By Gavin Kentch
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KINCAID PARK, Anchorage — Fitzgerald’s most famous line is, by general acclaim, “There are no second acts in American lives.” But the line’s full context suggests that he in fact allowed for the possibility.
All of which is to say, Hunter Wonders (APU) won the men’s 10-kilometer 13-kilometer interval-start skate race at a cold, brutally windy Kincaid Park earlier Sunday. Two-and-a-half years after he formally retired. Two years after he informally unretired. And after all that time, well, the Anchorage product found himself right back where he had spent so many hours before, standing in the natural wind tunnel that is the leviathan Kincaid stadium after winning a race.
Second place went to APU teammate Michael Earnhart, 15.9 seconds back, and third to Brian Bushey of Craftsbury Green Racing Project (+37.6). Graham Houtsma of BSF in fourth (+41.7), Thomas O’Harra of APU in fifth (+46.1), and Zach Jayne of Utah in sixth (+49.9) rounded out the six-deep SuperTour podium.
The skiing felt “really good” today, Wonders said. “It’s been a while since I felt very competitive again. And I think just — this time of year, it seems like as you get older, it takes a little bit more for the gears to start turning. So it felt good to start fast, and be able to hold that throughout the race.”
How old are you anyway, I inquired.
“I’m 27,” said a man younger than the Swix hat I was wearing while I was interviewing him. “Which feels old amongst this field. One of the few skiers holding down the fort for the 1990s.”
“It’s pretty shocking when you look at the results sheet,” said Wonders of his lack of coevals. “But I think American skiers can be in this sport longer than we think, if we can start making it more feasible for them. I’m just stoked; I love being part of the APU team. And it’s fun to be racing at Kincaid.”
“It’s gonna be a fun season,” continued Wonders, looking ahead. “You know, the Olympics are the big goal of the year, and it was a big goal of coming back out of retirement. And whether or not I make it, it’s just fun to make that effort, go all in.”
Are you having fun?
“I am. I’m enjoying life a lot more than I was when I was full-time World Cup. And even though I had a great season the year I retired, I’m just enjoying the process a lot more now. It took some time to realize the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.”
If you’ve read this far in the article, you may be thinking of another DOB 1998 athlete who retired following the 2022/2023 season, but is enjoying life, and skiing, and life outside of skiing, more their second time around. I told Wonders that I didn’t expect him to speak for Hailey Swirbul, his APU teammate who is likewise now officially returned to pro skiing, but that I saw some parallels there.
“It’s been fun to have her back on the team,” said Wonders of the native of El Jebel, Colorado. “I think she’s a very integral part of APU. … You know, we lived together for many years on campus [in the APU Ski House]. And so we’ve always just been pretty good friends, and it’s fun to have her back.”
Finally, and back to the race itself, Wonders ultimately won by roughly 16 seconds over 13km, and racing is always tight at this level. (The jury moved the race from two laps of a 5km course to three laps of a 4.33km course earlier Sunday morning, due to safety concerns — I’m assuming windblown sheet ice on the Lekisch downhill, though I never checked it out myself because skiing today was so much better on the race course than off — making for the rarely contested 13-kilometer race. I believe it was the first time the relatively newly homologated 4.33km loop was used in a FIS race, but don’t quote me on that.)
“I was trying to ignore the good splits and just keep the hammer down,” Wonders said. “But just take the energy that I was having a good race and keep rolling with that.”
As an athlete who is, shall we say, not exactly getting splits that he is threatening for the lead out there, I had to ask whether a skier at Wonders’s level is in fact capable of pushing yet harder if he hears, say, “You’re three seconds off the lead!” from the side of the course.
“I think there’s some times that you’re just willing to, if you know it’s a close fight, you just have that one more gear,” Wonders mused. “Or you’re just willing to collapse on the line. And it’s been fun to get that energy back. It’s taken a lot of work, I think, to get to where I was when I retired, but it feels like those signs are coming back around this year.”
APU teammate Michael Earnhart, in second, sounded similar notes to Wonders about working into the year.
“I think the first ones” of the season, said Earnhart of a spate of racing in November, “I was just kind of missing those race gears. The first one of the season, you know, I lost 30 seconds on the first lap and then was able to ski with Luke Jager the whole second lap. So it’s like, Okay, I know I can ski the pace, I just need to do it from the start next time. And I think today I was closer to that. I still lost 10 seconds to Hunter on the first lap, but you know, what can you do? Hunter’s pretty strong, so I don’t mind losing to him.”
Earnhart may have lost 10 seconds to Wonders over lap one today (okay: 13 seconds, if you’re keeping score at home), but it was a gap of just four seconds over lap two. And Earnhart closed hard, clawing back 1.3 seconds over the final lap.
“At the end,” he recounted, “my coach to motivate me said I was fighting for the win. You know, I was about 15 seconds off that, but it kept me going.
An athlete would have covered a lot of ground in those 15 seconds today, given how the wind-scoured course was skiing.
“The wind made it pretty icy,” recounted Earnhart, “but not — like, a totally manageable amount of icy; it’s not unheard of. I mean, a lot of races are on manmade [snow] and all that now. So it’s not conditions we haven’t had before, but definitely really fast. Like, for a 28-minute race, it was so still so firm that it felt like I was kind of sprinting the whole time, which is definitely — it’s a feeling I’m getting more used to. I feel like we do it pretty often these days.”
“It’s kind of a harder course to ski,” echoed Brian Bushey, “a little bit icy out there, but it was fun. Impressive that they pulled off the full 4.3km loop.” [see above]
Is a 13km meaningfully different from a 10km, I asked, or is it just three laps is three laps.
The difference is “barely discernible,” said Bushey, “especially when it’s so fast. It’s pretty much the same time.”
Bushey identified the rolling A-Climb that kicked off each lap, Elliot’s Climb, as the most important part of the race. “I think if you could be relaxed at the top of Elliot’s, that was pretty important,” he reasoned. “If you can ski relaxed and smooth from there.”
I also recall Bushey saying that he would like to make the Olympics if possible this year while acknowledging strong domestic competition for few spots, and enjoying life in his first year as a pro skier because all the college kids are taking finals right now. But the omnipresent wind in the stadium drowned out all this audio, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
* * *
Final say here goes to Earnhart, whom I provided with a Steve Nash–level lob of a question that he duly rattled home: Gosh, Michael, are there any other resources that people could consult to find out more about the highest level of domestic racing here?
“Yeah, there is now an Instagram page and a website kind of dedicated to the SuperTour,” he gladly explained. “Because it is the highest level of racing in the country, and so we’re trying to promote that. We are strong athletes; you know, skiing is kind of a small, weird sport, but if you look at the numbers, the VO2 maxes and kind of how we do when we hop into running races, we deserve a little bit of respect. So we’re just trying to put our names out there.”
Again, here is that website. The Instagram account for same has been embedded above. As literally the only journalist in the entire country — a country currently ranked fourth in the Nations Cup standings, by the way — who consistently covers high-level domestic skiing, may I editorialize that I applaud these efforts. Go team.
Note to readers: The article on the women’s race will be up tomorrow, probably late morning given my parenting schedule. Nothing personal, and I feel bad making folks wait. But it has been two *very* long days on this end, and tonight is a school night so I can’t afford to write until 11 p.m. like I did yesterday to get both of Saturday’s gamers up on the same day. While also editing and posting two World Cup articles. And getting out for a ski of my own. Lots going on here.
Results: Zone4 | FIS (not up yet as of Sunday evening but should be soon; shoutout to race organizers for posting Saturday’s sprint results day-of)
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