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By Gavin Kentch
LAGO DI TESERO — It took the American men fifty years and five days to win their second lifetime Olympic medal. It took them just eight days more to pick up their third.
Earlier today the hero of last Tuesday’s classic sprint, Ben Ogden, paired with roommate Gus Schumacher to claim an emphatic silver medal in the men’s team sprint. It is the first Olympic medal of Schumacher’s career, the second of Ogden’s week, and the third in American men’s Olympic cross-country skiing history, following Bill Koch’s silver in Innsbruck in 1976.
Team USA spent most of the race today near the front, with Ogden in particular skiing with aggression as well as poise. Schumacher did the same throughout most of his laps, but was repeatedly swallowed up by the prodigious draft on the loooong descent into the stadium.
“It feels like a pit in your stomach, or you’re just eating itself, or a thousand butterflies trying to escape,” USST head coach Matt Whitcomb said of watching Schumacher float to the back of the field at these moments in the race. “It didn’t feel good seeing those guys kind of swallowed up, but just the draft effect in this stadium is all that was. We had awesome skis.”
But the race is six laps long. And there’s no draft effect if you drop the people behind you. Ogden finished his final turn around the course, lap five overall, in a close second behind Norway. Johannes Høsflot Klæbo headed out in first for the anchor leg, with Schumacher 1.5 seconds back, and Italian great Federico Pellegrino, racing at home, just off his tails (another 0.4 seconds back of Schumacher). Lots of firepower there.
“Every race with Klæbo has a clear, clear conclusion,” said Andrea Ogden, aka Ben’s mom, afterwards, “and he didn’t make that known until the end. It was so dramatic.”
Klæbo, of course, went on the final uphill, of course. But Schumacher was ready.
“I felt like I came into the hill with good speed,” Schumacher said of this moment. “Switched to V1 a little early, kind of just like preemptively assuming that he was about to go, and his attack came a little later than I thought it would be, but you know, I’d burned a few V1 matches by then. But I’m really, really proud I was able to stay in striking distance.”
APU coach Erik Flora is the man in the orange hat on the left side of this photo, the farthest coach up the trail. (As an aside, if a blowup version of this shot is not up in the dankness that is the APU gym by the end of April, what are we even doing here.)
That’s Klæbo, in bib one, going. But then Schumacher, bib two, going with him. Only sort of; Norway won the race, by 1.37 seconds, so I don’t want to claim too much here. But Gus truly did make him work for it. And btw stone cold dropped Pellegrino in the process.
“Just to see him like put his head down and try to chase him — and he was holding his own — was unbelievable,” Flora said afterwards of this moment. “I probably can’t put that into words, you know? I just remember seeing it and — he chased with everything he had. But when he chased, there was a reaction in his body. He could see that he could fight with Klæbo in the future.”
Flora continued, “The emotions just came so high to watch him come up the hill and go like, Is he gonna get it? And then all of a sudden that gear turned. And you’re like, Oh man, he has it. When they cleared the top, you could see the medal was taken. Because he was in second place, and you could see fourth wasn’t going to get in there. Maybe, you know, maybe third was going to get in there, but then the way he came over the top, you could see it was decisive.”
It was indeed decisive. And then Gus Schumacher pushed over the hill, giving the final fillip that everyone in Anchorage racing knows so well, and he sped down the hill on skis made fast through the work of two dozen hands, and he came to the line in a free skate that he first saw from Kikkan and then made his own. And on the other side of the finish a man from Vermont was waiting for him, and Gus exulted across the line and fell at his feet. And they were crying in Val di Fiemme and they were crying in Alaska and they were crying in Vermont, and everywhere else in this great, oft imperfect country that contributed to this result, because it truly does take a village. And eventually Gus rose from the snow, and Ben hugged him.
I can’t tell this story without elevating Schumacher’s final-lap heroics, but he would be the first to tell you that nothing in this story happens without Ogden. So, final word here to Ben:
“Being from Vermont, I’m so proud, and there are so many that are so proud Vermonters. You know, I’ll never forget when I was eighteen years old and decided to go to the University of Vermont and ski there. Like, there were grown men who were just like beside themselves with how excited they were that I was gonna go to UVM, and it wasn’t even about like racing and winning races or anything like that. It was just the fact that I grew up in Vermont and I went to college in Vermont, and I’ll live in Vermont for the rest of my life. And it’s incredible to get to bring home some hardware to all the people who have believed in me. And I know they’re fired up.”
Full recap coming later, though I guess I couldn’t resist and just gave you a thousand words now, sorry. Plenty of stories to tell on a day like today.
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.
