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By Peter Minde
MOUNT VAN HOEVENBERG, Lake Placid — In a last ditch, 50-meter drag race, Novie McCabe, APU, outsprinted Tilde Bångman, University of Colorado, for the women’s 20-kilometer mass start skate national championship at Mount van Hoevenberg earlier Thursday. McCabe finished in 56:13.6, with Bångman 2.5 seconds back.
Kendall Kramer, APU, was third overall and second American in 56:42.8. Ava Thurston, Dartmouth, was fourth overall and third American in 57:27.6. Seeded 67th at the start due to a lack of FIS points in her return to racing, Hailey Swirbul, APU, threw down big time, finishing fifth overall, 2.8 seconds back of Thurston.
At the start, the temperature was 32 degrees (0 C). Low-hanging clouds proffered dampness and humidity. Channeling his inner Wolfman Jack, the stadium MC quipped, “The wax techs been here since zero dark thirty, putting a secret mix on the giddyup sticks.”
Four laps of Mount van Hoevenberg’s forbidding five-kilometer FIS loop loomed. Not for the faint of heart.
As the racers assembled in the start, it began snowing. Then they were off. In a mad dash, Rosie Fordham, University of Alaska Fairbanks, charged out of the stadium, followed by Kramer, Bångman, Alayna Sonnesyn of Team Birkie, and Samantha Smith of Sun Valley. There didn’t appear to be any collisions or broken poles.
At the first checkpoint, seven seconds separated the top nine skiers. By the 2.5km checkpoint, with Fordham still leading, 14 seconds separated the top ten. The next group wasn’t that far back. Slicing through traffic and intensifying snow, Swirbul had pulled herself to 20th by this point, passing 46 racers in half a lap. It was still anyone’s race to win. As we shall see, however, the Ho’s 5km World Cup loop exacts a toll, even on the fittest.
Coming through the stadium at the end of the first lap, it was Kramer, Bångman, Sonnesyn, Smith, Fordham, and McCabe, first through sixth, separated by 3.1 seconds. Hauling astronaut, and slicing through traffic, Swirbul was now in eighth place after 5km, after passing 58 skiers in her opening lap.
On the second lap, at the foot of the A-Climb, the order of the top six was the same. When they arrived at the stadium, 10km into the 20km race, the order changed only slightly: Bångman, Kramer, McCabe, first through third, separated by 1.2 seconds. Fordham was now in fourth, seven seconds behind McCabe. For the moment, the snow abated.
Heading on to the A-Climb for the third time, almost every athlete I watched V2’ed at least to the halfway point. (The livestream didn’t show the whole hill.) The effort began to catch up. Smith dropped back to ninth place by 11.25km. In fourth place, Fordham lost touch with the leaders, skiing in no-woman’s land. Thurston skied a steady race, in ninth place and then advancing one spot.
Bångman led McCabe and Kramer for the entire third lap as Fordham faded, bleeding time. “Unfortunately ski speed does actually matter,” the UAF skier would write on Strava that afternoon, with great sanguinity.
Swirbul skied in fifth place, with Thurston less than a second back. Sonnesyn dropped to eighth place; Smith to tenth. The A-Climb here is selective. Coming about a kilometer later, the two hills on the old Ladies’ 5 section are no easier. The snow resumed, forcing skiers to expend more energy when they least needed to.
Setting out on the fourth lap, some skiers looked worked over. Thurston turned on the jets, with a series of splits that brought her up into fourth place overall, third American.
At the penultimate time check, McCabe was 0.6 seconds behind Bångman. Rounding the hairpin into the finishing straight, both women accelerated hard. McCabe gained enough daylight to edge out Bångman for the win. There was a gap of nearly 30 seconds to Kramer in third overall, then another 45 seconds before Thurston came in ahead of Swirbul for the final spot on the domestic podium.
“It was definitely tough,” McCabe said after the race. “I think I was on the edge of getting dropped, like, the whole last one, maybe two laps. Tilde was pushing it so hard and skiing really well, and same with Kendall. So I was kind of on the ropes for a long time.”
“I had some really good skis today,” McCabe added, “and I maybe had a tiny gap going over the top of the hill, and then we were, like, gliding in together, and I had good skis and was able to make it happen at the end.”
“I thought it would be a hot start with Kendall and Rosie and Tilde up there,” McCabe continued. “So my plan was to go out and relax and work my way up. The pace was really hot. And I was like, I don’t know if I can hold onto this, but it let up a teeny bit, maybe, like the second and third laps, and I was kind of able to hang on, but those girls did a great job of keeping the pace hard. So we stayed ahead of the rest of the pack. My plan was to hang on and then if I had anything left at the end, try to make something happen. And so I just tried to stick with that, and it worked today.”
“It was such a fun race,” Bångman said afterward. “I was hoping for a fast race from the gun. Rosie and Kendall put up the pace the first lap, it was insanely fast, and going out on the second lap, it was Kendall pulling the squad all the way, and she was really pushing. And so I was just trying to hang in there.
“I was like, this is a really high pace, and this is hard, so I’m hoping I can make it at least halfway through the race,” Bångman said.
“Then going out on the third lap, things started changing a little bit more. And I was like, oh, I’m feeling pretty good. So I was trying to put some more work in and be up in front a little bit more and help out. I was trying to push the pace in the uphills, where I felt really strong and I had really good skis as well. So I tried to, like, help out on the sections of the course where I felt strong, and suddenly we were only two people left, and I realized that it’s between me and Novie, and then we just tried to battle it out. It was such a buzz skiing with her. It was amazing.”
Did the course catch up with you at all?
“Yeah, definitely,” Bångman replied. “This is a really tough course. We looked into it, comparing it to some World Cup courses back home [Sweden], and it’s a lot of climbing on this one. It’s 192 meters per 5km. It’s a tough course, but I like it.”
“It was great,” Kramer said afterwards of her day. “I got to work with a lot of my teammates and friends out there the whole time. I unfortunately didn’t have the skis to be competitive with the girls on the last downhills going into the finish, but I tried my best, and I’m super glad with my form right now. I can’t complain. They were skiing really strong the whole time, and I’m grateful to be in such a field.”
I’m supposed to be impartial, but I can’t help but be awed by these athletes. Hapless hero worship. How do you do it?
“I think that it’s the training,” Kramer said. “When Hailey, Novie, and I had the results that we had today, we trained specifically for this stuff. Our training is specific to championships we’ll be at, and what we’ll see at Olympic venues, and we prepare on purpose, for sure, for things like this.”
I couldn’t help asking: What does coach Erik Flora put in APU’s water?
“Just believing in everybody and having a lot of confidence in everybody,” Kramer said. “And also having seen so many people through this Olympic journey, he has so much data stored up of what works and you know, that’s invaluable. I’m really glad to have a coach that’s been in the game for so long.”
Make them know your name. A senior at Dartmouth, Thurston improved on her impressive results in last March’s SuperTour finals at this same venue. There, she was 9th in the 10km skate race, 6th in the 40km classic slushfest, and 7th in the sprint.
“It was a fun race,” Thurston said of today. “It was exciting. Lots of moving around in the pack. This is always a hard course, long hills, and you really got to work those downhills.
“I knew I was feeling good coming off of a camp we had in SilverStar. I got to do a little bit of Eastern Cup racing, but I kind of wasn’t sure how things would go here. And I’ve just been super stoked and feeling good. It’s a super competitive field here, so it’s always great. I’ve learned a lot skiing around people being in heats that are so tight.”
Sick in November, Hailey Swirbul missed early-season interval-start FIS races in Alaska that would have given her a better starting position today. With not great FIS points as a result, Swirbul started around mid pack, bib 67.*
“Oh, oh gosh. I don’t remember,” Swirbul candidly said when asked the last time that she had started this far back in a race.
“I think I definitely burnt some extra matches” to move up through the pack at the start, Swirbul said. “Like, the sides of the trail today had fresh snow on them, and those were the opportunities to pass. You ended up having to sometimes choose a worse line to find space, but that’s the way it goes. That’s racing.”
Did she find herself a bit gassed toward the end after that initial effort to move up through the field?
“Knowing it was 20km, I didn’t want to spend all my cash trying to move up,” Swirbul reasoned. “So I tried to be patient and pace it in a sustainable way, and I think I did. I was working hard that whole time and just trying to go as fast as I can while making it to the finish line.”
Reflecting on her performances this week, Swirbul said, “I think it’s been going well. I think sometimes, on a certain day it goes your way and on a certain day it doesn’t. But on a race like today I skied a really strong race for myself and I’m proud of how I skied and [I’m] stoked for my teammates. Each race of this season is another chance to remember how this feels. [It’s been] a couple years away, so it’s been fun to get my feet back under me and just see what happens.”
[Thank you to Nordic Insights colleague Noah Eckstein for conducting the interview with Hailey Swirbul]
Olympic team prognostication used to be simple. Once upon a time, this country held Olympic Trials for cross-country skiing. The most recent one of those, so named, that I’m aware of is from 1960. And I only know this from a friend whose invitation to same went unopened because he was undergoing Army basic training at Fort Dix.
The last time races as portentous these happened at Mount van Hoevenberg, they were called the Gold Cup. It was December 30, 1997, leading up to the Olympics in Nagano. The rules were simple: Win a race, go to the Olympics. And also take home $10,000. Mark Gilbertson claimed the 30km skate opener that week. Laura McCabe, aka Novie’s mom, was third in the women’s 15km that same day, just to bring things full circle here.
The 30km was four laps that featured Russian Hill and Hi-Notch. These two climbs, the hardest on the 1980 trail system, fall within the same mile. A Vermont middle school teacher, Gilbertson’s school district bussed his students to Lake Placid to cheer for him. Gilbertson might have been the last truly amateur athlete. He punched his ticket to Nagano and raced the 50km. Twenty-eight years later, I still get choked up recalling this.
Nowadays, it’s national ranking lists, World Cup performances, and goodness knows what else. What does one take away from the first three races? With her commanding win in the 10km and gutsy 20km race, USSS may have to take Swirbul to Milano–Cortina. And McCabe, first and second in the distance races, has wrapped up a trip to Italy as the top-ranked distance skier on the internal USSS points list. That’s as far as I’m willing to stick my neck out.
Racing concludes tomorrow with a classic sprint, technically a SuperTour rather than a national championship but still the same course and same high-end field.
Rain is forecast starting around 10 a.m., just in time for qualification. (The qual has recently been moved up an hour, to 9 a.m., due to weather, but athletes still need to contest a full sprint day after that.) Add wind gusting to 33mph and a high temperature around 44 degrees (6.67 C) — in, again, a classic sprint — and what do you get? The forecast calls for pain.
* If you are or know someone who is a student in, let’s say, first through ninth grade, have them listen to the opening seconds of this audio clip (turn your volume up to hear the response). Tell me that Swirbul coaches APU Devos (junior high athletes) without telling me that Swirbul coaches APU Devos.
Results: senior women’s 20km | junior women’s 10km (flight A) | junior women’s 10km (flight B)
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