From a German Convenience Store to the Olympic Podium: A Brief History of the Team USA Relay Socks

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By Gavin Kentch

Midway through the sixth edition of the Tour de Ski, which was held over nine (!) stages and five venues in two countries from late December 2011 through early January 2012, the American team was hurting.

“All three men and Holly were left wanting more,” said then–head coach Chris Grover following the stage-one prologue, “and everyone is already looking forward to tomorrow’s 10/15 C Pursuit.” Holly Brooks’s race was “subpar,” wrote FasterSkier the same day. A young Simi Hamilton finished 63rd in the prologue, 31 seconds back. In a race less than 4km long.

“I had fallen and broken my wrist on Christmas Eve (2011) in Ramsau,” Brooks wrote to Nordic Insights recently of this moment in the Tour. “I knew something was horribly wrong but we didn’t have any medical care. I raced three stages of the [Tour de Ski] before getting imaging in Oberstdorf, Germany.”

Fast forward a few days to January 1, 2012. The athletes had just raced four times in four days: for the women, a 3.1km skate prologue, a 10km classic pursuit, a classic sprint, and a 10km skiathlon. (The men had done the same race formats, but longer distances). They had a single day off before doing stages five, six, and seven on the next three days in a row. Two more stages would remain after that, including the Alpe Cermis climb that I have gazed upon in awe/horror when I take the bus through Cavalese to go skiing up at Passo Lavazè on Olympic off days. As an aside, this is what Devon Kershaw is talking about when he lambastes the modern-day Tour de Ski for being largely defanged.

It was well above freezing, because Oberstdorf. Race courses were sloppy. “Snow condition: Wet,” reads the official results sheet for the New Year’s Day skiathlon.

After Kikkan Randall, who was holding down fourth in the women’s overall Tour standings, things weren’t looking as bright for the American side. Liz Stephen was 37th. Brooks — who, again, had just done four races in four days with a broken wrist, the first three of them without the benefit of medical care — was 58th. She would nonetheless go on to finish the Tour de Ski that year, placing 39th after nine stages in eleven days, which tells you everything you need to know about Holly Brooks’s toughness.

On the men’s side, Kris Freeman was sitting in 39th. Simi Hamilton was 72nd. Andy Newell had withdrawn after stage three.

The team was in need of a pick-me-up. Enter the now-famous Team USA relay socks.

“While the team was waiting for me en route to Italy to travel to the next stage,” Brooks writes, “Kikkan popped into a little shop (akin to a dollar store) and bought them!”

She added, “This was the only good thing to come from my broken wrist.”

Following some substantial reminiscing from the parties involved (and, really, thank you so much to both Brooks and Randall for humoring this invitation to stroll down memory lane), the store in question has been tentatively traced to the Müller at Bahnhofpl. 6, 87561 Oberstdorf. As the street address suggests, the locus classicus Müller — which is officially a drug store, but in practice is far more akin to a dollar store or a Walgreens — sits just across the street from the Oberstdorf train station, or Bahnhof.

Here is a photo of the exterior of the Müller that gave the world the ur–relay socks, per Google Streetview:

Over to Randall now: “I picked up the relay socks (four pairs) and a pair of sparkly pink suspenders from a convenience store in Germany between Tour de Ski stages in 2012. The first race we used them was a team sprint that Liz Stephen and I did the evening after the Tour de Ski climb in 2012, to make it 10 races in 11 days. We won that night.”

Before I go on with this narration, let us pause for a second to appreciate what Kikkan has just said here. She had raced in Oberhof on December 29 and December 30, in Oberstdorf on December 31 and January 1, in Toblach on January 3 and January 4, in Cortina on January 5, and in Val di Fiemme on January 7 and January 8. The last of these races, her ninth in eleven days, had been the climb up Alpe Cermis.

The following evening, she and Stephen hopped into a team sprint, just for funsies. And won. This truly was a different era.

Back to Randall: “The next time we used them was the team sprint in Milan when Jessie and I finished second.”

The Milan team sprint occurred on Sunday, January 15, 2012. Randall had had a grand total of four days off between the unofficial team sprint on the night of Monday, January 9, and resuming World Cup racing with a skate sprint in Milan on Saturday, January 14. (Randall was second in that race, behind Ida Ingemarsdotter. Now Ingemarsdotter is present at the 2026 Olympics as a coach for the Swedish team, while Randall calls the races for NBC. Lots of familiar names here.)

In the team sprint the following day, January 15, Randall skied the anchor leg. The leg-one skier was one Jessie Diggins. The pair finished second. It was the first World Cup podium of Diggins’s career; it has been followed by, so far, 86 more. Diggins was 20 years old.

I am not saying that this was a long time ago, but this video interview dates to race day in January 2012. You may draw from this your own conclusions about the passage of time.

Time passed. As Brooks recalls, “We wore them in our historic first-ever team relay podium in Gällivare, Nov 2012, and then forever after. I love how it’s become a longstanding tradition, and one that even the men’s team has embraced.”

The above is, maddeningly, the only photo of the team on that breakthrough day in Gällivare that is available in Getty Images. Some small photos of the athletes, which do show the relay socks, may be seen in this article.

Here is Randall wearing the relay socks as she brought home team skate sprint gold for the U.S. (along with Diggins) at 2013 world champs in Val di Fiemme, crossing the line approximately one hour ahead of Ingemarsdotter of Sweden:

Here is Sadie Bjornsen wearing the socks at 2017 world champs in Lahti, where she and Diggins teamed up to win bronze in the classic team sprint (I was going to say that I assumed by this point that more durable socks had been obtained, but tbh they still look like the same ones as in 2013 yikes):

Here is Diggins wearing them at the 2018 Olympics, in what is presumably the most famous American cross-country skiing photo of all time:

And so on. Skip ahead just a few years, allow for the creation of a new ski news website and the passage of time (for perspective, Nordic Insights photographer Anna Engel, who is currently 30 years old and has a mortgage, was in high school when the relay socks made their debut), and here is Diggins in yesterday’s team sprint at the 2026 Olympics, wearing the socks for the final time:

“It’s emotional to feel like I’m never gonna pull on those relay socks again,” Diggins told Nat Herz after placing fifth in yesterday’s race.

Wednesday was in some ways the end of an era, but more so for Diggins herself than for the relay socks per se. There will be more team sprints, more relays, more chances for athletes to push themselves harder for the sake of a team goal than they could ever muster on their own.

And as Brooks’s experience shows, the socks era does not have to end along with one’s own racing career.

“We always had official ‘cheer socks’ too,” Brooks writes, “which would be adorned by the teammates who weren’t chosen for the relay that day but were an important member of the team. (We also coined this the ‘5th leg’ to signify that even though only four skiers are physically in the relay, the success of the team is dependent on the larger group.)”

Was Holly wearing the cheer socks for this year’s Olympic relay? You get zero guesses. Here is a photo of her on Saturday:

Final word here goes to Brooks, now a decade removed from racing and a mom of two, who works as a licensed professional counselor in Anchorage when she’s not cheering on her teammates at the Olympics.

“Putting on the relay socks is like an anchoring cue that you’re channeling the entire team out on the course,” writes Brooks, in her current professional argot. “It’s an honor and a privilege to be chosen for a USA relay team and putting on the socks feels like the ultimate act of solidarity.”

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.