By Gavin Kentch
Announcement: I am stepping away from full-time work on Nordic Insights. Ski journalism was never going to be a long-term job for me; it was more just something that worked well for my family at our current stage of life. Now, as those stages evolve (read: my maturing children need as much emotionally present parenting as ever, but less logistically involved parenting), it will work better for all of us for me to go do something else, so I will go do that.
This will probably look like a return to solo practice lawyering, now with some journalism work on the side. That said, if someone wants to cut me a check for $50,000 a year, I will take a pay cut from lawyering to continue elevating the level of discourse in American nordic ski journalism. I am serious about this offer, btw.
No, I don’t really have anyone else lined up to take this over. I honestly never thought the site would be as successful as it was, so I didn’t work too hard on a succession plan. Or on, and I am going to use a technical business term here so bear with me, meaningful amounts of “income.” I know how hard I have worked to make this site happen, and I do not expect anyone else to do this essentially for free like I have. Nor should they.
All that said, that unfortunately does leave me without a great path forward at this moment. Note to self, do more business planning up front next time. Or not, because this has been a hell of a run no matter what comes next, and I am so proud of what we have done here to advance the sport in this country.
But enough legacy-burnishing, and not just because you get to decide for yourself the import of this humble site. That’s your summary version, is that I am moving on to part-time journalism work, probably in a newsletter format, necessarily focused more on features than on daily newsgathering, though I do hope to continue publishing things that USSS does not appreciate and more broadly punching up. Read on for more.
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I said in my first post for this site that we would do two things here: show up to races in person and explicitly identify paid content. The latter speaks for itself; I have principles and I have stuck to them. So let me devote a few words to bragging about the former.
I traveled to 2023 U.S. Nationals (Houghton), 2023 World Juniors (Whistler), 2024 U.S. Nationals (Soldier Hollow), 2024 World Cup races (Canmore), and the 2026 Winter Olympics (Val di Fiemme), logging roughly 32,000 miles of air travel in the process. I also headed nine minutes down the road from my house to 2025 U.S. Nationals, 2023 and 2025 SuperTours, and a host of other races, all at Kincaid Park in Anchorage, among the least hospitable spots on earth at which to watch a ski race.
Noah Eckstein and Lukas Pigott endured the rainiest fortnight in Trondheim in over a century to bring back amazing coverage from 2025 World Championships. Peter Minde did yeoman’s work for everything occurring at Lake Placid the last few years, including 2025 Spring Series, 2026 U.S. Nationals, and 2026 World Cup Finals, not to mention nordic combined competitions and rollerski races. Dude literally scheduled his knee replacement surgeries around last season’s races. I respect this. Everyone mentioned here was working for very few dollars an hour over very long days, by the way.
In the recently-ish concluded 2025/2026 season, we had in-person coverage at eleven out of fifteen days of SuperTour racing, at venues from Anchorage to Lake Placid. We closed out the year with boots-on-the-ground coverage from not only the Olympics (all-time shoutout to Anna Engel for her amazing photos from same), but also multiple World Cup venues: Noah and Lukas in Drammen, Lukas in Holmenkollen, and Peter at his home course in Lake Placid, with an assist from Adele Haeg. That’s in-person coverage from fifteen of the final nineteen days of racing for the season, over four venues, three countries, and two continents. Not bad for a guy with a laptop who just wanted to write about skiing.
If you care about people you show up for them, in journalism as in life. Reader, we showed up. And I am really, really proud of the team that helped make this happen.
Let me tell you a little more about this team. Máximo Steverlynck assisted with World Cup coverage in year two of the site. Myles Brown filed dispatches from Birkieland in year three, and Grace Erholtz from Wirth Park in year four. After Zuzana Rogers, saint, qua Runners’ Edge Alaska, stepped in in summer 2024 with a check for $4,000 that enabled me to hire others and so kept me from walking away then and there in a fit of anxiety and overwhelm, I brought on board several more names that you will recognize from the last two years’ worth of coverage: Adam Bodensteiner, Noah Eckstein, Adele Haeg, Angie Kell, Merridy Littell, Peter Minde, Lukas Pigott, and Devin Ward. Every single person named in this paragraph improved as a writer in the time that I edited them, which was lovely to see.
I am now 44 years old, and had never really hired or supervised anyone before in my life. I was blown away by the caliber of people who wanted to write for my silly little website. Devin’s day job is editing for Nature Communications (yes, that Nature). Angie has a Ph.D., as does Devin. Noah speaks at least three languages and consistently produced camera-ready copy that was funny, too. Merridy did amazing work while still in high school. There are good writers out there, and it was a delight to find them. I hope you enjoyed reading what they had to say.
More broadly, the people, of course, were the true appeal of the whole thing. Being at the Olympics with Anna, a close friend from Anchorage, was a lifetime highlight; here is a wholesome photo of this experience:
I got to meet Devin at the Games, too, which was a delight. I stayed with Angie in Park City the summer before. I met Chelsea Little in Canada, twice, and got to talk about ski journalism in person for hours, fifteen years after first reading her work online. Worth the trip right there.
I found myself in possession of an email address and an Instagram account that received questions from, well, a whole lot of people in American skiing, and I undertook to answer them. If my body of work on this site reads like a love letter to American skiing from someone who really, really likes the sport and just wants to talk about it with others… well, there’s a reason for that. Thank you, to everyone who ever wrote in, whether you liked what we were doing or you did not. I sincerely appreciate it.
I am now going to speak briefly about that praise. Every fall for the past three years I wanted to do a state of the site post to give a general update on things and share feedback, but I was by that point consistently overwhelmed with the encroaching season and so would never get to it. Not great. So, here are some of the nice things that people said over the years:
Emma Albrecht: “That is an incredible article, truly a beautiful read. … The way you write is simply inspiring, and you definitely have a talent.”
Eric Solie: “I clicked through to a link someone sent me, and next thing I know I’m four articles deep, reading about a skier I’ve never heard of and don’t even care about. But the writing is so good, and you just love skiing so much, I had to read to the end to see what happened.”
Real author Matthew Komatsu: “Gavin Kentch’s prose is like a warm hug, and he writes about nordic skiing in a profoundly accessible way.”
Reader email: “I love, admire, and rely on Nordic Insights, thank you.”
Reader email: “I’ve been meaning to write you all winter to thank you for your superb nordic ski journalism and, most importantly, for your writing style that I enjoy so much. As a long time educator and writing instructor, I know parts of your style and voice are things teachers and traditional editors sometimes try to beat out of writers. But it is exactly your personal voice and little asides and parenthetical additions that draws me in and makes readers feel part of the nordic ski community.”
Reader email: “Just want to say that I really appreciate your reporting. I love that you give athletes a chance to speak for themselves. I love the tone of the articles — they don’t take themselves too seriously. I love that you emphasize the effort skiers put in as much or more than the result they get out. Just, like, exactly the way that I want to read about skiing.”
Current USST athlete: “We all really appreciate the work you’re doing with Nordic insights. It’s really great to have such comprehensive journalism in our little sport, and it’s a refreshing break from FasterSkier…”
Ron Barker (on this article): “I am Hattie Barker’s grandfather. This article had me choked up by the first sentence. Thank you for your fine writing about the whole women’s team.”
Different current USST athlete: “Love reading the articles, give me motivation to ski fast!”
Several other national-team athletes have also told me something similar over the past few years. Talk about a virtuous cycle — and all this time here I thought they were inspiring me.
That’s not all. Pretty much every single person who wrote to me with a question would also express some variant of, “Thank you for all that you do.” Ben Ogden said this to me as well, in person in Italy this February, on a day that he had literally won an Olympic medal and so perhaps had a few other things on his mind. (I would submit that this story really says more about Ben Ogden than it does about me.)
“You’re a part of this, too,” Matt Whitcomb had told me that same day. If you’re working for free for a cause you believe in, comments like this do a lot to keep you going. Thank you, Matt, and Ben, and all the other athletes I ever talked to, at every level of this amazing, difficult, rewarding, maddening sport. I know you know what it’s like to push yourself for a cause you believe in; I like to think you recognized that drive on this side of the fence as well.
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So why am I moving on? In part because my children are maturing and need less involved parenting, to be sure. But also because, bluntly, this job has destroyed the last four winters for me.
I’m trying to avoid writing something dramatic here like, “This has all come at great personal cost.” I was a middle-class straight white man when this project began, and I reach the end a middle-class straight white man still. Cry no tears for me. That said, over the past four years my weight has gone from 139 pounds to 156, a good distance race from 275 USSS points to 438, my medicine cabinet from nothing to Losartan (blood pressure) and Wellbutrin (anti-anxiety). Not great.
(Some footnotes to the above: First, since my teenage daughter reads this site, implications of weight gain are far, far different at my stage of life than at yours. You need to nourish to flourish, full stop, not to mention that you are still growing. Next, the Losartan prescription was, honestly, probably long overdue; I had had borderline high blood pressure for years, just due to genetics. That said, this job does seem to have pushed me over the top.
And the anxiety meds, finally, are all Nordic Insights… Matt Whitcomb told me on team sprint day, on the record, “I think I felt anxiety for the first time in my life. Tightness in my chest for the last several days. Monday, Tuesday, I wasn’t quite sure what the feeling was, and Kristen Bourne was like, I think that’s anxiety.” I am delighted that this was a novel experience for him, and hope that it remains a one-off, but buddy, if you ever want to know what anxiety-induced chest tightness in connection with nordic skiing feels like, hmu.)
Put another way, this site has resonated with readers, I suspect, because it is patently the work of someone who races himself, who loves ski racing and can empathize with those who pursue it at the highest levels. Perversely, this job has left me largely incapable of ski racing on my own anymore, given how destroyed I have become by covering others’ races. It also made me unavailable to my family for long stretches of the winter, and too often stressed and unpleasant when I was around. One of these things is the greater problem here, and it’s not the ski racing.
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And speaking of problems, it is now time for an excursus on generative A.I., a topic that I, and pretty much anyone else who produces creative work, feels rather strongly about these days. I published the “Hello, world” article for this site in fall 2022. ChatGPT was publicly released two months later. Since that time, the use of artificial intelligence in, well, everything has spread like a cancer.
When I started this website, humans writing articles was sort of just what journalism looked like, and had for centuries. (I am aware that I am writing this on an online news site, and that computers ≠ typewriters ≠ typesetting ≠ the printing press. Bear with me; I’m making a larger point here.) Now, less than four years later, while calling humans writing things themselves something like “a quietly revolutionary act” is probably a bit bathetic — we’re writing about privileged people skiing around in circles here, not exactly standing up for civil liberties (shoutout to my mom, who also reads this site; thank you for standing up for civil liberties while I just write about skiing) — it sadly does stand out.
I like writing. A lot. I like the process of writing, the meat and sinew of it, the very act of doing it myself, and frequently, and trying to get better at it. I was delighted to realize, after my first year of near-daily blogging, that I was more creative than when I had begun, that even after decades of writing there was a capacity there for plasticity and for change. Would that my classic striding could say the same.
As the noted sports blogger Pope Leo XIV, Pontifex Maximus and 267th Bishop of Rome, recently wrote, in a post with the extremely not-SEO-friendly title “Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas,” the seductive speed and ease of artificial intelligence can “also encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment.” If my notably irreligious self can get away with saying this, preach.
Or if you’d like another expression of the same message (“This concept can also be illustrated by the image of a multifaceted polyhedron, in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles,” as Leo XIV elsewhere notes; sorry, this is a Pope blog now, and not just because he says favorable things about journalists), now in Instagram embed form, here’s comedian Ronny Chieng addressing Harvard’s Class Day last month:
They have a point: Trusting the process is as important for writing as it is for ski training. Even more so, in fact; training without process may still be training, but writing with A.I. is not writing. I am fiercely proud to have written or edited every word on this site myself since day one, and to have attracted authors who similarly believe in the power of human writing. It shows in every facet of Nordic Insights; I am proud of that.
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So back to that whole working for free angle: I suddenly regret my failure to more efficiently monetize the site over the past four years. There are plenty of people out there who could do what I have done here; I am clearly very passionate about and very good at writing lots of words about cross-country skiing, but I am hardly sui generis in, ahem, American letters when it comes to general editorial qualifications.
There may, however, be no one else who would do this work, at this level, for free. I was tied to a computer every World Cup weekend, for four months straight, for four years straight. I came to associate the winter holidays (read: Tour de Ski giving way immediately to U.S. Nationals) with the worst week of the year, not with a window for rest and family time. My morning heart rate in a typical period of summer training and parenting looks like this; during the Olympics, it looked like this (both via Marco Altini’s HRV4Training app, for the nerds out there). Not great. This was work, and hard work, and my body paid for it. And every morning during the Games my app would tell me that I was ded, and then I would head off for another 14-hour day.
I don’t want to whine; I created this job for myself, and if I didn’t like doing it for free I should have worked harder to bring in more money, because capitalism. But I am trying to convey why I do not have an obvious exit plan here, at least one that involves someone else taking over editorial duties and the site continuing on in a recognizable form.
So, what does come next? Good question. I am taking the rest of the summer off; I am sick of trying to be present for my kids while also playing at working journalist, and realistically speaking almost no one reads the site in summer, anyway. So the site is largely going dark for the next two-plus months. (Should breaking news of sufficient moment occur, I’m sure I will not be able to help myself from covering it. Stay tuned.)
Come fall, I am going to try to clean up my life a bit, starting with the house chores that predate the pandemic. That’s not hyperbole; it’s been a rough half-decade-plus for anyone with kids. I am also going to consult with Nat Herz about newsletter-type publishing, and with Holly Brooks about career counseling. The most likely outcome of all this vis-à-vis paying work is obviously that I return to private practice as an attorney; I still have a valuable professional degree that I worked hard for, and appellate lawyers do get to do a lot of writing, too. But mid-40s career intermezzos like this are hard to come by, so I want to take the time to do it right, rather than just blithely head back to lawyering without first considering my options a little more holistically.
The most likely outcome for non-paying work is that I continue writing about skiing on the side, in a Substack or other newsletter format. I have done ski journalism, in some capacity, ever since I first walked on to FasterSkier in, yikes, 2016; this is clearly something that I believe in and enjoy doing. I do not see walking away for good now.
(Logistically speaking, I will of course let you know how to follow NI 2.0 once I know that information myself. Also, if someone wants to give me $50,000 a year to forego that active Bar membership and keep writing about skiing a bit longer, be in touch. That’s not necessarily a joke. That is a sizeable pay cut from lawyering, but lawyers make too much money as it is. And there are more lawyers in the country than there are nordic ski journalists.)
In conclusion: thank you. To my deeply patient wife, who has earned a living for our family while I serve as the at-home parent and play at ski journalist, interspersed with taking over all driving and parenting duties when I leave town to gad about at races (thank you to my mom as well on the school pickup and childcare front).
To the readers who believed in this project and supported it, financially and otherwise. Life has been logistically overwhelming and I have done a piss-poor job of thanking my GoFundMe supporters, to my regret, but believe me that every cent was noticed and appreciated. This is all writing that you can read for free, and yet you believed in my project enough to donate a cumulative $25,000 (!) over four years to support it? “Flattered” doesn’t even begin to cover it. To anyone who wrote in with a question, comment, or critique. To anyone who offered a meal or a ride or a kind word.
The content on the site is ultimately just the visible expression of a lot of belief from a whole lot of people. I stand on exactly the same shoulders as the athlete who is uplifted by their club and community; believe me that I am equally humbled and grateful.
It has been a privilege beyond compare to cover this sport in this country for this past Olympic quadrennial. Thank you again, to everyone, for everything, and go team.
