By Gavin Kentch
The first team sprint of the 2025/2026 World Cup season was held in Davos earlier Friday. The Swedish women and Norwegian men both won, by three-plus and two-plus seconds, respectively. Try to contain your shock.
No American women raced today. I reached out to Matt Whitcomb, USST head coach, for comment on this after I saw the start list.
Just to give a little context for Whitcomb’s thoughts, I clearly see a tension here. On the one hand, the team sprint has been a medal event at global championships for a full 20 years now; Jessie Diggins has one Olympic and four World Championships medals in this race to her name, for example. On the other hand, it’s a long season, the Americans are always far from home, and, given current parameters, performance in this race provides neither individual World Cup points nor a potential avenue for Olympic qualification.
Put another way, since the start of the 2022/2023 season three-plus years ago now, Diggins has raced in two team sprints at world championships (collecting a medal at both), and in zero team sprints on the World Cup. She last raced a World Cup team sprint in December 2021, in Dresden, on my reading of her FIS profile. I say this not to pick on Jessie, but just to highlight some of the dynamics at play here.
So. I put some of that to Whitcomb in an email yesterday. Here are his thoughts on today’s race, as sent at after 10 p.m. his time (thanks Matt).
“It’s certainly not ideal that we aren’t participating in the women’s team sprint on Friday, but I stand by the athletes’ decisions because the rationale makes sense,” he wrote.
“This weekend holds a lot of value for athletes who are trying to qualify for the Olympics, and the team sprint is not a qualifying event. Given that it is the first event for the weekend, competing Friday could compromise athlete performance on Saturday and Sunday. This is a sensitive period for the team as we have arrived from sea-level to over 5,000 feet and are still within our acute acclimatization phase. Many athletes are being very measured with their output.
“Lastly, this is our third weekend in a row of having three events, and racing the full calendar is unsustainable. So, in spite of it being a bummer, I stand by the athletes’ decision to not compete.”
This marks the entirety of the women’s race article for today, btw, not because it is not worthy of more coverage, but just because this is a shoestring operation and I’m using our resources as they will best serve readers. I am imminently off to the venue here in Anchorage for a full day of SuperTour reporting, and there was no one else available on staff to cover World Cup (we do have Angie Kell writing a standalone article on the men’s race). There you have it. FIS’s news article on today’s women’s race is better than anything else I’ve found; here are Expressen and NRK’s versions of same.
Racing continues in Davos tomorrow with the individual skate sprint. Starters for the American women are listed as Jessie Diggins, Julia Kern, Rosie Brennan, Alayna Sonnesyn, Kate Oldham, Erin Bianco, and Luci “not just a biathlete” Anderson. Notably, Dariya Nepryaeva is also on the start list, one spot after Oldham. She is listed as an AIN; there is a FIS-logo flag by her name in lieu of the Russian flag. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues.
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