I haven’t skied over 20km since December, so that was pretty difficult. I want to thank some Gatorade and Coke and bars out there for getting me through it.”
Local skiers have noticed an enormous stockpile of snow, covered with wood chips, in the 1980 stadium. Trail supervisor Jake Handerhan elaborated as he raked the fishhook.
“We’re looking at ways to get our season going earlier and more efficiently,” Handerhan said. “And we had opportunities to make snow later in the season that we don’t really need to make out on the course. And so we were able to make a lot of snow in the old stadium, and we’re using an insulation method that’s worked in other areas to get a jump on the start of next season.”
“We’re looking to try to keep that snow over the summer, and that way we can get ourselves going bright and early in the season. Hopefully we’ll have stuff set up, definitely by Thanksgiving, and we’ll have a better snowpack into our earlier season races next year. I believe our first two races are in December next year, and then we have a pretty packed schedule.”
(In addition to regularly scheduled programming for the venue, Lake Placid will notably be hosting 2026 U.S. Nationals in early January, and World Cup Finals in late March.)
“This year we were able to make snow through the weekends,” Handerhan continued. “Getting into late December and into January, we just won’t have the amount of days in a row that the race course won’t be used. so we won’t really be able to make snow, kind of almost irregardless of the weather, due to the scheduling conflicts and the races there. And so we’re being very conscious of that going into the season.”
Today’s trivia: The Ladies 5 Km Trail is so named because it was the loop for the women’s five km relay in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Junior races: Davis Isom and Ally Wheeler claim victories
APU showed its strength in the junior men’s race, claiming the top two spots on the podium and three of the top five in the 15km classic. Davis Isom took the win here, with teammate Oskar Flora in second. Canadian Adam Heale, of National Team Development Centre in Thunder Bay, was the third man across the line. Luke Rizio, University of Vermont, was fourth overall, third American. Justin Lucas, also of APU, was fifth.
The junior women’s race (above embed) saw Ally Wheeler, of Casper Nordic, take a clear victory, nearly two minutes up on Lea Perreard of Ford Sayre over 15km. Mia Gorman of Mansfield Nordic was third, another ninety seconds back. She was joined by teammate Astrid Longstreth in fifth. Beth McIntosh, GMVS, interrupted the Mansfield parade in fourth.
More photos:
Results: men | women | junior men | junior women
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hey Peter, thanks for the report! Do you know if Kendall Kramer already switched to running and that is why she didn’t participate? And just an idea for an article in the off-season: it is interesting to know what different athletes do throughout the year, sport-wise, to prepare for the next season (how long do they rest, when do they start, where will they go for camps, do they train the gym more or less during off-season, etc. etc.). Thanksss!!!
(this is Gavin; Peter appreciated the question, but asked me to respond because I’m in Alaska)
Kendall is enjoying spring in Alaska: backcountry skiing, snowboarding, probably some easy running but if so she’s not putting it on Strava. She was ski racing in November, and racing at D-II Nationals for xc running in December; it’s been a long season for everyone, but maybe especially for her.
o, wonderful, thanks for reply!