By Gavin Kentch
This is a reader-funded website. Virtually all of my income (for perspective: I took home less than $5,000 from Nordic Insights last year after paying staff) comes from reader contributions, which I sincerely appreciate. If you would like to support the site, including helping us pay off our final bills from Olympics travel, you may do so here. Thank you.
The national team’s move from Kappa to The North Face for uniforms and apparel is not only a chance to wonder what happened behind the scenes to make what was originally announced as a ten-year sponsorship deal come to an end after just four. It is also, like any moment of transition, a chance to take stock of what we have gained and what we have lost.
In corporate-speak, we have, I regret to inform you, lost a collaboration that wasn’t just “an honor and a testament to the credibility Kappa has built over time,” but that further “reinforce[d Kappa’s] long-term vision of working side by side with athletes and federations to develop authentic, performance-driven products born from real sporting experience.” (Will we nonetheless soon stand poised to gain increased synergies from vertical integration with a leader in the outdoor exploration space that has for sixty years now outfitted expeditions that inspire us to test the outer limits of performance and possibility? Stay tuned!)
Update: I wrote that paragraph earlier this week, before the official announcement from USSS came out on Tuesday. We did indeed learn at that time that “The North Face is synonymous with innovation, performance and a deep respect for the mountains, which are values that align perfectly with U.S. Ski & Snowboard,” per USSS president Sophie Goldschmidt. Is USSS “proud to partner with a brand that shares our commitment to excellence, athlete-driven innovation and pushing the limits of what’s possible”? You know it.
From a purely aesthetic perspective, meanwhile, what did the Kappa era look like for the cross-country team? Let’s remember some dyes.
2022–2023: The pajamas
Ben Ogden, left, and JC Schoonmaker, right, stun as they strut their sprint stuff in this shot from early December 2022. There are stars across the entire front of the suit, giving way to stripes on the lower right and upper left arm. An American flag, on the lower left leg, is the only real pop of color here. Sponsors on the arms are just USANA, the Salt Lake City–based multi-level marketing company that you may recognize from the USANA Center of Excellence powered by iFIT (viz., USSS headquarters in Park City), and then a Kappa logo on each shoulder. The left quad appears to feature Xfinity, which is basically Comcast but maybe not quite so widely reviled. Maybe they will have live coverage of World Cup Finals in Lake Placid! (Too soon?)
Ben and JC: Top-ten in the Lillehammer skate sprint, first in our hearts.
Additional view: Haley Brewster races at World Juniors in Whistler in January 2023. Possibly the only time in the past decade that athletes competing at this venue (a) raced on hardwax or (b) wore what appears to me to be the Toko Polar Race Glove. (I got a sunburn early in race week, because everyone had told me not to bother packing sunscreen for Whistler lol.) From this angle you can really see how extensively the stars spread across much of the suit, plus the additional logos on the outside of the right quad (Visa, Toyota, and a notably large Kappa brandmark).
2023–2024: Good ombré
So, personally speaking, I loved these suits. There were no stars per se. There were no stripes. Just a melding of blue, pink, white, and red, working surprisingly well together in a colorful whole. I’m not sure what the concept pitch for this was, or how it got approved, but I love the result. It’s bright. It’s fresh. It, dare I say, pops. It is a great deal more vibrant than the somber pajamas of the season before. I am a fan.
Sponsor watch: The same Visa–Toyota–Kappa trifecta on the right quad. Stifel replaces Xfinity on the top of the left quad. USSS media asked me to start referring to the squad as the Stifel Cross-Country Team around this time; I politely declined, because I bow to no brand. (Except for Runners’ Edge Alaska, which is, financially speaking, the reason that years three and four of this site happened; thanks, Zuzana et al.) Looks like USANA still on the upper right arm, and now another “Stifel” on the upper left.
2024–2025: Back to stars, including some problematic ones
After the blank verse that was 2023–2024, we return here to strictly metered vexillological rhythm. This suit has some STARS, and it is going to tell you about them. There are stars down the right leg. There are stars down the left leg. There are stars on the left arm. There are stars on the right arm. There are suggestions of stripes on both forearms, but really just the stars predominate.
(As an aside, Jack Young, foreground of the above photo from the iconic Toblach stadium roof, and Gus Schumacher, back right, are both wearing Toko gloves, in red, white, and blue and red and white, respectively. They nicely align with, if not fully accentuate, the red and white stripes from the forearms. I am 99 percent certain that the other two athletes in this shot, Schoonmaker and Ogden, are also wearing Toko gloves, but they seem to be the standard black colorway.)
The stars here stop in the front middle of the suit, fading to a solid blue. They did, however, continue up the legs on the back of the suit, extending to, well, up to and onto the athlete’s butt.
One prominent American skier blacked out the stars on the rear of their suit, seemingly with a black Sharpie, for the entirety of the 2024–2025 season. I assume they did so for some or all of aesthetics, modesty, or just general feel.
I got so. many. questions from readers about this; like, folks were really curious why there were no stars on [redacted]’s butt. I had intentions of covering this story after the first dozen or so reader questions, even going so far as to ask the athlete in question for comment (I got back a polite “no comment”), but ultimately forebore since I really couldn’t write about this without implicity encouraging readers to zoom in on [redacted]’s butt, and that felt not great. Plus the no comment, while polite, was telling. In conclusion, designers should maybe include athletes earlier in the ideation process? And/or just show them a mockup at some point and ask them if they would be okay having stars on their ass?
Sponsor watch: A lot of Stifel and Kappa, not too much else. Based on other photos that I reviewed for this important and hard-hitting article but don’t have rights for to readily embed, the suit had, in toto, two Stifel and three Kappa logos. In addition to those, the right quad said USANA; the right arm, Visa and Toyota. The other arm had ads for Cloudflare (an IT company) on the left bicep, and something called Easy Green on the outside of the left forearm. Easy Green is, apparently, an internal USSS sustainability initiative; the fact that I am a massive dork about this stuff and am only now just learning this — I thought it was a fertilizer company! — feels telling, and not in a good way. Though tbf maybe it is my brand awareness that is lacking here.
Bonus: 2025 World Championships: melting ice
Keeping with sustainability concerns, 2025 World Championships, held in a very rainy Trondheim, featured a custom kit designed to evoke melting glaciers. The alpine team had previously raced with a similar version of this suit at their 2023 world champs.
“In addition to the team partner logos traditionally on athlete race suits,” USSS wrote at the time, “the World Championship suit also showcases the POW logo, a key partner of U.S. Ski & Snowboard in the fight against a warming climate, and the Easy Green logo.” Awkwardly, the logo is on the collar, and is covered by an athlete’s bib in basically every single photo that I have from these championships. You can see a trace of a suggestion of it on the right side of Kate Oldham’s neck in this zoomed-in shot (yes I know that this is a horrible photo sorry).
Sponsors for this race suit, “designed to bring attention to climate change,” included the notably climate-forward companies Toyota and United Airlines. Other sponsors were Visa, Cloudflare, USANA, and Easy Green. And, of course, Stifel.
2025–2026: Back to stripes for the final year of Kappa, plus the U.S. Army entered the picture, because America
Kappa went out with the most flag-like iteration of their Olympic quadrennial worth of kit. There are stripes on both lower legs, large ones. There are stripes on the left forearm, but not on the right forearm unless I have really missed something. There are stars, but fairly large ones, in a pleasing array of sizes. We have both a U.S. flag per se on the left quad, and “USA” below that over the left knee. A not-small Stifel logo is between them, because Stifel really loves America or some such. I am a big fan of the small caps in their logo.
On the one hand, this suit does not try to do too much. On the other hand, it does it well. It is red. It is white. It is blue. There are stars. There are stripes. There are, notably, no stars on the butt, nor indeed anywhere north of the back of the left knee, as per this photo of the skate train from the men’s 20km in Lake Placid:
Sponsors? A few new ones here: on the right arm, Dunkin’, née Dunkin’ Donuts, and our friends at the National Nordic Foundation, or NNF. On the left arm, iCapital, a relatively young fintech company. They are joined by stalwarts Visa and Toyota, on the right arm, and Cloudflare, on the left. Plus another Stifel logo or two, and that large Kappa brandmark above the right knee. Happy trails to Easy Green, at least at the level of claiming uniform space.
The 2025–2026 season also saw USSS announce the U.S. Army as the organization’s “official armed forces partner,” which manifested in part as athletes “don[ning] an Army/10th Mountain Division patch on team outerwear” and the Army “investing in the U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s athlete influencer program.” You can see the patch on Jessie Diggins’s jacket in the above shot.
In non–ski race news during the 2025–2026 season, representatives of this same U.S. Army (Delta Force and 160th SOAR(A)) joined other branches of the United States Armed Forces to kidnap the sitting head of state of another country and extradite him to Brooklyn, followed by their Commander in Chief announcing hours later that the U.S. would take over and run that country’s oil infrastructure. “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations,” President Trump said. “And they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.”
I would say something snarky here about the Americans proceeding to compete in Italy under their own flag just a month later while the few Russians in attendance had to compete as neutral athletes, but hey, the Olympics are not political, so what do I know.
Speaking of which:
Olympics bonus: The 1984 L.A. Olympics come to Val di Fiemme
I previously wrote about the suits designed for the 2026 Winter Olympics here, at some length:
“A key source of inspiration,” the relevant USSS press release told us at the time, “comes from the iconic design of Team USA uniforms at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games. Distinctive elements recalling the LA ’84 aesthetic include the star band inspired by the American flag and the bold ‘USA’ lettering, which appear across the collection as signature design features.”
(1984 and 2026: What are, two Olympics at which Russia did not compete. But hey, the Games are, again, apolitical, and probably I should keep politics out of sport here. Lord knows that the two never mix in real life.)
I liked these suits on-screen at the time they were unveiled. I liked them even more in the flesh after two weeks spent standing courseside at the venue and trying to pick the Americans out of the pack. Indeed, I just installed a large print of this photo:
in a position of honor above my SkiErg, so personally speaking it is a suit that I don’t mind looking at. Shoutout my good friend Anna Engel for crushing photography duties all Olympics long.
And because you can’t have one without the other, here is the other American male who medaled at these Games (yes Jessie Diggins also medaled, but I sort of feel like she got enough Olympics exposure already tbh):
In conclusion, Kappa is dead. Long live Kappa.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American skiing. We started with nothing, and then we made it to 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.
