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By Emily Hanscam
SÄLEN, Sweden — Snow fell as skier after skier appeared, forming queues that snaked through the early-morning darkness, waiting for their turn to step into the huge arena (equivalent to the length of about 10 football fields) and claim their spot in the largest cross-country ski race in the world.
The first Sunday in March is an important day on the Swedish calendar, and indeed one when many people question their life choices. Why are they in a giant queue on a hill, with approximately 15,000 other people, waiting patiently (or, not so patiently) to ski 90km through Dalarna, Sweden?
Welcome to the Swedish Vasaloppet, running on a historic trail from Sälen to Mora (not to be confused with the Vasaloppet held over 58km in Mora, Minnesota; the North American Vasa held in Traverse City, Michigan; nor Vasaloppet China, held in, well, China). The Swedish Vasaloppet (henceforth, “Vasaloppet”) is the oldest nordic ski race in the world. It dates from 1922, a decade before the first running of the Birkebeinerrennet, and commemorates a historic journey taken by the legendary Swedish king Gustav Vasa in 1520.
Five hundred years later, my Swedish friend wants it known that Vasaloppet Sunday is so important, in fact, that it is the only day of the year when “it is acceptable to eat breakfast in front of the TV.” Swedish families gather there to watch the spectacle of the start in particular (it is apparently not so important who wins, so long as that person is not a Norwegian!).
So who are these 15,000 skiers toeing the starting line in Sälen? The Vasaloppet attracts a strange mix of ski fanatics, weekend warriors, masochists, people losing bets, people experiencing midlife crises, and those special individuals attempting the Swedish Classic. Another Swedish friend states that this list should include “people with a poor grip on reality,” aka the blåbär (blueberries) in Swedish.
For those of us watching from abroad, the Vasaloppet is obviously a seriously hard ski race. But, for those who grew up watching it in Scandinavia, it is perhaps easy to underestimate the level of skiing ability needed to, well, ski for 90 kilometers. A Swedish colleague told me that many Swedes think that they, as a Swedish person, should be able to ski the Vasaloppet, and they don’t actually realise how hard it is because they are so accustomed to watching the race every year. Many in fact decide to spontaneously buy a ticket the night before and join the starting line without having skied at all during that winter… hence the blueberries.
In 2026, according to official statistics, 20 percent of the ca. 14,300 registered starters were women, 47 percent had never done the Vasaloppet before, and starters ranged in age from 16 to 85. Many of course came from Sweden, but there were also 1,129 from Norway, 567 from Finland, 354 from Denmark, 237 from Germany, 72 from the U.S., 18 from Canada, and (at least) one errant Alaskan.
I grew up skiing in Anchorage; I raced for South Anchorage High School and Alaska Winter Stars, before heading to Whitman College in 2008 with the intent of continuing with the sport. Unfortunately, the varsity ski team there was cut in 2009, ironically around the same time that alumnae Holly Brooks and Laura Valaas were qualifying for the 2010 Winter Olympics and dominating domestic sprint racing, respectively.
Time passed. Graduate degrees were obtained. In the fall of 2021 I found myself working for a university in southern Sweden. Five years later, and I have just completed my fifth trip to the Vasaloppet vintervecka (winter week).
While the big finale is undoubtedly the 90km Vasaloppet on Sunday, for approximately a week prior a series of races and open events are staged along the Vasaloppet trail — including the Tjejvasan, the world’s largest women-only ski race, and the Nattvasan, or “night Vasaloppet,” starting at 8 p.m. and running through the night. In 2026, over 60,000 people were expected to participate in one or more events during vintervecka.
While the flagship Vasaloppet is classic-only, some of the other events are freestyle. In 2022, recovering from Covid and over a decade out from my last ski race, I went for the 30km Nattvasan skate. In 2023, I attempted, and DNF’ed the full Vasaloppet (guess who didn’t train enough and underestimated the hill queue!). In 2024, I finished the Vasaloppet, while in 2025 I went for the 90km Nattvasan skate (highly recommend, bring a good headlamp!). This year, it was back to the Vasaloppet proper, for what turned out to be a record-setting event — more people DNF’d the race than ever before.
Before we get to the special circumstances of the 2026 race, a few notes on Vasa “preparation.” I live on Öland, an island in the far south of Sweden, connected to the mainland by a six-kilometer-long bridge. The climate is more like Seattle than Anchorage and the snow of late is brief and fleeting.
The local ski club, located in Nybro, 40km inland, are nevertheless wizards at making tracks out of nothing. From December (hopefully!) until late February, many, many laps are skied on a 1.5 to 3km loop. Admittedly, we did get lucky enough with snow this year that the full trail system was open for a few weeks, for the first time since 2022. This part of Sweden is exceptionally flat, so kiss hill training goodbye — the best option is the nine flights of stairs in my university building. Last year, it was much warmer which allowed for rollerskiing through the winter, although as it turns out frozen cow patties are super slippery!
Another important part of Vasa preparation is the seeding races, which are usually classic races of at least 40km that can influence your starting position in the Vasaloppet. Many training plans involve racing at least one, if not several, between December and February to try and advance forward in the massive start queue (remember, Group 10 starts a full kilometer back from the Elite group). For the super hardcore, you could in theory ski a vintervecka race earlier in the week (e.g., the Vasaloppet 45) in a bid to improve your start position in the Vasaloppet proper. But, it is possible to complete the Vasaloppet even from a start position in the very back (shoutout to my sibling, Beck, who did just this in 2023!).
For the past few years, the Vasaloppet has dealt with above-freezing temperatures during the race. This year, at least, the trail seemed to have ample coverage and the forecast was –2 to –4 C on race day, although it threatened to snow through the night before.
Spoiler alert: it snowed. It snowed a lot, and kept snowing into Sunday morning. By 6:30 a.m., the Vasaloppet arena was full of propped up skis. At 8 a.m., with some skiers still queuing to get into the arena, the race started. We formed the world’s biggest ski-conga line on the hill, known as “Första backen” in Swedish, or “the first hill.” This year, race organizers erected a stage alongside the hill, complete with a rock band serenading us as we slowly duckwalked up the trail.
Pro-tip: The Vasaloppet gives every starter stickers to mark their skis with their bib number. Find a person whose skis are covered in years’, or decades’, worth of those stickers, and follow them up that hill. Unless they look suspiciously young, in which case someone is probably borrowing Farfar’s lucky skis! Also, don’t be like that one dude who thought he was being really sneaky, walking into the woods carrying his skis. Chances are he tried to jump the queue, and chances are even greater that he was spotted by a race official…
By the time I reached the top of the first hill (according to the official time checkpoint, about 78 minutes after the start, yielding a race pace of slightly over 26 minutes per kilometer for the day’s opening 3km), I realised that we were all in for a special day.
Usually, upon reaching the high point, the crowd thins, tracks start to appear, and it isn’t too hard to launch into race mode. This time, however, chaos reigned as snow stuck to klister and skiers realised that they would faceplant if they tried to continue without knocking off the snowballs. Many did, in fact, “eat snow,” a trend that would continue throughout the day. The heavy, wet snow had bonded with the icy base, like marbles glued to cement, helped by the approximately 10,000 or so skiers that had already gone down the trail ahead of us.
The Vasaloppet has a series of checkpoints, each of which comes with a time cutoff. Once that time has passed, race officials draw a red rope across the course and skiers are not permitted to continue down the trail. Sometimes, due to bad conditions or other incidents, they might extend these cutoff times, usually by 30 minutes. To make it extra fun, these announcements are usually made one checkpoint at time, and posted online rather than at the actual checkpoints…
Before encountering the 2026 trail, my goal had been a sub–10-hour Vasaloppet; I had managed an 8.5-hour Nattvasan 90 the year prior in skate, and figured that I could and probably should try harder at classic. For the Anchorage folks, I thought of how local legend Ellen Toll could classic ski and tried, in even the smallest way, to stride like her.
By the time I made it to the first checkpoint in Smågan, 11km from the start, my goal had changed to survival. Striding was out, as any attempt to kick even a little bit led to the skis skidding out completely. I was about an hour ahead of the cutoff time but people continued to fall as the trail became increasingly hard and icy — the first major hills come about 20km into the race, and I knew that they were going to be rough.
I was not the only one who thought so. Apparently, so many people were behind the first two cutoff times, and/or wanted to quit, that they ran out of buses and were begging race followers to transport extra people to the finish line in Mora. They began extending each time cutoff to keep more skiers in the race, the first by 30 minutes, others by over an hour.
The average Vasaloppet participant skiing in the back third of the race isn’t necessarily super confident going down any sort of incline in good conditions. To be fair to the Swedes (and the Danes), there is a serious lack of hills to practice on in both countries.
Risberg is the most famous of the Vasaloppet hills, not because it is the steepest, but because it is (1) a hill and (2) right next to the road, making for good spectating. Accordingly, it is somewhat infamous for “thrills and spills”; video compilations appear on YouTube annually. For those readers familiar with Anchorage trail systems [at least one in ten, given site analytics –Ed.], Risberg is less steep than the moderate hill on the end of Besh Loop that takes you back to the inner parking lot at Hillside. If they graded Vasaloppet hills like alpine slopes, Risberg would maybe be blue; the blacks come later.
My 2026 Vasaloppet turned into an exercise in doublepoling, herringboning, and trying to stay on my feet. In other years, I had tons of fun flying down the hills in the tracks. This year, it was a question of how strong your ankles were as you skidded and snowplowed and tried to avoid adding to the body count that was strewn down each. Several hills had bloody snow in places; one descent, at roughly the 50km mark, had race officials standing on the hill in intervals and emergency services camped out at the bottom.
The race officials tried, repeatedly, to fix tracks — they sent what had to be their entire groomer fleet down the trail in intervals and there were fleeting moments when, to quote a fellow racer “skiing was fun again!” I mostly remember ticking off checkpoint after checkpoint, trying to stay upright and hoping that the track would improve, “just a little farther.”
There are usually a good number of spectators camping out on the trail, some by snowmachine, some hiking in, others hanging on the part of the trail running alongside the road to Mora. This year, perhaps because they knew we were in trouble, spectators turned out in droves and formed many such “Heja” or cheering zones. Kämpa på (fight on!), the traditional Vasaloppet cheer, took on new meaning. (If you are skiing down the Vasaloppet trail, and wonder why the spectators are literally bowing down, it means you are in the company of a Vasaloppet veteran, wearing an orange bib, which they earn only after 30 successful starts.)
By about 5:30 p.m., I was at Hökberg, the penultimate checkpoint, and it was growing dark. I switched on my headlamp and began to think about the finish line in Mora — I had only about 19km left to go and I figured I could probably get there before 8 p.m. As I left the checkpoint, I heard an announcement that the pistmaskin (big groomer) was coming, which was met with somewhat exhausted cheering. It would be another 8km or so before I saw it, but those tracks for the closing 11km were beautiful.
In the final surprise of the day, I was apparently one of very few who had brought a headlamp to the start; I think most had assumed they would beat the dark to Mora and had met with an unhappy surprise as the gloaming turned gloomy. I therefore had plenty of company heading through the dark, before we finally made it to the lights of Mora and the Vasaloppet finish arch by 7:40 p.m.
(At the finish, the Vasaloppet arch says, “I fäders spår för framtids segrar” or “In our forefathers’ tracks for future victories” — since they were kind enough to allow women to join the race starting in 1981 (Margit Nordin broke down that barrier in 1923, thereby spurring the race to officially, if unsuccessfully, ban women for the next six decades), sooner or later it might be time for a minor edit…)
I was pretty sure during the race that it would be my last Vasaloppet. Only a day later, memories fading as they tend to, I was ready to wear the official t-shirt that says: “Aldrig mer Vasaloppet! … Vi ses nästa år” (Never again Vasaloppet! … See you next year). Suffering aside, it is truly unique to be able to ski with 15,000 other people, many of whom (we presume) also love nordic skiing. I promise the crowds do thin out after the first few checkpoints! The blueberry soup is also excellent.
As the future of our winters grow increasingly uncertain, I am sure the Vasaloppet will continue providing challenging years. I am also certain that the Scandinavians and other ski fanatics will rise to meet the challenge, highlighting our joy for this sport in the process. Next March, another 40,000 will head to Sälen for vintervecka and the Vasaloppet will again provide the grand finale — I hope some bold folks from North America will consider experiencing these 90km through the woods of Dalarna. Vi ses nästa år! (Alaskans, hit me up, I’ll probably be there.)
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