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By Angie Kell
The cross-country skiing scene is abuzz this week, after the release of most countries’ final team rosters for the 2026 Milano-Cortina Olympics. Excitement, topped with a little controversy for those named or not named to the Olympics, made many media headlines in recent days, and it was easy to capitalize on the Olympic fervor for today’s men’s team sprint in Goms, Switzerland, the last World Cup stop in Period 3 before next month’s big stage.
Having the sprinting big hitters present for a final tuneup wasn’t a guarantee. But with names such as Switzerland’s Valerio Grond, Federico Pellegrino of Italy, and Frenchman Lucas Chanavat on the start list, it was shaping up to be an exciting day, and a tough one at that.
The course today was a single 1.5km loop, featuring what the livestream deemed “two pretty basic, mid climbs.” (Skiers would later take umbrage with this description.) Occurring at just over 4100 feet of elevation, one of the higher venues on the circuit, altitude was another reason for athletes to modulate their efforts.
Team USA fielded two teams, perhaps as a test for the potential team sprint combinations forthcoming in Val di Fiemme. Longtime training partners Ben Ogden and Gus Schumacher comprised USA I; Zanden McMullen and JC Schoonmaker constituted USA II.
Ogden and Schumacher have previously made history together in Goms in a team event, a fact that unlikely escaped the American coaches in orchestrating today’s pairing. At World Junior Championships in 2018, the two were part of a four-person men’s relay team that earned the U.S. a breakthrough silver medal (see embed above for all-time throwback photo).
(Also notable was that Harald Østberg Amundsen and his team from Norway won that relay, held eight years ago next week. Other athletes who competed here in both today’s team sprint and the 2018 relay included Davide Graz of Italy, Gustaf Berglund of Sweden, Graham Ritchie of Canada, Ondřej Černý of Czechia, Seve de Campo of Australia, and both halves of today’s Switzerland I team, Janik Riebli and Valerio Grond.)
In the qualification round, Grond and Riebli, racing on their home turf, took the fastest combined time over a single lap apiece to send them to the final, with a time of 5:43.96.
After the qualification, viewers of the livestream got a sense of the true nature of the beastly course: “The hills are fucking long,” Grond exclaimed on-air. “And it’s hard to pace it in the first hill but the crowd is good and then it’s a bit easier.”
Norway’s Amundsen, paired with biathlete-turned-cross-country-star Einar Hedegart, were 0.21s back from the Swiss leaders for second place in the qual. USA I took the third-best qualifying time, just 0.81s behind the leaders. USA II came in 13th; as the top 15 teams advanced (out of 29 total), Schoonmaker and McMullen also took a spot in the final.
In a format where each team skis a total of six laps, three per athlete in a rotating manner, the start gun found Amundsen of Norway I leading the pack. Unlike the earlier women’s race, which began in a more measured fashion, Amundsen approached the first uphill with intent to ensure that any hints of trouble remained behind him. Ogden too positioned himself towards the front of the pack, while USA II, led by McMullen, found themselves at the rear of the pack.
After a clean first exchange, Schoonmaker of USA II moved through the field to remain just behind Schumacher of USA I, following his tempo up the long hill for temporary good positioning, but would struggle to keep the team in the front group thereafter.
With Norway I still at the front, cameras saw Hedegart displaying his strength and fitness with a powerful push at the crest of the hill to open some daylight between him and the rest of the field. However, the field was able to regain contact on the descent on this breakaway attempt.
An uneventful third lap found the fourth being a rinse and repeat of the previous anchor leg. Once again, Hedegart used the crest to create separation on both uphill segments, but this time maintained them on the descent, perfectly setting Amundsen up for his final lap.
Amundsen stomped on the gas heading out into lap five, mouth agape and drooling, and demonstrated his supreme Norwegian conditioning while a group of five skiers pursued him from several seconds behind. In this group was Ogden.
Hedegart began the sixth and final lap well ahead of the pack, but a heroic surge from Schumacher on the first uphill of the loop closed some, but not all, of the real estate between him and the Norwegian. At the risk of likening everything to World Juniors 2018, it brought to mind Schumacher’s anchor-leg surge here eight years ago, where he moved the boys from 26.2 seconds off the podium to second overall within a 5km leg. Once again, however, it was Norway taking the win, this time behind an uncontested Hedegart in a time of 17:43.75.
Pellegrino used all of his might to hang with Schumacher through the rise of the second hill, and the two longtime Rossi athletes descended together toe-to-toe. But a final sprint with the famed Italian sprinter was likely to end only one way, and Pellegrino overtook Schumacher in the final meters to grab silver for Italy I, in 17:45.69.
“Second slipped through my fingers and I kind of knew that was coming,” Schumacher told USSS media after the fact. “But [Ogden] was psyched and it was really fun to share that with him, and always fun to share a big result with a teammate.”
“Doing it with Gus, my boy from day one, was pretty fun,” echoed Ogden to USSS. “A dream come true, really. Super fired up.”
Schumacher and Ogden took third in 17:46.51 to make history once again: It was the first team sprint podium for the U.S. men’s team, in a race format first contested on the World Cup over twenty years ago.
When asked by Nordic Insights to reflect on the day, Ogden told us, “The course was one of the harder courses we’ve raced, probably, and at a reasonable altitude too, so that complicates things.”
How were the two “pretty basic, mid climbs” and the course overall? And what were the critical points of the race?
“The tough uphills were a challenge to walk the line between being frantic and trying to be in the perfect position at all times, and just relaxing and conserving energy,” said Ogden. “Going over the tops of the hills was the key points for me, and I tried to be in the top five at the start of every downhill, and I feel like I accomplished that pretty well.”
Schumacher added, “It hurt pretty bad. I threw up a little bit after the qualifier. I don’t do that much but I was pretty toxic with lactate, and after the final, I felt pretty bad for awhile,” he told us.
“That course is really big and we are at elevation and that hill is like a minute long, maybe a bit less, but pushing over the top makes it a minute. The downhills are skiing too; they’re pretty hard so you have got to keep that in mind. The last hill is fun — you recover enough to push it there and you carry speed so it feels fun.”
USA II would finish 11th, in a time of 18:31.61. Schoonmaker concurred with his APU teammate whose name sometimes gets conflated with his own: “The big hill was the critical point for me,” he said. “It was super long and I really struggled there.”
Schoonmaker added, “Today was really hard. That course was brutal to do three times. I felt like Zanden executed great today and put me in good spots, but I didn’t have the gas to hang onto the pack the last two laps.”
Racing continues tomorrow in Goms with the classic sprint. The start list can be found here. Racing for the Americans will be a full crew of seven men: Zak Ketterson, Gus Schumacher, Jack Young, Ben Ogden, JC Schoonmaker, Kevin Bolger, and Zach Jayne.
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