By Gavin Kentch
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Four times a year, the U.S. Ski Team publishes an announcement of the athletes nominated to start on the World Cup during the next period of racing. Qualifying athletes either accept or decline the opportunity, communicating their choice to team leadership; skiers in the former group show up on the start line in Europe a few weeks later. Simple enough in theory.
In practice, the process can be any or all of messy, rushed, stressful, expensive, or uncertain, reflecting the logistical exigencies of athletes who live and train on a continent that is just so. darn. far. away from the European race circuit, ski team administration that has to book hotel rooms and make other logistical arrangements well in advance, and the twin demands of opaque funding sources and tight deadlines. Here’s a detailed look at how this played out for one athlete last season, and at what she wished she’d known going in.
Emma Albrecht did four races at 2025 U.S. Nationals between January 2 and January 7, 2025. The first-year pro skier with Bridger Ski Foundation, originally from Stillwater, Minnesota, consistently placed well but not on the podium during her week in Anchorage, finishing 8th and 13th in the sprints and 13th and 14th in the distance races. Notably, Albrecht was also the third-fastest American in the classic qual, and fifth American in the skate qual. Her results were likely strong enough to make her a bubble pick for World Cup sprint races during Period 3 of the 2024/2025 season, depending on the outcome of several other athletes and selection pathways (see more here or here for what this selection-pathways math looks like; this is the World Cup selection document for this season, but last year’s version was comparable).
The following day, January 8, Albrecht was in Alaska’s unofficial embassy to the Lower 48, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, when she got an email from Chris Grover, program director for the U.S. Ski Team. (Or, more precisely, teammate Erin Bianco got the same email and congratulated Albrecht, who does not typically look at her email when she travels. This happy announcement led Albrecht to find her own email and spring into action.) Grover’s email had been sent at 2:31 p.m.
Albrecht had received starts for up to four races in Period 3, all sprints, spread across four countries and four weekends between mid-January and mid-February. She needed to respond by midnight that night or she would lose all her spots.
It was after 4 p.m. Seattle time. She was getting on a plane again in less than three hours. That flight would land after the midnight reply deadline. As an American skier not named Jessie Diggins, Albrecht’s bank account was not exactly flush. She had no idea how much this trip would cost her and how much financial support she might receive from NNF to help offset it. Go.
Albrecht panicked, briefly, then started looking for guidance. She asked BSF coach Andy Newell what she should do. She talked with other BSF athletes in the airport. She talked with other athletes from other teams who were also nearby; BSF was not the only group of skiers in Sea-Tac the day after Nationals.
“It was very stressful,” Albrecht matter-of-factly recounted in a phone call earlier this week.
“I had never made international races ever in my life before,” she continued. [Okay Albrecht literally made her World Cup debut in Canmore in February 2024, but that was a lot closer and cheaper.] “I had to make this split-second decision. I had about three hours to decide. That was super stressful, because I didn’t know how much funding I was actually going to receive — no one could tell me — and so I had three hours to decide if I was gonna take all my starts or not.”
“I was under the impression that NNF would cover some” of the cost, “but no one could tell me how much,” Albrecht said. “And so as a freshly 23-year-old I had to decide how many thousands of dollars I was willing to spend for a few weeks in Europe.”
She talked to anyone she could find in Sea-Tac. She made phone calls. She reached out to Caitlin Gregg. To Brian Gregg. To Matt Liebsch. If there is an unofficial rolodex of Midwestern skiers trying to make the jump to the World Cup, Albrecht was clearly working through it.
The skiers were helpful, but Albrecht was still not getting the answers she needed.
“I was like, How is this possible?” she now recalls. “How do I have to make this thousands-of-dollars decision in three hours without actually knowing how much I’m actually going to spend?”
As an additional wrinkle, Albrecht adds, “When you’re not on the national team and you are invited up to the World Cup, you don’t know if you will be provided a wax tech by the U.S. Ski Team or not. And in the email they stated that at that time they did not know and they could not give us an answer whether or not we will have to provide our own wax tech.
“And that was huge for me, because when you are not provided a wax tech not only do you have to find someone that you trust enough to wax for you, but you also have to buy their plane ticket to and from Europe and you have to pay for their lodging. … Then additionally you have to pay for your own waxing services, which I can’t remember how much it is, but it’s like $150 per waxing day.”
“I was stressing pretty hard,” Albrecht notes.
Finally, she connected with Greta Anderson, development coach for the U.S. Ski Team.
“I called Greta Anderson and she was able to tell me,” Albrecht says: “NNF pays a base amount of 40 percent of your World Cup room and board and wax costs. They do not pay for flights and they do not pay for transportation between the World Cup venues, so I had to buy my flights to Italy and then my flight back from Sweden. But I also had to buy a flight from Italy to Oslo, so those three flights.
“You additionally get 10 percent [more of qualifying expenses covered] if you raise more than 250 dollars in the Drive for 25, and you get an additional 10 percent for raising over a thousand dollars in the Drive for 25.
“I ended up raising more than a thousand dollars for NNF, so I was able to get 60 percent of my World Cup room and board paid for by NNF, which was huge. This actually changed the entire outcome of my season, because I was able to financially afford this trip without having to stress too much and pay over $10,000 for a month.”
“You get another 10 percent for an individual World Cup top 30,” Albrecht continued. “So Erin and I got that top-15 [in a team sprint in Cogne], but that was a team event so that does not count. You can also get another 10 percent for making the world champs team; I also did not do that.”
“So NNF can make a huge dent in those fees,” Albrecht now says.
(When we spoke recently, Albrecht again thanked Anderson for her assistance at a difficult time. “Honestly I called her with just about tears in my eyes,” Albrecht recalled. “My voice was wavering up and down because I was so anxious about this decision. And she was very level-headed and helped me come to an agreeable answer that seemed like it was a good fit for me at that time. And so yeah, I definitely owe a lot to her. … I am quite honestly the opposite of the development pipeline, and so it was very nice to have Greta — I didn’t even know her that well — but she told me I could call her whenever I wanted.”)
Armed with this partial information, and with the clock ticking, Albrecht responded to Grover to accept the third and fourth starts on this list, while declining the first two:
- Les Rousses classic sprint on January 18
- Engadin skate sprint on January 25
- Cogne classic sprint on February 1
- Falun classic sprint on February 14
Albrecht then got on another plane and continued her journey back to Montana. Given that she had done four races in the six days immediately preceding this, including two sets of sprint heats, and had incurred a not small amount of stress during her layover, I hope that she had a friend nearby to grab some food for her while she was working the phones.
Albrecht contested a trio of SuperTour races at home in Bozeman in late January — the weekend of the Engadin skate sprint — then flew over to central Europe a few days later. She would go on to place 49th in the sprint qual in Cogne and 41st in the qual in Falun. She was also selected for the team sprint in Cogne (not included in the above list because team starts are awarded on the ground, not in advance), where she partnered with teammate Erin Bianco. Team BSF placed 14th in qualifying to move on to the final, where they ultimately placed 15th.
Albrecht raced for a total of three minutes and twenty-six seconds in the Cogne sprint qual, three minutes and thirty-seven seconds in the Falun sprint qual, and three minutes and sixteen seconds in Cogne team sprint qual. By virtue of making the final there she got to cover the course three more times, taking three minutes and twenty-one seconds, three minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, respectively.
In the moment Albrecht was likely heartened to make the team sprint final in Cogne just qua racing, but with the benefit of hindsight it must also be said that this roughly doubled the amount of time that Albrecht was able to spend with a bib on in Period 3.
All told, Albrecht spent a total of twenty minutes and thirty-seven seconds on course (20:37.14 if you wish to be precise about it), covering just over 8 kilometers. (Again, to show my work, five laps of the Cogne sprint course @ 1,331m each, then once around the Falun sprint course @ 1,408m, is a total of 8,063 meters.) This occurred across three days of racing, at two venues over a thousand miles apart.
To achieve this 8km of racing, Albrecht spent over two weeks in Europe, bookended by day-long transatlantic travel. For an athlete seeking to make the jump from SuperTour racing to the World Cup circuit, this is what development looks like.
Cash rules everything around me
So how much did this twenty minutes of racing cost Albrecht? Here are the data that she provided (note that this is an after-the-fact accounting; much of this information was not available to her on the evening of January 8):
| Flights (for athlete) | $1,649.12 |
| Luggage fees | $130 |
| Lodging and meals (after NNF paid 60%) | $1,000.39 |
| total out of pocket cost: | $2,779.51 |
| total cost without NNF: | $4,280.10 |
And here is how much it would have cost Albrecht to stay in Europe for a full month and accept all four starts originally offered:
| Flights (for athlete and wax tech) | $3,298.24 |
| Luggage fees | $130 |
| Lodging and meals for athlete (after NNF paid 60%) | $1,650 |
| Lodging and meals for wax tech | $4,125 |
| total out of pocket cost: | $9,203.24 |
| total cost without NNF: | $11,678.24 |
You will likely notice that the second figure here is disproportionately higher than the first. The discrepancy is due to the need for a wax tech: Non–national team athletes racing on the World Cup not only have to find their own wax tech and fly him (or her, but so far pretty much only him) to Europe, they also have to pay for the tech’s food and lodging once they’re there.
You will likely also notice that the out-of-pocket cost for a non-USST athlete to spend a month on the World Cup is pushing $12,000, down to slightly over $9,000 following assistance from NNF. I can’t say this without editorializing, sorry, but that is a lot of money.
Happily enough, BSF head coach Andy Newell came along to work this two-week trip largely gratis, which kept Albrecht’s expenses much lower than they would have been otherwise, slash that is why there are no wax tech expenses in table one.
“Andy was basically Erin [Bianco’s] and my back-up wax tech,” Albrecht explains. “We didn’t know if we needed one or not” (because USST could not state if ski support would be provided).
“So Andy was like, I’ll fly over. He missed the World Cup anyway. And he did that on his own dime, I believe. But if I had accepted the first ones [in Les Rousses and Engadin], I think that I would have had to find my own wax tech and pay for their ticket.”
After the season ended, Albrecht learned that NNF had some money available to offset personal wax tech expenses for her and for other non-USST World Cup starters in the same boat. This tranche of funds, $10,000, was retroactively available for 2024/2025; the same amount will also be available for similarly situated athletes in the 2025/2026 season.
Looking back
Notably, the increased cost for the longer trip notwithstanding, Albrecht now wishes that she had accepted all four starts offered.
“Looking back, I would not have declined those starts if I knew NNF was going to pay for that,” she notes. “But at that time I did not know that and so that’s why that decision was so tricky, and I ended up declining those starts.”
Albrecht also gently wishes that more detailed information on the NNF funding structure and incentives were more broadly available to athletes in a comparable position, which is why she has shared that breakdown with Nordic Insights here. [Note that this year’s funding breakdown is set forth at the bottom of this article.]
Finally, Albrecht is emphatic that she blames neither USST administration nor NNF for the logistical pressures she faced at a Sea-Tac gate as the hours ticked by on the evening of January 8: It is not Chris Grover’s fault that Europe is far away and that USSS faces tight deadlines for booking athlete lodging on the World Cup.
“I’m not mad at NNF,” Albrecht clarified. “NNF definitely provided me with so much this past season. I think that the entire program is fantastic and they do so much for the nordic community and so many people have opportunities that they wouldn’t have without NNF, and so I wholeheartedly support the foundation. That’s why I raised over a thousand dollars last year for them. I believe in it and I believe in what they do.”
“Do I think that they can advertise more what they do on their website?” Albrecht gently added.
“Of course. That shouldn’t be hidden, what great funding they do for World Cup bubble athletes. Why don’t they put that on their website? I don’t know, because that’s great. I would want to advertise that if I was in charge of that foundation, you know. Like, you’re doing amazing things for so many people.”
On its website, NNF discusses athlete grants here and, briefly, here (look under “World Cup”). Albrecht is correct that NNF’s discussion of funded athletes, such as who got how much last season, is sparse to nonexistent.
Looking forward
The 2025/2026 domestic race season starts next weekend about an hour outside of Anchorage, snow permitting, then commences in early December in earnest with SuperTour races in first Fairbanks and then Anchorage on successive weekends. 2026 U.S. Nationals are a few weeks later in Lake Placid.
The highest-placing American athletes after Anchorage, and then again after Lake Placid, will be offered spots on the World Cup for the Tour de Ski and Period 3, respectively. For athletes who are neither on the U.S. Ski Team nor the current Continental Cup leader (i.e., the overall leader of the SuperTour based on cumulative points scored this season), the opportunity will come with a comparable cost, and comparable choices, as those faced by Albrecht this January. For American skiers looking to make it on the World Cup, this is the reality of what development looks like.
* * *
Epilogue: As a service to any bubble athlete reading this article and looking for information, the following funding breakdown for 2025/2026 is currently available here on the NNF site:
The information shown here for 2025/2026 was uploaded earlier this month, I can tell from the URL; I truly have no idea if a comparable version of this for 2024/2025 was available on the NNF site last season or not.
This year’s NNF Drive for 25 starts later this month. I would encourage you to donate (general link here). If you are moved by this article and would like to donate via Emma Albrecht’s page specifically, you may do so here. (Disclosure: After writing this article I made my first two donations for this year via Albrecht’s page. That said, I did not tell her I did so until after our interview, which hopefully reduces the potential for a quid pro quo aspect to this.)
