By Gavin Kentch
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KINCAID PARK, Anchorage — There was a race today, a classic sprint at a brutally windy Kincaid Park, and lest I bury the lede I should be sure to tell you who won it: Lauren Jortberg, currently representing Centre National d’Entraînement Pierre-Harvey, going away. Hailey Swirbul, long of APU but only recently returned to professional skiing, was second, over 4.5 seconds back. Third went to Nina Schamberger, previously with the University of Utah, now of the University of Colorado, roughly four seconds yet further in arrears.
Schamberger was around a second up on Emma Albrecht, of BSF, in fourth. Fifth went to Renae Anderson, of APU, and sixth to Elena Grissom, also of Colorado.
Jortberg’s path to the overall win was brutally simple. She won the qualifier, by a moderate 1.51 seconds over Swirbul in second and an obscene 9.38 seconds over Albrecht in third. Jortberg was 19 seconds up on tenth place in the qual, and 56 seconds up on 29th. (To be fair, with only 29 starters in the women’s field, some athletes may have backed off somewhat in the qualification round. But I am assuming that the top end of the field did not.)
Jortberg was in the first quarterfinal, which she won by over seven seconds. She was in the first semifinal, which she won by over five seconds. You may be sensing a theme here.
On the other side of the draw, Swirbul won her quarter by nearly six seconds, and her semi by over four seconds. There were two women who were clearly the class of the field today.
On to the final. “It’s a fun face-off,” said Swirbul of meeting Jortbeg for the first time in the final heat of the day. “It’s a little drama.”
The APU skier added, “I knew Lauren was skiing really strong. She’s a really incredible skier in all sorts of techniques.”
In the final, Jortberg was clearly the strongest woman on the day. She took a narrow lead over the top of the gradual hill out of the stadium, which was an all-doublepole grade in today’s fast, windswept conditions. [Find out more about how the sprint course skis here.] By the time athletes returned to within view of the stadium, cresting Gong Hill at roughly the 800-meter mark of the 1.4-kilometer course, Jortberg had stretched her lead over Swirbul to at least 10 meters, probably twice that.
An athlete would have to have catastrophically poor skis, or an ill-timed fall, to surrender a lead of that size to an athlete far enough back to not be in her slipstream coming into the final sweeping downhill. That did not occur here. 600 meters later, Jortberg had come down the hill, around the lollipop curve, and up the final in-and-out climb back to the stadium with a lead that looked like this:
Again, that’s Jortberg first, time passing, then Swirbul in second. Schamberger comes in ahead of Albrecht for fourth.
That’s about what I can tell you for on-course proceedings today from a sprint course that, while widely liked by athletes, keeps skiers out of view for large portions of it, prioritizing terrain (how ’bout that 24-meter B-Climb though?!) over viewing.
Jortberg was really strong today. Swirbul was farther back, but in the ballpark. Both women were a degree or two ahead of the rest of the field. Oh, and max wind gusts during the women’s final were 33 miles per hour, with a gust of a full 40mph recorded at the nearby airport weather station at the same time. That was sort of lame.
I would now like to tell you a great deal more about all three of these women as people, and about off-course developments that put them in a position to be skiing well here today. “Athletes are people too” is an unofficial motto of this website, and all three people on the podium here were happier about more than just results.
Here’s Nina Schamberger first: “I am really happy,” said the 20-year-old junior at Colorado, now in her first year in Boulder. “This is probably the best I’ve ever felt at the beginning of a season. I’m enjoying skiing more than ever and just stoked to get it started.”
I have seen Schamberger be bodily stopped by a coach from continuing in a race, then literally carried off the course in pain. How is her back doing these days?
“My back is doing really, really well. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I don’t think about it anymore because it’s just been not an issue for a while now.”
Okay, back to the race a little. Does she like this course?
“I have a love–hate relationship with this course,” mused Schamberger, “I think as a lot of skiers do.” (Same, Nina, same.) “I’ve had a lot of really, really bad races here. Like at Nationals, I had to race sick so I could qualify for World Juniors, and so it was really nice to kind of redeem myself at a sprint here. So I really liked it today.”
* * *
“I’m doing so great,” were the first words out of Hailey Swirbul’s mouth. We were hunched in the lee of the timing building as she spoke, desperately seeking shelter from the north winds scouring the cavernous stadium.
“You are back at Kincaid,” I said, “and it’s winds to 30 miles an hour, and we’re huddling behind a building. Are you happy?”
“I’m really happy,” came the answer. “I’m just happy with where my life is right now.”
“If you asked me a year ago if I thought I would be standing here in these 30 mile per hour winds huddling behind a building at Kincaid,” she continued, “I would have thought, No way. Except maybe in a coaching uniform actually.
“This has just been so fun. Like today was the first race back for me [Swirbul had fought a cold for the last three weeks] and getting to be on the start line was such a treat and such a cool experiment to get to do and see where this goes. It was fun to rip the band-aid off.”
Three months ago in these pages, I limned Swirbul’s time as a pro skier as follows:
“After a coruscating start to her career — World Juniors relay medal at age 18, two individual World Juniors medals at 19, World Cup podium at 22, first World Championships team at 22, Olympics at 23, second world champs team at 24 — Swirbul was out of professional skiing before her 25th birthday.”
Which is to say, the now-27-year-old has spent previous Decembers on grander stages. Here she is placing third in a World Cup in Davos five years ago next weekend, for example, behind teammate Rosie Brennan in first. What’s it like to be back here on the domestic circuit once more, racing her way into shape?
“I tried to go into this with — tried to keep the pressure low and make sure to smile and have fun out there, and remember that me coming back is supposed to feel different for me,” she mused.
“I’m trying really hard to keep the perspective that this is such a gift, and such a special opportunity to get to try this experiment” she continued, emotion palpable in her voice. “Rather than just hold onto these expectations of maybe what I used to be, or my old benchmarks. And I want to be patient with myself and let myself get back as fast as [completely inaudible due to wind, sorry] but it’ll take time.”
* * *
Finally, on to Lauren Jortberg. The Boulder native, now 28, has just been grinding for the past several years. Sometimes the fastest woman in this country, sometimes one of the slower women in Europe, starting five World Cup sprints before she finally made the heats, then going out there another six times before making her second. I respect this. She has also been largely her own club over the past few seasons, joining the SMS T2 exodus to work with Perry Thomas, and now landing with Centre National d’Entraînement Pierre-Harvey in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Québec. It’s been a journey, and not always an easy one. Again, I respect this.
“This has been a really stable and consistent summer and fall for me,” Jortberg mused, “even though there have been a lot of changes in the last bit. I’m finally in a place where I have a really stable home life and house that I live in, whereas in the past I’ve always had to move every four months and live on the road out of a suitcase. And I think people forget how much stability in your life is important when we live these lives where we’re on the road for a long time.”
She continued, of her current support network, that she has “a really, really strong, solid, supportive team around myself, with both Perry [Thomas] and also the Center Pierre-Harvey, CNEPH, and my sports psych, my family, my partner. So I feel like I finally am in a place where I have a lot of really good support and can ski free and thrive in what I love to do.”
Jortberg mentioned her partner: that would be Québécois Antoine Cyr, member of the Canadian national team and three-time top-five placer in the team sprint at either world champs or the Olympics.
“I promise I would also this of a man dating a famous female skier,” I said, painfully aware of the potential gender dynamics here. “But do you guys, like, talk about skiing?”
“Of course,” said Jortberg, kindly, in response to my somewhat awkward phrasing. “I mean, he’s one of the best skiers in the world.”
“We train together almost every day. … He’s incredibly experienced with World Cup and World Champs and Olympics and all those things, especially classic skiing. And I think he’s a big part of where I’ve come with my classic skiing technically as well. I feel really lucky to have — I mean he’s also like the most amazing human in the world, so, like, we talk about skiing, but we also go on kite surfing trips or do other fun things.
“He has a very good perspective on skiing and life and a very broad outlook on the world, and it’s not just skiing-focused. So I feel like that’s been also a really big part of me liking skiing again and not being in a place where it’s just like your results mean everything, and it’s just more about the process and getting better and trying to be your best, and that’s how I’ve been handling or approaching skiing in the last year-and-a-half or so, probably, and he’s a big part of that. I feel really lucky.”
* * *
Racing continues tomorrow with an interval-start 10km skate. It — famous last words — at least cannot be any windier?
Based on my post-reporting, pre–article writing ski from roughly 4 to 5 p.m. today, athletes should expect wind-scoured fast snow across the manmade loops at the heart of the distance course, much slower snow elsewhere with a lot of organic matter atop or mixed in. Also a mature spruce tree at least 16″ in diameter fell across the course roughly 2km in, following the descent down Rollercoaster and shortly before the left turn onto Dark Alley. Thank a groomer tomorrow, to be sure, but also thank a man or woman with a chainsaw.
(For everyone else in Anchorage, just go to Hillside, where it was basically calm all day and the skiing is, I am told, so much better. Kincaid is special.)
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