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By Gavin Kentch
LAGO DI TESERO, Italy — Today was day zero at the Olympics venue, the calm before the storm, a stage without a set. Choose your metaphor.
Mostly I just walked around and soaked in the vibes; you can read more about that here:
Calm Before the Storm: Wandering Around the Venue on Olympics Day Zero
But I also had a chance to talk with USST head coach Matt Whitcomb, and, well, soak in the vibes some more, albeit in a slightly more formal, reportorial manner.
Questions for this conversation came from both me and, mostly, Nat Herz. It is, as an aside, a delight to have Nat here. You can read his dispatches from Milano–Cortina on some or all of FasterSkier, Northern Journal (Nat’s day job site), Alaska Public Media, the Anchorage Daily News, and National Public Radio.
Anyway. Here’s Matt Whitcomb. Questions have been summarized as necessary for better narrative flow. Whitcomb’s answers have been very lightly edited for clarity.
I can’t share audio this fortnight because it would make the values of the Olympic Movement cry, or at least IOC’s bank account, so expect less raw audio from Milano–Cortina now than from Trondheim last spring. Sorry, those are the rules.
Nordic ski journalist based in Anchorage: How much time did your guys spend practicing the ski exchange?
Matt Whitcomb: Good question. And it really varies. This is a skill that we’ve practiced over a decade and a half in some cases. But each athlete really sort of takes their own initiative to work with another teammate or coach to film some exchanges.
That can include using the same pairs of straps and two pairs of poles, or you might have each pair of poles have their own set of straps. Just depends how much time you’re looking to get out of the exchange.
For me personally, the thing that can go wrong in the ski exchange is everything, and the thing that can go right is you can gain a second or two and then the pack’s back together.
But it’s like a, don’t rush and fuck up versus just like if you take your time and you do it right, you’re not going to lose situation.
Yeah. But I recognize that’s the difference in my mindset versus somebody who is just like turning over every stone. And so some people want that second, and those people are the ones that have the gold medals, and I don’t.
Jesse was doing them at speed yesterday, I saw.
Yeah, we were trying to throw a little interference in there just to make it a little more stimulating. Because she is somebody who, you know, visualizes things, tries to practice them, goes back to visualizing and then does it. And you know, you tried a few different scenarios and those were all a part of your visualization.
[There was some discussion of the World Cup skiathlon earlier this season in which both Jessie Diggins and Frida Karlsson wanted to be in the same space at the same time coming into the ski boxes during the exchange. Words, and contact, were exchanged, though Karlsson demurred when asked by Expressen after the fact if she wished to repeat those words.]
One thing we can guarantee is there will be a lot of people in a small space. And if that’s part of your visualizations, you won’t be disappointed.
Is it fair to say that you guys are pretty eager to get this first race out of the way?
Absolutely. The schedules in the first few days are a little bit chaotic, where you have press conference, headshots, all these things that are kind of smack in the middle of this complicated schedule, and then on top of that, your 16 athletes all have 16 different workouts.
And once we get into the racing, there’s only one group that can race per day and there is one window on course when people can train, and so it really simplifies things. That’s something we look forward to. And then also getting athletes kind of off-site so that they can ski the Marcialonga trail once this championship starts to settle. Maybe go up to Passo Lavazè for off-site training. That can all be refreshing.
How do you feel? How are you feeling in this exact moment?
Really excited, very centered, prepared. Our team is vibing in a really incredible way. You know, we have all these great clubs, but it feels like it is Team USA. It’s not one club versus the other club. It is just like this amazing union and I think the athletes would agree with that.
[This was a much longer question that I would summarize as, how would you characterize the resources for and attention paid to this team now versus when Jessie Diggins was in her second year of racing internationally, at World Juniors in Hinterzarten in January 2010. Diggins’s teammates on the relay that year were Sophie Caldwell, Caitlin Patterson, and Joanne Reid, if that helps to date this.]
You could look at it from so many different areas.
You take a look at food: we went to our camp in Bend, Oregon, in May, living in home stays, and we catered from this little Mexican restaurant called the Taco Stand. And we just had a tray of like enchiladas for lunch and for dinner every day for two weeks. And now we’re renting out a house, or a couple of houses, and bringing a chef.
And with waxing, we used to be in two of these Conexes, and now we are in two trucks. We’re not moving two thousand pounds of equipment every time we’re loading and unloading after and before a race.
And so things have really changed. Our team cheers: We used to really celebrate a single top-30 on the whole team. And we had a banner where we would write down these results. We said “ALL IN” [the USST motto at the time] on the banner. And if you got a top 30, you know, a 29th in a World Cup, we wrote that down.
And just the way that the standard has changed across the board and all the while as the level of professionalism and resources has climbed, it’s remained fun and enjoyable and we haven’t lost the human value. And so that’s perhaps the thing I’m proud of most; I think that’s contributed to the long careers of Jessie, Rosie, and Julia.
Is it fair to say your budget going back to that time was probably in the realm of an order of magnitude, like 10x difference from what it was?
I don’t think it’s that much. My history is, in 2006 I was hired because Pete Vordenberg gave this inspiring presentation to the board and to the President, Bill Marolt, and famously got a million dollars. He started a development team, a women’s program, and hired a bunch of coaches. And from there, while there have been minor undulations, it’s rarely in the negative. And I’ve just benefited from twenty years of nearly incremental progress every year with regards to budget.
And I think that more than anything has — a gap in the middle there takes us back ten years or five years.
What about the Olympics is different? I’m not dumb; there’s clearly a lot of media attention and the surroundings are different. But in terms of your actual job, what, if anything, is different?
Managing expectations is different. You know, this is a venue that I list as my favorite venue. And we’ve been coming here, you know, world champs in 2003 and 2013, and now we’re back for the Olympics in 2026. The courses are a little bit different, but it’s the same topography. But it is all about managing expectations.
You look at the rings, and — I am patriotic because of the Olympics. From when I was a little boy, I remember seeing the rings and just dreaming from the beginning about wanting to represent the U.S. at the Olympics, and that’s how I developed my patriotism, and just national pride. And so there’s just such a difference.
I mean, we’re looking at right now — you look that way, you see the FIS emblem, and then you see the Olympic emblem. And one really jumps out to you. One really hits you because of just a lifetime of experiencing it. So it’s managing expectations for coaches, other staff, and for the athletes, of course.
At the same time, there’s a starting line and a finish line. These are super well-run races. We’ve got all the infrastructure we need and so in many ways, things are very easy, and so that allows us to manage those expectations.
One follow-up on that: Obviously, a World Cup race day is almost always two races, one for the men and one for the women. Is it easier or harder that you have just one race a day here?
It’s easier. Four athletes per day, with the exception of the classic sprint when we have eight. Every other day is just four athletes. Team sprints, four athletes, because have men and women on the same day.
What’s hard about that is that we have ten days of racing. So the the durability is the challenging thing for techs and coaches.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American skiing. We started with nothing and now we’re at the Olympics. You can read more about our first three years here, and donate to the Olympics fund here. Thank you for consideration, and, especially, for reading.
