By Peter Minde
WHITEFACE MOUNTAIN, Wilmington, New York — SMS T2 finished their Lake Placid training camp in impressive fashion. Jessie Diggins and Ben Ogden repeated Saturday’s performances, winning the Climb to the Castle on the Whiteface Mountain toll road in Wilmington, New York, outside Lake Placid. Diggins won Sunday morning’s race in 43:48.5; Ogden’s time was 37:38.7
The women’s podium was a total repeat of Saturday. Julia Kern, Diggins’s teammate at SMS, took second place in 46:41.7, followed by Shilo Rousseau (unaffiliated) in 47:09.7. On the men’s side, former Climb to the Castle winner Ricardo Izquierdo-Bernier, of Quebec’s Fondeurs–Laurentides, was second in 38:22.9, with Colin Freed of Mansfield Pro Nordic third in 38:55.8. Ogden and Freed reprised their podium spots from yesterday, with Izquierdo-Bernier filling in for Rémi Drolet in the role of foreign national placing second.
As a writer departed for the mountain, the weather was less than auspicious. Mist enveloped Lake Flower, and dense fog made driving through Lake Placid… interesting. The golf course outside Lake Placid received frost, and the temperature hovered around 30 degrees. We’ll say nothing of the cat who was mildly freaked out at his human’s uncommon dawn-patrol departure.
All that changed as the car clawed its way up to Whiteface’s toll gate from Wilmington’s four-way stop sign. Saturday’s glorious weather repeated itself, and it was warmer at the race start, the toll gate at 2,351 feet elevation, than it had been in the valley.
With a summit elevation of 4,867 feet, Whiteface is the fifth-highest mountain in the Adirondacks. Standing apart from the other 4,000-foot peaks, Whiteface casts an imposing shadow and can be seen from miles away. The toll road up to the eponymous castle, just below the summit, snakes for five miles. This makes for an average grade of eight percent, or approximately 500 feet per mile of elevation gain. In metric terms, this is a not exactly FIS-legal 95 m/km of climbing. But, hey: There’s only one hill.
New in recent years is a short-course option of approximately 2.5 miles. While attendance for this race was initially sparse, the short race has since gained traction. As long-course athletes completed their warmups, short-course competitors clambered into a van for a ride to the halfway point. They would race from there to a shared finish line at the castle.
The men went off from the toll gate first, with the women starting five minutes later. About 1,500 meters into the race, Rémi Drolet (SMS) led Ogden, Freed, and Izquierdo-Bernier in a tight group off the front. The men’s pack strung out into several groups behind. Diggins, Kern, and Rousseau quickly gapped the other women once their race began.
road and trees (all photos: Peter Minde)
From the castle parking area, one can see the section of the road between the Lake Placid Corner and Windy Corner. Four skiers closed on Windy Corner and the race’s final half mile. One leading, another several seconds back, then two more together. From that distance, you couldn’t tell who was who.
Ultimately, it was Ogden who cruised in alone, with Izquierdo-Bernier about 40 seconds back for second.
“My goal for this was just to practice pacing, and my teammate, Rémi, is good at pacing,” Ogden said. “I figured I’d follow him for the first three, four k and then see how I’m feeling and see how the rest of the race pans out. We were in a tight group for, like, about 3km, and then I took the lead and got a little ahead with an old friend, Ricky [Izquierdo-Bernier] from Quebec.”
With two kilometers left, Ogden decided to put the hammer down. At that moment, unfortunately, the road devoured one of his ferrules. Undeterred, “I kept it going, kept pulling on it and it worked out,” Ogden said. “So I’m pretty happy. Damn hard event. I’ve never done it before.”
“I felt pretty good,” Izquierdo-Bernier said of his race. “I didn’t know what to expect today. I don’t know what my shape was, so I just start in the pack with Ben and Rémi, and after that, we start going a little bit harder at 4km to go, and I feel pretty good, so I push the hardest I can. Ben accelerated, like with two k’s to go, and dropped me, but I’m pretty happy with what I did.”
“That was fun,” said Freed, of Mansfield Pro Nordic, afterwards. “I like uphills and I like skate skiing, so it’s kind of a combo of both, nice!”
Asked about his plan for today’s race, Freed said, “I’ve never done it before, and I was like, I’m just gonna go out with the top guys and see how long I can last. And ended up being about pretty good for about four or five k and kind of just dug it out by myself to the end.”
Freed said he was close to Ogden and Izquierdo-Bernier up until the last two or three kilometers. “I think I was with them for about 5km, and then I dropped a little bit, and I think that’s about 15 seconds behind them till the last kilometer or so. And then they put a little bit more time on me.”
Jessie Diggins (right, bib 46) approaches the finish. Sisu Lange (Paul Smith’s) is at left.
Following a quick recovery jaunt to Whiteface’s summit, Diggins told Nordic Insights, “We’re so lucky to have this great weather, getting to the top and nobody’s freezing cold and you get the views, and everyone can just hang out and some wonderful volunteers baked cookies and had all this stuff. So it was a really cool, wonderful atmosphere.”
Reflecting on her week, Diggins said, “It’s a hard race, but it’s a great way to end a hard training camp and go home really nice and sore and tired and then absorb it all.”
Diggins was skiing in the zone, and couldn’t recall exactly where she pulled away from Kern and Rousseau. “I’m not entirely sure, because as we started skiing with some of the men’s field, you hear the click clack of poles. So you just don’t really know who you’re necessarily with.”
The wind was negligible for most of the race, but there’s a reason the big right turn half a mile from the summit is called Windy Corner. Fortunately, the wind was more benign today than usual.
“I do have these memories from 10 years ago, of basically being bent in half because the wind was so much that it was all you could do to not just be crawling along,” Diggins said.
[Maybe a full 15 years ago, if this blog post from a 19-year-old Diggins in October 2010 is the correct reference, because I am old now. —Ed.]
“So it was not actually so bad,” Diggins continued. “I was really lucky. I was skiing with a really nice young man. I’m not quite sure who it was, but we were working together. And I was behind him at that point. I was very grateful to have someone to ski with who keeps you going, Right foot, left foot. I don’t think the wind was so bad this year.”
A writer recalled a Climb to the Castle a decade or more in the past. Coming in from her warmup Diggins, then a young phenom, was going a little too fast and didn’t make the hard right turn up to the toll gate. She crashed hard. That might have ended the day for many people.
“That freaked me out. That was a tough one,” Diggins recalled. “I remember I had my drink belt wrapped around the front because I had just eaten a gel or something, and I’d put the wrapper in. And so I landed on my stomach, and the drink belt took all the brunt of it, so it knocked the wind out of me. But I don’t think I lost much skin. It just freaked me out. You get punched in the stomach. It takes you a minute where you can’t breathe. But I wasn’t hurt. I was mostly just super rattled.”
But Diggins got up, composed herself, and finished fifth that year. Years later, she won Sunday’s race by nearly three minutes.
Reflecting on her race today, Kern said, “It was a beautiful day. It was really hard. The Climb to the Castle is always a very humbling race and a really hard effort. But [today] was one of the best days I’ve had up here.”
“My plan was just to stick with Jessie as long as possible,” Kern continued. “What’s unique with an uphill climb is you kind of settle in and you know what is sustainable and what is not. And so eventually, just find that gear, and you try to V2 as much as possible, and then mix it up once, once you start getting tired.”
blurry photo of a short-course skier
Today, the short course had a lot of younger skiers who wanted to get a taste of the toll road, but maybe weren’t quite ready for the whole megillah.
Skiing the short course with his son Red, Justin Beckwith made his first appearance skiing the race after several years organizing it as the NENSA competition director.
“Red’s been doing a lot of mountain biking and hiking, and I realized he could do it,” Beckwith said. “He wanted to skate, and I was going to classic because it’s easier. And so I classic skied as a backup plan if he ran out of steam, because he hasn’t really skated before, but he did great! He got tired a couple times, and we had a little scenario with the water where he didn’t want water at the bottom and he didn’t want water at the first rest station, but he really wanted water about five minutes after the rest station! So dad couldn’t really motivate Red very well at that point. And then, Benny [Ogden] came by, and that was enough. And then it was just a stream of encouragement the whole way. We had an awesome time.”
After a strong start, Rémi Drolet finished in sixth place. The road had it in for SMS today: As with Ogden, the road ate one of Drolet’s ferrules. And the last day of a hard training camp might have caught up with him.
“It was kind of a tough one for me today,” Drolet said. “I think I was pretty tired from the training camp. We were just finishing up here in Lake Placid. It was a good training session, but I definitely blew up a little bit pretty early on, and then also lost a tip near the end of the race. So not the best day out there, but, you know, super nice out here. I mean, when I was hurting, I was just looking down at the view and like, wow.”
A writer observed [from personal experience] that if one blows up on the toll road, there’s no place to recover. “Yeah, exactly,” Drolet concurred. “But I’m happy to be here. I think this is a really cool race. My first time doing it. I’ll definitely, hopefully come back next year. This was really cool.”
Theo Mallett (bib no. 13) and Thomas Videtich Bye (bib 8) on course
Representing both XC Ottawa and the Haitian Ski Team, Theo Mallett raced his first Climb, finishing in 49:36.1. Of his race, Mallett said, “It was hard, but it was good. I think I finished in a good placing, and I feel fit, like I’ve trained all summer, just came back from two-and-a-half-week training camp in France, and I skied at the French championships. So yeah, it’s good. And I had a race back in Canada, in Québec, and I did pretty well there, too.”
Of the Haitian Ski Team, Mallett said, “So we’re two cross-country skiers, me and a guy from France, Stevenson Savart. He’s quite good. And then we have two or three downhill skiers as well. So it’s not a small team, but it’s not a big team either.”
Both Mallett and Savart were in Trondheim for the 2025 World Championships. Mallett didn’t go quite fast enough in the qualifier to get into the 10km skate. Savart started the 50km, but did not finish.
Mallett’s father got him interested in skiing as a kid: “My dad was on the national Canadian team for biathlon, and he introduced me to skiing at a very young age. And he signed me up for our local club, Chelsea Nordiq. I skied with them for a while and fell in love with the sport.”
Daniel Mallett, Theo’s father, almost made Canada’s 1988 Olympic team as a biathlete. “He almost went to the Calgary Olympics, but I think he injured himself just before. But he qualified for the team, he was on the roster and all that.”
Rachael Strock, a junior representing Freedom Trail Nordic, was happy to cut three minutes off her time. “My goal for the race was to beat my time from last year and also maintain an even effort throughout the whole race,” she wrote, “which I think I was able to do. It was pretty cold in the morning but once we started the race, the weather was perfect and the views were really pretty with all the foliage changing.”
The long-course junior podiums were dominated by Mansfield Nordic and Paul Smith’s College. Elsa Futch of Mansfield was the fastest junior girl on the long course, followed by teammate Astrid Longstreth. Greta Dickman, from Paul Smith’s, was third.
Silvester Williams of Mansfield was the fastest junior boy, followed by Sisu Lange of Paul Smith’s and Henry Sterner of Mansfield.
The girls’ short-course podium was Mia Gorman, MNC, followed by Leela Volyanik of NYSEF. Chapeau to Volyanik for taking a shot at the toll road with only three months on rollerskis under her belt. “It was hard,” she said.
The boys’ short-course podium was Isaiah Bowen, Jorgen Pirrung, and Gabriel Perchemlides, all of Mansfield.
Will Haiti represent at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Val di Fiemme? Stay tuned.
Some video:
Women’s start:
Short course skiers at the finish:
Ricardo Izquierdo-Bernier on his way to the finish:
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