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By Gavin Kentch

Rosie Brennan is officially retiring from World Cup ski racing… but is spending this summer training twice a day, and will be taking her rollerskis with her to snowless Liverpool this fall. She races with a grit and intensity that border on threatening… but off the race course is loyal to her friends and is a devoted chef, with muffins a particular specialty. She is one of the most accomplished American cross-country skiers of all time… but her retirement announcement was met with what I can only describe, unfortunately, as a collective shrug amidst the spring non-news cycle.

So. One last time, before she takes her talents, and her muffin tins, to more Liverpudlian climes, let us appreciate Rosie Brennan, and what she brought to American skiing over the past, count it, twenty years.

* * *

Briefly, her origin story: Brennan grew up in Park City, in what she describes as “an outdoor-oriented family,” a twin brother at her side. There was biking and camping in the summer, alpine skiing in the winter. There was, notably, not cross-country skiing, at least not until well into adolescence.

“At some point in middle school I kind of found myself without a sport, at least in the winter,” Brennan now says. “And I certainly had plenty of energy. So my mom was like, You have to find something, I don’t care what it is. And she kept suggesting nordic skiing. And finally, I was like, I got no better ideas. Fine, take me to practice.”

And? “It was literally love at first sight. And I never really looked back after that. And so each year, I ran in high school as well, but each year I kind of got more and more converted to skiing, and it kind of snowballed from there.”

Brennan graduated from high school in 2007. Before that, she logged her first lifetime FIS races, in a career featuring approximately 500 (!) of them, at 2006 U.S. Nationals, just down the road at Soldier Hollow.

I sit across from Brennan in an Anchorage coffee shop in mid-May of 2026 and slide a results printout across the table to her. Ask her what she remembers.

The race on the printout, the women’s 10-kilometer interval-start classic, was held on January 7, 2006, slightly over twenty years ago now. Brennan was 17 years old. The winner, Kikkan Randall, had just turned 23, and had not yet been named to the U.S. Ski Team; there were five athletes on the national team that season, all of them men. Notably, Randall was stateside in January to race U.S. Nationals, not in Europe for the World Cup. The second-place finisher that day, Morgan Arritola, last contested a FIS race in 2012. The tenth-place finisher, Wendy Wagner, is now dead. This was a different era, in a lot of ways.

“I remember being really sad,” Brennan says now of this race. “I think I got passed by some people I should not have gotten passed by, we’ll put it that way. And then I remember being very sad because I really thought I could qualify for World Juniors that year, and I did not.”

Brennan pages through the results in search of her name. She had finished 20th, in a field of 78 in the FIS results and presumptively more than that on the ground, which doesn’t feel that bad to me. Brennan also beat one Courtney Dauwalter, by 3.5 minutes over 10km. Wonder whatever happened to her, and if the Minnesotan found a future in endurance sport.

“Oh, twentieth,” Brennan says after perusing the results sheet. “That’s not even as bad as I thought. But I must have been pretty far back for juniors. I think I qualified for the J1 trip [now U18 trip] that year, but I really wanted to go to World Juniors, and I didn’t make that. So I remember being actually very sad because it was like my home race.”

Thankfully, Brennan’s ski career did not end here. More, and better, results followed, enough to land Brennan on the radar of some of the country’s top NCAA ski teams. She had interest from some local schools, as well as from some D-II running programs, but ultimately found a home for skiing, a very happy one, at Dartmouth.

“When I went on my college tour,” Brennan now recounts, longtime Dartmouth head coach Cami Thompson Graves was “the coach who stood out for me as someone who was willing to support me as a whole athlete and entertain my goals of going to World Juniors and these other things, as well as doing the college circuit, and just kind of had a much more holistic view of things. And then, having grown up on a really small team that was mostly boys, the idea of having a female coach and an all-women’s team was really cool to me, like, What could I do with all these teammates here that can push me?”

As for those teammates: “I was walking into a team that already had some really strong results,” Brennan says. This is true: Dartmouth had won the NCAA Championship the year before, one of just two times in the last thirty years that a non-RMISA program took the crown.

As you may expect from the defending champions, the squad was a powerhouse. Brennan’s teammates her freshman year included Susan Dunklee and Kristina Trygstad-Saari. Within a year she was joined by all of Sophie Caldwell, Erika Flowers, and Ida Sargent, which is a hell of a recruiting class. Annie Hart and Becca Rorabaugh followed soon after. Every woman mentioned in this paragraph would go on to have multiple World Cup (or IBU) starts in her career. Over half of them would make the Olympics. Dunklee would win two medals at biathlon world champs. That’s a lot of firepower in one place.

“It was an incredibly strong team,” Brennan says. “It was awesome. We just trained up together and kind of walked into that world.”

“College is great for that,” Brennan adds. “This was also — I’m dating myself — pre–widespread social media, and we didn’t even have, to be honest, service in most of campus. So, like, I had a phone, but I never went anywhere with it because it didn’t get service. So we were just in our bubble.”

“And I’m very, very thankful for that,” Brennan observes. “Because I think it was just such a nice way to both learn as a student and expand my knowledge horizons, but also just be involved in this group that was doing really cool things and pushing each other and lifting each other up. So it was a really positive time there.”

Life was not all sunshine and flowers at Dartmouth, though, for not the last time in Brennan’s career. “I actually had decided my senior year I was done skiing,” she now says, also for not the last time in her career.

Brennan had had knee surgery her junior year, which ended up being more serious than expected. Her comeback was sidelined by a car crash, and ensuing concussion, just as she was returning to baseline in early winter of her senior year.

“And I happened to be doing well in school for the first time,” she recalls, “and I was like, Oh, maybe academics is my thing; it just seems like the world is telling me that enough is enough. So I started applying to grad school, and I had decided I was done skiing. I couldn’t race Nationals or anything that year.”

Brennan returned to campus in January 2011, just a few months left in her Dartmouth tenure, poised to move on to the next thing in life.

“Cami was like, Okay, I don’t care what you do after this, but I ask that you race the college season, ’cause our team needs you,” Brennan says. “And I was like, Okay, fair enough. Like I love this team, I’ll do this for them.”

“But I had to start at ground zero,” she says, “so I was put on the [Dartmouth] D Team and had to go — I wasn’t a scoring member of the team and I had to race my way back onto the team, essentially. And slowly but surely I did get in better shape by the end of the season.”

March 2011 was, in retrospect, a significant turning point in Brennan’s life. “Maybe the fateful decision was, come March, I had an invitation to go on the Grand Canyon with a bunch of friends or go to Spring Series,” she says. “Which, maybe most people are like, This girl’s an idiot. But I decided to go to Spring Series because I thought, I don’t know if I’m quite done with this and I should see.”

Brennan abjured the raft trip in favor of the Sun Valley ski trails. She did five races in a week. She… did not race spectacularly well, with finishes mostly in the teens, reflecting, well, the fitness of someone who had been ready to leave the sport four months prior.

“I think I was probably close to last in the 30km there,” Brennan says, with perhaps slightly more self-effacement than strict statistical accuracy. “That was like the farthest I had skied at any point that season. Like I was in really bad shape.”

(Because I’m a dork: Brennan was 17th out of 25 finishers in the women’s 30-kilometer mass start classic race at 2011 Spring Series; five additional athletes were DNF on a tough day. To be fair, Brennan did finish more than eleven minutes back of the winner, Kikkan Randall, so her broader point holds. Yes I pulled original results from a race that has “OJ” (Older Junior) as an age group and features Jennie Bender racing for CXC.)

Nonetheless, something beyond the results caught the attention of longtime APU coach Erik Flora.

“He always tells me how I said something to him that, I don’t know, made him see something in me,” Brennan says. “And I don’t know what that was, but somehow he was allured enough to be like, I guess we could give this girl a chance.”

Brennan gives a significant shoutout here to Sadie Bjornsen, who had joined APU a year prior. “Sadie and I were really good friends at that point,” Brennan says. “And so she was kind of the one that was like, You should come. She had had success that year, and so I had seen her go from kind of a broken place to having quite good success. And so I was like, What’s going on? She’s like, You should come. It’s super awesome. And I was like, Well at least I’ll have one friend I guess. And so I think she had a fair hand in convincing Erik that I was worth investing in.”

And with that, it was off to Anchorage once the Dartmouth phase of her life was over.

“I think I flew straight from graduation to here and almost immediately went on the glacier to get my ass handed to me real hard,” says Brennan. Welcome to Alaska.

Brennan’s coach for that first camp on Eagle Glacier in summer 2011, as at World Cup Finals in Lake Placid in March 2026, and at all times in between, was one Erik Michael Flora. I could write an entire article about Erik Flora, the doyen of Alaska Pacific University Nordic Ski Center, and indeed already have; you can read it here, should you like. But for purposes of this article, and at the risk of making an athlete summarize a fifteen-year partnership in a single paragraph, what has Brennan taken from her time working with the man?

“He’s just Erik,” says Brennan, laughing.

She expands: “I think he is just the epitome of somebody who sees you as a whole person and who wants you to grow in every part of your life all the time. And he offers support for that, which is invaluable. Like, he’s the busiest person alive, but if you need to talk to him about something serious, he’s always there to listen, which is just insane.”

“And in terms of athletics,” Brennan continues, “he has an insane ability to just watch me or watch anyone and know exactly what’s going on. And for someone who will push themselves to the ground before they recognize something bad is happening, that’s incredibly valuable to have somebody to step in and be like, So how are you actually doing right now? … And he’s definitely a massive mentor, and someone I hope to have as a mentor for the rest of my life.”

“I admire what he puts into his job and how he sees people and how he gives everyone a chance,” Brennan adds, “and his patience with people and all the support that he’s offered not just to me but to everyone on our team. Which is no small job when you coach that many athletes.”

Flora has, perhaps more than any other coach in American skiing, worked with multiple athletes who were experiencing problems. Not “feeling run down for a few months” or “rehabbing an injury”–level problems, more like “endemically sick or injured”–type problems. There was Brennan and… whatever it is she has dealt with over the final years of her career (more on that below). There was Sadie Bjornsen, now Maubet, who was literally unable to train for more than 30 minutes at a time when she joined the team. Novie McCabe, in the entirety of the 2024/2025 season. Kikkan Randall, in her return from childbirth. David Norris, in the era of working through whatever odd, possibly viral illness he had. Lex Treinen, same. And so on.

“I think when you can see someone as a whole person you notice those small things,” Brennan says when asked about Flora’s track record of rebuilding athletes. “And when you can watch how someone trains, you can really see when they’re in a place to move forward and when they’re in a place to step back. And so to have that skill set is incredibly valuable when you’re navigating uncertain territory.”

When Brennan first joined APU, simply moving forward was challenge enough.

“When I showed up here, I was in really bad shape,” Brennan candidly says. “People are like, Oh, what does that mean? I’m like, No, really. Like, I had quit skiing and I had hardly trained for well over a year at that point. So I was more or less starting at ground zero. So it was really a career progression of just slowly building that base, getting to a point where I could have higher volume.”

What else was there? “Because I started skiing so late, I had a lot of technical ground to make up as well,” Brennan says. “So our time on the glacier was insanely valuable for that. That was something I did very continuously every year.”

What else? “And then as I kind of got to a point where it was more stable in my volume and more World Cup–level training, then we started more, like, small projects. Leading into 2022 I wanted to improve my sprinting, so we did a lot of power work that was very successful, and kind of small things like that. But for the most part, the structure of the training is the same as the day I showed up here, still today. It’s kind of a very traditional basic model that fits for most people and then you just have the ability to make small tweaks for where you’re at each year and and what what you want to work on.”

[Read more: The training life: These are the building blocks of Rosie Brennan’s world-class cross-country skiing career (Anchorage Daily News, October 2024)]

I don’t want to obsess about patience here (I already did that once, four years ago, in this piece titled “Rosie Brennan and the Power of Persistence”), but do keep in mind that Brennan’s first individual World Cup podium came in November 2020, days before her 32nd birthday, and her last in March 2024, at age 35. Reaching these stages of the sport, at these ages, requires some, well, patience. And a hell of a lot of training.

Brennan did the work. She stacked the training blocks. She journeyed to Eagle Glacier and back three times a summer. For a decade.

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Eventually, the results came. Most famously, she won back-to-back World Cup races, in Davos in December 2020, at the time just the second American cross-country skier ever to do so. Brennan racked up ten additional individual podiums within her World Cup career, alongside six team podiums (one in the team sprint, five in the relay, the latter with teammates spanning from the Liz Stephen era to the Sophia Laukli era). Only two American skiers have more individual World Cup podium finishes than Brennan’s twelve.

I am not the first to observe that eleven of these twelve fall within Period 1 or Period 2 of the World Cup calendar; with the exception of a third-place finish in the classic sprint in Drammen in March 2024, which ruled, all the other individual podiums occurred between Ruka and Toblach, November 25 to January 5.

“I think it has to do mostly with the conditions you tend to see in that time of year,” is Brennan’s simple explanation for this. “I do well when it’s cold and slow, and I think that’s most often what you get” at that point in the season. Plus she likes altitude, which features in Davos, in December, and the Tour de Ski, soon afterwards. There’s also the trend toward repetition of the Period 1 courses, which rewards accumulated familiarity over time. But mostly, in Brennan’s analysis, it just comes down to how she skis.

“I think I am a fairly high-power skier, but I’m not the best at applying it in a nanosecond,” she muses. “So when it’s the type of situation in which you can have a little bit more time to apply the power, I tend to be really good, which is like cold snow essentially. I have high endurance so I don’t get fatigued doing that. So that kind of grinding terrain is for sure my best. Davos is kind of the epitome of that. And it’s a steady grind and it’s at altitude and it tends to be cold and slow, and that’s all my best skill sets in one race. So I think those are just kind of the strengths that I have.”

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While eighteen total World Cup podiums is nothing to sneeze at, Brennan’s career was, famously (infamously?), also marked by a number of near-misses at global championships. Fourth in the sprint and sixth in the 30km at the 2022 Winter Olympics, 1.33 and 5.4 seconds out of the medals, respectively. Fifth in the team sprint at those same Games, as the leg-one skier, after tagging off for the final time in third.

Fifth in the 30km in Planica in 2023, 3.6 seconds off the podium. Fourth in the relay in Oberstdorf in 2021, by literal fractions of a second, following a teammate’s shall we say arguably sub-optimal tactics on the anchor leg. (“That’s a team event, right?” Brennan now demurs when a teammate’s tactics are gently alluded to. “It takes more than one person and everyone has to have their best day on the day.”) An additional seven finishes at the Olympics or World Champs in fourth- through sixth-place.

Let down by a chase pack that refused to lead in the Beijing 30km, or by a partner who couldn’t hang with the lead in the Beijing team sprint (“In the last leg of the final, when the chips are down and it’s time to go, the wheels fell off three quarters of the way up that first big hill,” was Devon Kershaw’s real talk at the time, accurately, about said teammate), or by a freak crash and broken binding in the Planica skiathlon where she was a serious podium contender. Passed over in favor of Julia Kern for what became the bronze-medal team sprint pairing the following day. It was always something, it felt like.

“She’s at the absolute peak of her career,” Matt Whitcomb told Nat Herz following the what-ifs of the 2022 Games. “It’s been a long, wonderful career, a challenging career. And you just want to see a medal wrapped around her neck.”

(Note that Brennan continued grinding for a full four more years after this comment, racking up six more World Cup podiums in the process. I’m not sure what comes after a long and wonderful career — no snark, Whitcomb was not wrong when he said this at the Beijing Games, already thirteen years after Brennan’s first World Cup start — but boy did Brennan achieve it over the ensuing Olympic quad.)

How would Brennan’s life be different now if a cumulative twenty or thirty seconds, across a few hundred of kilometers’ worth of racing and several thousand hours’ worth of training, had swung the other way? What would change if Brennan had retired with two or three Olympics and World Championships medals to her name?

“Certainly I’d have more money,” Brennan now laughs, Realpolitik in her voice but not a hint of bitterness.

“That’s probably the biggest part. Maybe people would remember you more; I don’t really know how those things work. We haven’t had that many medalists in the U.S., so it’s hard to know what happens to them over time and how it changes their lives. But I’m sure it would have changed my life a bit.”

But otherwise? I had just asked Brennan what she wanted to be remembered for. “I don’t think I would change my answer to that question at all” even with multiple medals on hand, Brennan says.

“I think the results things are definitely more like a personal thing,” she continues. “Maybe other people will remember me as the near-miss girl, which is kind of a sad thing to be remembered by. But my guess is that it eats away at me more than anyone else thinks about it. … Though maybe it does resonate, like maybe other people have had near-misses in their lives.”

So what was Brennan’s answer to the legacy question?

“I hope to be remembered as someone that had resilience and took the punches and rolled with them and made the best of the situations that I was in,” she says. “And I certainly hope to be remembered as a good teammate that brought value to the teams I was part of. Someone that had a good work ethic, added to the environment.”

Reader, Brennan is going to be remembered as a good teammate.

“Rosie B was one of the main teammates that welcomed me to the APU team alongside Sadie B and Lauren Fritz,” writes “the other Rosie,” Rosie Frankowski, Brennan’s longtime teammate at APU.

(Disclosure, Frankowski currently coaches me in APU Masters.)

“Rosie lived above me in the ski house and gave me many a ride to training or showed me rollerski loops from campus. She was probably one of my most influential teammates during my time with APU by exemplifying how to just blatantly believe in oneself and make things happen.

“Rosie B works harder and smarter than almost any athlete I know. Her athletic career and life outside of skiing was fraught with challenges, disappointments, and tough life events, and yet from the outside, you would never know what obstacles she was working through. I don’t think I have ever heard her complain about unfairness or bad luck in any of her struggles, most of which would flatten someone with less strength. Her can-do attitude and tenacity in tackling whatever is thrown her way set her apart as one of the most inspiring U.S. skiers in history.”

There’s more: “I spent a lot of time chasing Rosie in L4 intervals and on snow and she set a high bar for what pushing yourself to your limits actually means in practice. She is notorious for dropping 30 seconds on the last interval of a session when the rest of us are just trying to not get slower!”

Off the course? “Outside of ski training and racing, Rosie also is one of the most loyal and dependable friends you will ever have. She is not going to sugarcoat things and hold your hand, but she is always going to show up when you need her and she is incredibly thoughtful. She leads by example and with actions not just words, and she deeply cares about her friends and teammates shown through extreme generosity. She is really fun and doesn’t shy away from the lighter sides of life. Rosie continues to be one of my close friends and I am so excited to see what this next chapter holds for her both in her studies and adventures in Liverpool and on the ski trails.”

And finally:

“An example of Rosie’s character shows in a situation during the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. The 30km start was between me and Rosie and the coaches granted it to me (Rosie was struggling with undiagnosed mono during that season and it was impacting her results, a medical situation which she would overcome with a vengeance the next season). Neither Rosie nor I had any say in this and yet she could have been incredible upset and angry with me. They informed us both the night before the pre-race day.

“Even with visual emotions on display, Rosie stood tall and told me she was disappointed but didn’t blame me, and that I should go out and race as hard as I could. This was a huge relief to me that she supported me and wished me well when she very understandably could have been the opposite. Having that start changed my career trajectory and also my own self belief and I am so grateful to Rosie for also helping to instill the belief that I could go out there and compete on a stage that I had never raced on.”

(I didn’t manage to work this in above, but Brennan highlights her cohort on the APU Elite Team ca. 2016 to 2024 — she mentions Frankowski, Bjornsen, Rorabaugh, Norris, Reese Hanneman, Eric Packer, Tyler Kornfield, Chelsea Holmes, and Jess Yeaton by name here — as “definitely something I won’t ever forget and something I miss daily still. … We had something insanely special, both the men and women. And that time here is something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to top in my life. It was just a really special group of people that — we worked together in a really remarkable way that I think brought us a lot of success and really kind of paved the way for a lot of people.”

Brennan also shouted out the prior generation at APU, notably Holly Brooks and Kikkan, for paving the way for them. Shoulders of giants, as they say.)

And turning to coaches: Here’s Matt Whitcomb, currently USST head coach, on what it’s like to see Rosie moving on:

“We are going to miss Rosie this winter on the World Cup,” Whitcomb writes. “She has been racing international competitions for around 20 years, which matches my career as a coach. My first trip with Rosie was in Italy for World Juniors in 2007. She was tenth in the classic sprint, and that was a huge moment for the U.S. team that week. It’s satisfying to see an athlete put in as much work as she has, and to then retire 20 years later as a two-time World Cup winner, with a fourth-place finish at the Olympics. In a word, Rosie has grit, and we will miss her work ethic and her leadership on the women’s team. She should be proud of her accomplishments. We all certainly are.”

So why is someone so beloved, who was more often than not still the American women’s second-best classic skier last season, calling it quits? Unfortunately, Brennan’s body betrayed her starting a few years ago, in blunt, drastic, and ultimately unresolved ways.

“I still have no idea what has happened,” is Brennan’s unvarnished start to this answer.

“I do know that I have more than one thing going on. The vascular side of it [which has impaired her skate skiing], that was diagnosed in December, that’s more like cut and dry, that’s something you do imaging for, that’s something you see. I have decided not to do anything about it. It wasn’t something that was causing me any risk in terms of my everyday health. And so I decided that surgery has more risks than reward at this point, so that’s something that I will just navigate as I go through life.”

But everything else? “The other stuff, I still have no idea,” Brennan says, even after multiple seasons’ worth of living with this. “We don’t know if it was a virus thing, we don’t know if there’s an underlying autoimmune issue, we don’t know if there’s some other underlying things that we haven’t been able to figure out. But I still have symptoms that come and go, unexplained. We haven’t identified any patterns that can explain the stuff that happens. So I’m still trying to figure it out.”

Brennan was trying to figure things out last season while working under a harsh deadline: “I can’t change when the Olympics are,” she notes. “So that was something I wanted to try to do, but that was a lot of pressure to try to get myself into a place to be able to do that. And I just felt like continuing to apply that sort of pressure of a date that I need to be ready by was just not serving me. And so I’ve done my best to remove that and hope that relieving that allows my body a better chance of healing.”

“It sucks,” is Brennan’s real talk on the realities of seeing the basis for her livelihood essentially disappear without warning. “I think the craziest part for me is that it was literally overnight. Like, I woke up one day and couldn’t ski. … I had had some promising races, and I had pushed my volume a little later into the year, so I felt like I was kind of on track to turn things around in time for championship racing.”

“And I woke up one day over Christmas and was just like, I can’t ski. I tried, and it was so hard. And nothing was — it’s not like I was sick, had a fever, sore throat, like, nothing. I just couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. And I haven’t felt the same since.”

Brennan continues: “When it happens overnight like that it feels very jarring, and it’s very unsettling. Of course in the moment you’re like, Oh, I’ll just rest; it’ll go away. And obviously I’ve come to terms with the fact that that’s just not the case. But you ride these waves of, ‘Maybe I’m never getting better.’ Which could be true; I don’t know.”

This experience was not only physically discomfiting, if not terrifying, it also directly affected her ability to earn a living.

“Financially, it’s a massive hit when you depend on your body and it suddenly doesn’t work,” Brennan says. “And I wish I could say I had a bunch of contracts that were just for me as a name and a person, but skiing unfortunately doesn’t have that kind of money; almost all my contracts are results-oriented. … So when you’re not getting the results it’s a big blow.”

Brennan navigated the uncertainties of an unknown illness for the last few seasons of her career, gamely showing up for races and answering my “how are you doing” emails after most of them.

Is it frustrating to be in a position where you have to talk with reporters who ask you why you feel bad when you don’t know what’s going on, I inquire, perhaps grievously overestimating the amount of media attention Brennan receives at a European ski race at which neither a Nordic Insights reporter or Nat Herz is in attendance. 

“I mean, being American, you don’t get asked that much in the mixed zone, period,” is Brennan’s candid take. “I don’t think any foreign reporter ever asked me anything.”

Oh.

“And in some ways that almost feels bad because I’m like, Wow, they just think I woke up and sucked one day,” she continues. “I mostly feel bad because I wish I had an answer. I’m genuinely not trying to hide things from people, but I don’t know. So it’s been just more like hard to answer the question.”

* * *

So. It is time to heal, which looks, in this instance, like moving on to Liverpool, and away from World Cup ski racing. But not from ski racing altogether.

“I don’t know exactly how skiing will fit into my life moving forward,” Brennan wrote a month ago in her quasi-retirement announcement, “but I do know it will, and I do believe I will put on a race bib as soon as my body is ready.” She echoes this now: “My hope is to be able to do some training [next year] and jump in a race or two, hope that my body cooperates and kind of navigate that as I go,” she says.

Brennan is bringing her rollerskis over to England with her, along with at least one bag of Rossi skis. She is spending this summer training with the APU women, inheriting the mentorship role that Kikkan and Holly once filled for her. This is, grudgingly, the end of her time racing World Cups, it seems, but not of racing otherwise. Or training. Or teammates. Or the nutrition that makes all these training hours possible.

Speaking of which: why Liverpool? The master’s programme in Sport Nutrition at Liverpool John Moores University, plus, I will briefly editorialize, what feels like a certain lack of imagination from American masters programs.

“I’ve been interested in nutrition for a while,” Brennan says — as the local paper noted in a profile of her, “On her website, Brennan features meal prep suggestions more prominently than her skiing accomplishments” — and wanted to pursue this more formally. But she “actually faced a lot of hurdles” when attempting to formally study this at the post-graduate level in this country, “because the U.S. is really strict on things and my undergrad is not in nutrition and so there were actually very few programs that were even willing to look at me. Which is insane to me.”

It is insane to this reporter too, I have to say. Apparently a Dartmouth degree plus three Olympic teams don’t get you as far in life as I would have imagined. Your loss, American schools. 

But they do get one to England. Brennan has pursued “various self-education projects” in the field of sports nutrition over the years, she says, and consistently noticed that quality research was coming out of John Moores. So she asked them for their view of her qualifications; they were “really stoked.”

So was Brennan. She is quick to say that transitions are hard and that there are moments where it all hits her, but she is clearly excited for what’s next. Mostly in the classroom, but she also observes that racing in Europe is pretty accessible when one is staged out of England…

* * *

And so, with rollerskis and muffin tins in hand, Rosie Brennan will head across the pond at the end of this summer. It will be her first winter not employed as a professional skier since her senior year of college, 2010/2011. It will be her first year not on the U.S. Ski Team since — okay, the national team had a nasty habit of kicking her off over the years, but she was first on the team in 2007/2008, a remarkable nineteen years ago. Let me gesture one last time in the direction of patience and persistence, because, damn, being on the national team in 2007/2008, and again in 2025/2026, bespeaks a lot of it.

American skiing now loses a quiet leader, one who, as Frankowski put it, will always show up when you need her. We will miss her.

Photo gallery

More photos? More photos. All shots here courtesy of Steve Fuller, aka @flyingpoint, who has been doing this job for just about as long, and as well, as Brennan has. My sincere thanks to Steve for this fine collection. Click on any image to enlarge.