Morning from my room in Vuokatti
I wanted to get my very expensive Madshus skate ski boots here from Duluth. That's how it started. I got the boots in March of last year and hadn’t gotten to ski in them for but about three sessions. I didn’t want to have to reinvest that kind of dough into making my feet happy while skate skiing here, and I thoroughly love them. I asked a friend to bring them with him to Ruka when he came. That turned into a chance to venture north for some phone-shot video for NBC support footage of our XC and Biathlon shows. What I hadn’t expected was how it would be a “This Is Your Life” in the sport. It turned out to be something I hadn’t even realized I needed.
In 2006 I was hired to start a competitive NCAA ski program at a small college in my hometown. Before that I had been a US Biathlon Team member, coach, and Olympic Games organizer. I was selling real estate and coaching high school cross country running in Duluth at the time and announcing ski races as the very part-time gig it was. An acquaintance at the college told me about the college wanting to start a ski team. The athletic director called and encouraged me to apply. I didn’t think I’d hear them say anything that would compel to take the job, which turned out not to be the case. They said all the right things. I quit selling real estate, took a sizable pay cut, and poured my heart and soul for the next decade into a creating a competitive NCAA ski team. Many people came and went. Many people made the program what it is today. I mostly spearheaded it.
In 2016, I stepped aside after 10 years in the job. Several factors weighed on the decision. Exhaustion was one. Medical condition was another. Relative stress and enjoyment of coaching running was another. The growth of regular programming of skiing and biathlon on American TV is kind of pushed it as well.
The TV thing is probably what I’ll most widely be remembered for in ski world, and I appreciate that, but what matters to me is the legacy that my work might have on the sport and individual athletes, whether that’s via media or coaching. They both have value. I haven’t underestimated the impact of Here Comes Diggins, but on a personal level, seeing the athletes you’ve invested yourself in, feels bigger, even if that is a singular, personal impact by comparison. When you coach, nothing matters more than the people you work with.
Last year, two graduates from our small-college ski program stood on an IBU Cup podium—the minor leagues of the biathlon world cup. It was a proud winter for our program. One of them was in Vuokatti Friday, preparing for the opening world cups in Kontiolahti with his US Biathlon teammates. I got to see him because I had to go to Ruka to get my boots. Vuokatti was on the way. It turned into a video-clip-gathering trip. I got a few brief moments to talk with Paul about the life he’s experiencing and the path he’s on. It was good to see him again. The other athlete’s father was in Ruka as the long-time doctor of the US Ski Team. I caught up with him a day later. We snapped a selfie together that he was going to send to Kelsey. I hope it made her smile and it was good for her to see us again.
I can’t take credit for, nor should I take credit for either of their successes. They have done the work. I tried to establish for them a place from which to launch their goals and dreams. To see them doing it is rewarding to say the least. They have had numerous impactful coaches. I sure am proud of what our program has done though. That was just one moment in a weekend of many realization moments.
When I got to Ruka, the first guy I ran into was Eli. He walked out of the US Ski Team wax truck, both of us in masks, in a dark, quiet parking lot with snow guns whirring in the background on the jumping hill. It was kind of a surreal moment. Eli and I didn’t compete often against each other as skiers when we were younger but we had a good rivalry when we did. Eli is a rivalry guy, and I mean that in the best way. I feel like we actually ran against each other more than we skied. We remember state high school meets for sure, which we were more aware of as kind of bigger guys who were ski racers who also ran decently fast. A few years later, he pushed me to the fastest 5k road race I ever ran as we’d meet up in my home town in Duluth on Grandma’s Marathon weekend in late June, and knock out the 5k on Friday evening. We did it three years in a row and by year two, I think it was kind of a thing. We were two bigger guys near the front. My dad laughed the first time he watched us line up. He said we looked like two big linebackers running amongst delicate distance runners. I don’t think Eli nor I ever thought of ourselves that way. We just ran hard and tried to beat the other. I remember it well enough that the Chad v. Eli William A. Irvin score is and always will be 2-1 in favor of Eli, unless he wants to start it up again next June. I think the score would just get more lopsided towards the Eli column though.
There we both were, me at 49, he at 48 I think, in a parking lot nearly 30 years later about as far north as anyone might go to ski race; him waxing skis, me talking on TV about what he and the staff around him are working hard for. I hadn’t seen Eli for at least 10 years. He was the head ski coach at the University of Utah when I was trying to build my fledgling college program from the ground up in Duluth. You probably couldn’t come up with two more different jobs within the same small microcosm of the same small sport, but Eli always afforded me respect for what I was doing, when many others did not. I’ve never forgotten that about Eli. Rivalry is great, but respect is bigger. It was good to see him again.
Ruka at 3:30 pm
The US Ski Team wax truck
The next guy I saw was the guy who brought my ski boots all the way from my mom and dad’s front door in Duluth to that parking lot in Lapland. If you think of all the shit a guy has to deal with as the personal coach of one of, if not the best skier a country has ever produced, the fact that he’d even consider my absurd request, tells you what kind of guy he is. Not only did he bring my boots, but he threw in some clothes—the kinds of stuff I hadn’t had room to pack in July to ski this winter.
We go way back too. He moved to Duluth in the mid ‘90s to work with Russian coaches Nikolai and Antonina Anikin and the Gitchi Gummi Sports Club. I used to join the group when I was in town and got to know him well. He came down from Fairbanks with a great attitude and a thirst for knowledge. We also ended up as college coaching colleagues. We see a lot of things similarly and have to catch ourselves sometimes in the company of others, as we are prone to training-talk rabbit holes in each other’s company. I don’t know anyone I can geek out with on training minutia, yelling over a loud, live music festival, better than with Cork. We kept it going through two bands, last time we did it. We’re definitely a special breed. In a country that has had its lumps in this sport, Cork has a unique place in history as one of only two cross country skiing coaches to have coached an Olympic gold medalist. I’m hoping he’ll have company. So is he, I’m sure. He lent me his poles to ski the next day, and I broke one before I skied a step. How he puts up with me, I don’t know. He just shrugs his shoulders and laughs. Not because he brought my boots from Duluth; not because he gave me sweet US Ski Team jackets; but because he’s a great and selfless guy who is a good friend; it was good to see him again.
The next guy I saw was one of my best college friends. Back then, I had no idea Matt would be one of the pivotal architects of the greatest period of US skiing success, ever. Maybe I should have. I met Matt when I was living and training in Jericho, VT. His junior coach, Ed Hammill, asked me to give a talk to his junior team at the cafeteria during their junior training camp at the military facility where I lived and trained. We became great friends in college. He was a big part of the dignity I gained those two years as I lost all semblance of caring about my own ski racing. We spent evenings on the roofs of various campus buildings, smoking cigars after the ski season, watching sunsets over the Adirondacks, waxing poetic and philosophical about skiing, women (love, really), and the finer points of Motley Crue.
Matt in his office
Matt and I got a chance to catch up out on the trails the next day—the only way for us to really navigate their Covid protocols safely from a distance. He reminded me of a time we skied together in college in when I told him something about what I saw as a fundamental of the “new” (in 1999) skate technique neutral position. I felt like a jerk that I couldn’t remember the conversation, though I remembered the tip itself as something I would have suggested when he described it. He told me how he still thinks about that when he coaches technique. I may not have shown it, but it almost brought me to tears inside. We never know the scope nor range of something we might say to someone or the broad impact it might project over time. It’s just a snippet. Hardly a piece of gold. But for him to share that memory
with me at that moment, as I gasped for air atop one of Ruka’s famous brutal climbs, it simply moved me. It wasn’t even that it was that big a deal as an anecdote. It was that Matt, in his position, would take the moment and be kind enough to share with me that I had any kind of positive impact on him at all. It was good to see him again.
As I came out of the sauna Saturday night, my phone had a message on it. It was from Jessie. She apologized for missing me at the truck and not responding to my text earlier in the week. We went back and forth, and she became sort of motherly, ensuring I had what I needed to ski the next morning. It was so nice of her. I ended up on her rock skis—which I have to say were the fastest rock skis by far I’ve ever skied on—and I even managed not to break either of them.
Jessie and I also go way back; not way back in a deeply connected way, but way back to when she was starting ski racing. I was re-engaging the Midwest coaching community as the head coach of a new college program when Jessie was finding out what her life’s calling was. We always got along fine but nothing suggested we’d be closely connected in life until about the final ten seconds at the end of a race in February 2018. Since that day, we’ve had a connection that is obvious. I’ve always felt a bit like a party-crasher—like she and Kikkan made the moment and my part in it feels over-blown to me. But she’s always been gracious, even proactive with our connection, taking me along on a couple of promotional rides with her after she’d won her gold medal.
Jessie and Taavi at the Vikings game when she blew the horn
I don’t know that in any other walk of life that Jessie and I would have such a connection. We are both gregarious and expressive. I think we are both quite positive and emphatic, but we are not obvious buddies by personality. Yet, by some twist of fate, we have this moment that is almost cosmic that lives now between us. Without ever uttering a word about it to each other, I think we have come to know it to be true in our hearts. Jessie is smart and infinitely capable. She is a deeper well than she gives off readily. She is caring, and not to be cliché, she is not just brave enough, she’s brave, period. I admire her so and feel so fortunate to be one of her people, even though I’m supposed to be an objective journalist. I’ve watched as she’s grown into who she is and I have marveled at how she’s handled herself. It felt really nice to have her take just a little time to be sure I had what I needed before she got to work that day. It felt special, like her taking care of me "because I'm with her." It was and always will be nice to see her again.
The last person I saw in Ruka, before I jumped in the car for my 7-hour rally home in the Yaris, was Anita. She was struggling at another college ski program in 2013 and after a phone call together, chose to come to ours in 2014 to see if she could turn it around. She did. I simply gave her the space to do it and she did the rest. What came out of that process is a bond that will always be special to me in so many ways, not the least of which is, she is the only close connection between me, my sport, and my wife’s homeland.
I’m surrounded by a country that is well versed in the sport I’ve dedicated most of my life to. When you go into their version of a Target store and see an entire aisle dedicated to reasonably high quality ski equipment—the kind you’d have to go to a ski shop in America to find—you realize the magnitude of that sport in the country. We live downtown in the shopping district. When I needed red klister (a kind of specific sticky grip wax for wet, icy and slushing ski conditions), I went across the street to the basic sports store, and in their skiing section, found Ski Go red and violet klisters on sale for 4.99. I mean, I don’t know if I could find Ski Go klister in all of Minnesota, let alone in the sports shop across the street. You catch my drift.
The skiing aisle in Prisma, Kuopio
Anita is, and always has been herself, which is a testament to her as well as her nationally-iconic ski racer parents. She graciously loves the sport her parents and I love too, regardless of what her family name might put on her for pressure. She chooses to ski race. I find her refreshing because, like Jessie, she is brave. Not many people have Anita’s grace. I admire her so much. We chatted. She smiled and laughed about stuff, as always, inquired about the family, talked about upcoming races and training approaches. I told her she needs to visit again soon which she promised to do. I watched her ski away and it made me happy. It was good to see her again.
My professional adjustment hadn’t prepared me for the changes I’ve experienced since I quit coaching skiing in 2016. You would think covering a sport more completely would bring you into the sport more. In reality, modern media brings cost and logistical savings to centrally located studios, in which a phone, email, or social media update becomes your only interactions with the sport you cover. Until this year, my job as a commentator almost entirely removed me from the American ski racing community. Some of the greatest things that have ever happened in American Nordic racing have happened in those 4.5 years. While I have been in a position to help make those moments hopefully more memorable and special, I have never been more isolated from the sport myself. It took a pandemic, a relocation of my family to Finland, and a weekend car trip through the snowy northern reaches of this country to a couple of small ski racing villages, to reconnect with that community. It was exactly what I needed. It was great to see the sport again.