By Gavin Kentch
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“The chances of making an Olympic Team are low,” as no less an authority than 2018 Olympian Annie Hart has written.[1] But they won’t take just anybody: The Ted Stevens Act, the federal law governing Olympic sport in this country, mandates that the United States be “represented [at the Olympics] by ‘the most competent amateur representation possible.’”[2] Indeed, Hart argues that funding decisions must be “driven by the desire to field a competent team in each event.”[3]
So who are those competent athletes going to be, and how many spots do we get in February, anyway? Read on for more.
Team size
This Olympics, like the last, provides a maximum of sixteen athlete spots per country (for cross-country skiing), eight per gender. Up to four athletes may start per country in a single race.
The American women will have eight spots come February, per the somewhat byzantine qualification process that is best explained by, uh, this Wikipedia article (really). The American men will have either seven spots or eight. I cannot officially tell you now that this will be seven — this is not officially known nor knowable until after the final allocation and reallocation process occurs in mid-January — but I can unofficially tell you now that, unless a lot of unexpected things happen, BO & Co. will have seven quota spots for Milan–Cortina.
Qualification pathways
There are two objective pathways and two discretionary pathways for an American cross-country skier to make the team for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Here are the pathways in descending order:
- Objective: Top-eight performance in specified World Cup events
- Discretionary: Straight-up discretionary selection of athletes who are (very) good skiers but who are not captured under the other criteria used
- Objective: Top-50 ranking in the World Cup sprint or distance standings on January 18, 2026
- Discretionary: Selection based on top performances in domestic races, realistically speaking probably just at U.S. Nationals in early January
This is great background and all, and I appreciate that you at least made this section shorter now than the last like hundred or so times you wrote a selection article dating back to 2017, but I *really* just want to know who’s gonna be on the team
Fair. I hear you.
So: If the team were named today, January 5, 2026, here is who would be selected. This analysis is based off of the USSS Olympic-selection document, which you can find here, and the 2025/2026 SuperTour and Olympics points lists prepared by USSS, which you can find here.
These calculations are not final final yet, but they are getting progressively more useful than they were when I wrote the first version of this article midway through World Cup Period 1. In practice, the World Cup spots are essentially set, so we can profitably look at how many spots will be available for top performances at U.S. Nationals, which are currently ongoing. (TLDR, a ton of spots for the women plus at least one for the men, but it will probably have to be a distance skier, not a sprinter, on the men’s side. In the event of a hypothetical eighth men’s quota spot becoming available, make that two male distance skiers, still no domestic sprinters. Sorry, everyone racing in Lake Placid on Tuesday and Friday.)
Criterion no. 1: Objective selection based on strong finishes in specified World Cup events
There will be four individual events held in Val di Fiemme: a classic sprint, a 20km skiathlon, a 10km interval-start skate, and a mass start 50km classic.
Athletes who post a top-eight finish in any of four analogous events on the World Cup between November 28 (Ruka) and January 19 (Oberhof) will be selected: the classic sprint, 20km skiathlon, 10km interval-start skate, and 20km classic.
The sprint result looks to an athlete’s finish in the heats, not in the qual. The 20km classic could be either an interval-start or a mass start race, but the sole 20km classic race in the qualifying period is a pursuit, so that’s that. No, there is no race longer than 20km on the entire World Cup calendar before they race a 50km at the Olympics.
As of January 5, the following athlete has recorded a top-eight finish in one or more of these events and so will be selected to the team:
- Jessie “our sparkle queen” Diggins (first in Trondheim skiathlon; third in Trondheim 10km skate; fifth in Davos 10km skate; there will very likely be additional qualifying races for her during the selection period, but I probably won’t further update this parenthetical because she is clearly going, the end)
Criterion no. 2: Discretionary selection
Even though this is the second category in a sequential list — USSS could, in theory, select up to three athletes here via the exercise of discretion and then call things good, all while complying with at least the letter of the law — I am going to table this one for the time being. My reasoning is that the third criterion is extremely likely to capture all athletes who should reasonably be selected for the team, and so this second criterion is relatively unlikely to come into play.
History is on my side with this approach; USSS has not selected an athlete to an Olympics or world championships team on a purely discretionary basis for many years now. I feel like they are particularly unlikely to do so for an Olympic spot, just given the general rhetoric and attention surrounding the Olympics.
Update, December 18: Okay, if results play out at U.S. Nationals the way they did in the Period 1 SuperTour races — say Hailey Swirbul again wins the 10km interval-start classic by an obscene margin, but then suffers misfortune in the 20km mass start skate on the level of a broken pole and ski that greatly skews the results relative to what she is capable of — I can see potentially selecting Swirbul under this criterion even if she is not the highest-ranked female domestic distance skier, because you, like, need two people who can classic ski to round out an Olympic relay team. (No offense to every other American skier with that glib and possibly insulting phrasing! I more specifically mean just that American classic-race results on the World Cup from Period 1 were below many athletes’ historic levels of performance. Classic technique day at practice still makes me want to cry about half the time, so I promise that I am not judging here.)
Which brings us to:
Criterion no. 3: Objective selection based on top-45 or top-50 rankings in the World Cup sprint or distance standings on January 18, 2026
Assuming that spots are still available after applying criteria one and two — nearly all of them will be — USSS next looks to which athletes rank in the top 45 or top 50 of the World Cup discipline standings, sprint or classic, as of January 18, 2026.
Why the indeterminacy vis-à-vis top 45 versus top 50? Because of the following geopolitical wrinkle in a document first published in December 2024 and revised (very slightly, and not in a way having anything to do with Russia) in June 2025:
“If athletes from the Russian Federation are allowed to compete in the 2025-26 World Cup season during the Selection Period [Ruka through Oberhof], this standard will be Top 50. If athletes from Russia are not allowed to compete during the Selection Period, this standard will be Top 45.”
The document continues, “It is expected that a decision on the inclusion of athletes from the Russian Federation in the 2025-26 World Cup season will be made by the FIS Council in October 2025.” This literally occurred in October, but FIS proposes, CAS disposes, as the saying goes.
Russian athletes were both allowed to compete and did in fact compete, starting in Davos, so we are into the top-50 option here. Far fewer than five athletes per gender have yet started on the World Cup, so this language is in practice notably over-inclusive. I’m guessing that the Russian Ski Association didn’t exactly have the feelings of USSS’s transactional attorneys in mind when they chose start lists for Period 1.
women
As of January 5, the following female American athletes are ranked in the top 50 of one or both of the World Cup sprint or distance standings and so would make the team:
- Jessie Diggins (first in distance, 7th in sprint)
- Julia Kern (20th in sprint, 39th in distance)
- Rosie Brennan (32nd in sprint)
- Alayna Sonnesyn (49th in sprint)
Diggins was already selected under objective criterion no. 1. You can therefore slot in Kern, Brennan, and Sonnesyn as also making the team under objective criterion no. 3.
men
As of January 5, the following male American athletes are ranked in the top 50 of one or both of the World Cup sprint or distance standings and so would make the team:
- Ben Ogden (fourth in sprint)
- Gus Schumacher (15th in distance, 27th in sprint)
- Jack Young (21st in sprint)
- Zak Ketterson (29th in distance)
- JC Schoonmaker (36th in sprint)
- Kevin Bolger (40th in sprint)
Criterion no. 4: Discretionary selection based on top performances in domestic races
The final criterion here is both discretionary (“may be filled”) and applied only on an as-needed basis (“should there be any remaining quota slot(s) after Selection Method Nos. 1–3 above have been applied”). Don’t get me wrong, both history and my sense of the specific athletes involved would leave me quite surprised to see not a single domestic athlete selected for the Olympic team on the basis of their performance at U.S. Nationals… but I do have to flag this as an at least theoretical possibility.
Either four or five of the eight spots for the women will remain unfulfilled via World Cup results come January 18, so let’s look at U.S. Nationals results: USSS will look to an athlete’s two best performances in domestic races this season when filling the team via this criterion.
On the one hand, the period of qualifying races here includes eight high-level races held in the first half of the 2025/2026 domestic race season, everything from the four SuperTour races in Anchorage in December through the last race held at U.S. Nationals on January 9, 2026. On the other hand, the bonuses given for top performances at U.S. Nationals are such that you can expect the top-ranking domestic athletes to emerge based exclusively on their race results at Lake Placid in the first week of January.
Also note that, while the World Cup top-8 results criterion looks to an athlete’s final finish position in the heats when ranking their sprint results, scoring for the internal USSS 2026 Championship Selection List looks only to their position in the sprint qual. If, say, Murphy Kimball or Lauren Jortberg sweeps both quals in Lake Placid (I feel like there are fewer moose there than at Kincaid, which would be a boon to Kimball’s chances), but then runs into bad luck in the heats and finishes like 28th and 29th with two broken poles, their races would have really sucked but they would still receive the full 30 points for each first-place finish, plus an additional 15 bonus points for first place in one of the four national champs/SuperTour races held in Lake Placid in January.
Note the bonus structure here: a second- and third-place finish in the two Lake Placid sprint quals would be worth more (61 points total) than first-place finishes in any two other “normal” SuperTour sprint quals (60 points total).
Note also that foreign nationals are excised from the results for purposes of this calculation; this is not to be xenophobic, but rather to rank American skiers against only American skiers for purposes of selection to American championship teams.
Putting all that together, here is who leads the domestic-athletes selection list after the first of four races in Lake Placid:
- women’s distance: Hailey Swirbul
- women’s sprint: Lauren Jortberg
- men’s distance: Hunter Wonders
- men’s sprint: John Schwinghamer
BUT, you should not treat these standings as final at present, given the bonus points on offer for top performances at U.S. Nationals. Don’t get me wrong, these are all strong skiers. But we realistically need to wait through the end of this week of racing in Lake Placid to see what the points tables look like. Then we can all construct scenarios for which four or five women will be chosen from the domestic circuit; this is absolutely the most wide-open year for domestic qualification in many Olympic quads.
Check back here for more as the season progresses.
Embed from Getty ImagesI’ve really enjoyed that you took nearly 2,000 words just to tell me a few names. Do you have any more of a history lesson to close this out?
To be fair, it was important to me to show my work; people care about this, a lot, and litigation has repeatedly been threatened in the past over team selection.
But since you may well appreciate a sense of the Americans’ quota spots over the last four Olympiads, I do have that history at hand. (Disclosure: much of this is copy and pasted from my earlier work on the subject. No need to reinvent the wheel.)
- In 2022 (Beijing), the American nordic team had a total quota of 14 athletes. USSS filled this quota, taking eight women and six men. Not every athlete who traveled to China started a race.
- In 2018 (Pyeongchang), the quota was a hefty 20 athletes. USSS filled this quota, taking nine men and 11 women, although not every athlete who traveled to South Korea started a race.
- In 2014 (Sochi), the quota was 17 athletes. The U.S. Ski Team did not fill this quota, instead taking seven men and seven women, citing visa restrictions that limited the amount of staff available and a desire to take only competitive athletes to the Olympics. The Americans’ three unused quota spots were (infamously, depending on your perspective) reallocated to other nations. People had thoughts on this; check out the 33 comments at the bottom of this article. One is from some rando named “gkentch” who calls out the USST on some of their statements, while including cites to the FIS results database to bolster his claims. Plus ça change.
- In 2010 (Whistler), the American quota was initially seven athletes at the start of the 2009/2010 World Cup season, but was later expanded to eight, then up to ten, and ultimately to 11 athletes. A 22-year-old sprinter named Simi Hamilton (photo above) was the 11th and final American athlete taken.
Ski racing at the 2026 Milan–Cortina Winter Olympics begins with the women’s skiathlon on February 7, 2026. Stay tuned for more.
Footnotes
[1] Anne Hart, Note, Torching Athlete Rights: Examining the Fiduciary Duties of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee Board of Directors, 61 Boston Coll. L. Rev. 2695, 2734 (2020) (link to full article if you’re curious).
[2] Id. at 2744 n.348 (quoting Act).
[3] Id. at 2733 n.263 (emphasis in original). See also id. at n.348 and accompanying text (analyzing “Matt Witcomb” [sic] interview discussing rationale behind 2020/2021 national team selection).
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