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By Peter Minde
LAKE PLACID — After a fashion, the hangover is probably mine. Eight weeks post–knee replacement, roaming the course was outta the question this weekend. So I’m gonna sit on my tuchis in the media room, watching the live stream. Then, walk to the mixed zone to interview as many athletes as I could. How hard could it possibly be?
A former ORDA president, who shall remain nameless, once opined that “nobody” would pay to watch ski races or mountain bike races. This was confirmed by a current ORDA staffer who’s in a position to know.
Yet, after three days of racing,the Olympic Regional Development Authority, ORDA, counted 35,622 attendees across three days of the World Cup Finals. That includes not only spectators, but teams, staff, media, and volunteers. This is comparable to the crowds in Minneapolis two years ago, where admission was free, and blows away the approximately 17,400 who turned up for the UCI mountain bike races held here in October. Not too shabby for a backwoods village in the sticks.
Friday opened with the 10-kilometer interval-start classic for both men and women. I watched the livestream, then raced to the mixed zone to interview skiers as they came in. Between men and women, I interviewed 17 athletes. My phone’s touch screen got wet and went haywire in the near-blizzard conditions, but I managed.
Because of the late hour — the men’s race didn’t start until 3 p.m. — not only did I get home late to a hungry cat, but also Snowmageddon had dumped six inches of snow, and the village kindly plowed a knee-high berm at the end of my driveway. I had to dig out before I parked my car. Only then, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski, could I start typing. Gavin didn’t get the story until 9:45 Eastern Time.
There’s a rush one gets from interviewing all these athletes and being right in the thick of the action, but it catches up with you. Saturday morning, I woke up feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. And I had two more days to go. There’s plenty of stories here besides the racing. Do it more, do it better.
Cameron Chalmers is Ben Ogden’s uncle. On Tuesday, he trekked from southern Vermont with beans, a grinder, and an espresso machine and parked his truck in the wax area. He spent the whole week pulling espressos from the tailgate for ski technicians and athletes, and he did it the right way. Grind the beans fresh, put the coffee in the machine. No stinkin’ pod coffee. No charge, no tip jar, just a desire to give back to the sport and keep people caffeinated.
Your correspondent has been accustomed to roaming wherever he dang pleases at races. But at the sport’s highest level, access to athletes and ski technicians is more restricted. On Wednesday, we caught up with a road-weary Bjørn Hanson of Out There Nordic.
The peripatetic Hanson and his crew have traveled all across snow country this winter, including three stops in Lake Placid. He estimates he’s driven between 10,000 and 15,000 miles this race season alone. “I’m glad this is the last event,” he said.
“Kris and I were at Junior Nationals all last week [in Cable] with the High Plains region, and the week before that, we were [in Lake Placid] at the IBU Cup,” Hanson said. After Junior Nationals, they turned it around and came right back to Lake Placid, bringing along the head of World Cup service for Kästle skis. For reference, the drive between these two venues is slightly over 1,000 miles. One way.
Is there an extra stress level at an event like this, as opposed to Junior Nationals or the Birkie?
“The goal for anybody doing service is to make sure that you have competitive skis,” Hanson said. “I think sometimes it’s a little easier when you have athletes that understand competitive skis and have been putting in the training. Some of the citizens’ events are kind of tricky because we can’t fix no training. Sometimes those can be a little more stressful because the expectations are hard, too hard to match if you haven’t done the training.”
Kästle aren’t as widely known in the U.S. as Fischer, Rossignol, et al. “If we can get Klæbo to switch to Kästle, then we could give him some really good skis,” Hanson said. “But, you know, I think he’s gonna stick with Fischer for now.”
Who’s on Kästle at present?
“We have three athletes. We’re providing race service support for two athletes from Australia, Rosie Fordham, who just took the double win at NCAA, and Seve de Campo, who is just coming off the World Cup and the Olympics. And then Katey Houser. Katey skis for Montana State University and got a World Cup start. So she is coming here, just off of NCAAs, for her first World Cup start.”
Some people might think that ski service is a thinly veiled excuse for a vacation. Here’s Bjørn’s report from January’s national championships to help disabuse you of that notion.
Later on Wednesday, prior to the races, I ran into Australia’s Hugo Hinckfuss. He’d just finished a training session. Although his hometown is Sydney, Australia, he studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and skis NCAA for the Buffaloes. But this week was the first time in Lake Placid for the RMISA skier.
“Funnily enough, I’ve, for sure, had a lot of opportunities to race in Lake Placid, but I’ve been ducking and weaving to get out of there,” Hinckfuss said, laughing.
“It’s beautiful, tough tracks, for sure,” he said of the course. “We’ve had some crazy weather the past few days, so the snow can be a little dirty here and there, but the tracks are tough, and I think they’ll be really fun for racing.”
Then, along came Alexei Sotskov, the Australian team coach. A resident of Gilford, New Hampshire, he’s coaching a team halfway around the world. How does that work?
“The biggest challenge is to combine two seasons,” he said. “You know, it would be great to live in one season, but because of summer and winter not particularly aligned in Australia. So we have to ski for the local community in the summertime. And it’s also qualification, a lot of qualification races for the kids to qualify for racing in Europe, they have to be in good shape. And then it’s good on one hand, you know: we have a lot of snow time, but at the same time, it’s difficult to get to Europe and perform well, because the competitive season is twice.”
Does it wear on the athletes to spend so much time on snow?
“It’s a good question. I’m always questioning myself,” Sotskov said. “This, the same, same? Is it a problem, or an advantage, or disadvantage? I don’t know. But I always say, swimmers swim year round, and they seem to be in good shape, runners running year round. I don’t know the answer.”
Embed from Getty ImagesOn Sunday, I left the mixed zone after interviewing 20 wet, cold athletes. National teams took turns mounting the podium and spraying sparkling wine all over each other.
An unassuming man in black, gray in his beard, walked away from the crowd around the podium. It was Thomas Wassberg of Sweden, a hero of the 1980 Winter Olympics here in Lake Placid. Wassberg won the 1980 15km race by 0.01 second over Finland’s Juha Mieto. [Wassberg is shown here in 1980 in the above file photo] At that time, it was the closest race finish in Olympic history. ORDA invited Wassberg to come from Sweden, and he graciously did. ORDA also invited Mieto. Unfortunately, he was unable to attend.
In those days, the only mass start race was the relay. The 15km race that year was an interval-start. Classic, of course. One long lap through the woods. There are few picture-postcard views such as one finds at Craftsbury, Prospect Mountain, or Viking, all in neighboring Vermont (and all fine places to ski). Rather, the 1980 trail system is a blunt instrument designed to break athletes’ motors and technique. Those trails might not meet modern FIS standards. But I’ve skied that 15km loop hundreds of times. Trust me, even though I used to be a salesman: it’ll get your attention.
But I digress. I accosted Wassberg, begged for an interview. He looked aside, saying, No, my English is no good. But ultimately he relented.
How is it, coming back to the site of your big victory in 1980?
“It’s fun, and fun to see how it looks,” Wassberg said.
Is it healthy for the sport to have one team, even one man, so dominant?
“It’s not good for the sport. I think the whole nation, the Norwegian nation, is too good,” Wassberg replied. “No, they have to have more nations which have good skis.”
What do you think about the changes in the race formats? In your day, it was mainly interval starts, and now it’s all mass start. Is one format better?
“No, I like interval starts much more, and I think it should be more from this season. You can have both, but longer distance and individual start,” Wassberg said.
Starstruck, I couldn’t think of anything else to ask him. I thanked him, as I did the athletes, for coming to the US.
Incidentally, in their story about the women’s 20km race, a reporter for a competing news outlet wrote, “Lake Placid sits at the highest elevation of any village in the east.” A publication that my esteemed editor has termed the paper of record for our sport. [I was trying to be nice. –Ed.] Lake Placid village’s elevation is 1801 feet, or 549 meters. Mount van Hoevenberg sits at 1879 feet, or 573 meters. For the record, the highest-elevation ski center in the east is Prospect Mountain in Woodford, Vermont. 2250 feet, 686 meters.
On my way to Sunday’s 20km races, I stopped into my local for an espresso, on top of the six-cup moka of Café Bustelo with which I’d fortified myself at breakfast. Who was there but Australia’s Lars Young Vik [far left in above embed photo], with a couple of compatriots.
Uh, the men’s race is starting in two hours?
“I need my coffee,” Vik said. “I’m a sprinter. My biggest day was yesterday, but I’m looking forward to racing today.”
How are conditions out there?
“It was a bit tricky, to be honest, with the fresh snow we got on Friday,” he said. “The past couple months of racing has been a lot of soft, quite warm conditions from the Olympics and Period 3 in Scandinavia. So having fresh snow again and the more wintry conditions was actually a bit weird just to ski on again. But it was really good conditions, good skiing.”
It’s not possible to convey in words the vibe and energy that spectators brought to the Ho. Of course, there was the outpouring of love for Jessie Diggins. Despite the rain, the lodge was EMPTY for Sunday’s 20km; everyone wanted to watch Diggins’s last race.
But the crowd cheered everyone that raced past them, whether it was Diggins, or another favorite U.S. skier, or someone from a competing nation. They got loud, and they remained loud until the end of every race. Every day in the mixed zone, every foreign athlete commented on the love they got from the crowd.
Finally, ORDA merits a well-earned shoutout, as do the volunteers who gave their time making this event happen. This is a way bigger event than — no disrespect to those athletes — a Junior Nationals qualifier or a SuperTour race. ORDA went all out and put on a great event. And the races couldn’t have happened without the awesome volunteer corps in the Tri-Lakes.
That’s it from Lake Placid. I wish to thank all the people who’ve come up to me, or messaged me this winter to talk about the stories I’ve written. You’re too kind! Your appreciation motivates me to go 90 miles an hour every time I sit down to write. There will be more stories to get us through the offseason, but I gotta go play the guitar now. But not having practiced for a week, I’m not sure I’ll find them.
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