Yesterday was the annual Cochran’s Nordic X (Nordic Cross, Skier Cross, etc) race. This was the best-ever edition of the event…it featured harrowing banked corkers on shaky legs, wild pump-track rollers, and a jump/pond skim option at the very bottom. Skiers made their way to the top skating up the alpine slope (there wasn’t enough snow for the T-bar. Plus, we’re endurance athletes!) and then took on the winding course that went ALL THE WAY down with so many crazy obstacles and features that challenged cornering skills, balance, ski control, and fearlessness.
It didn’t look like the Nordic races of old, and the various outfits (from giraffes to Teletubbies) didn’t incite intense fear or power. But the two skiers who won could’ve easily been the favorites for your “average” cross country ski race: UVM and US Ski Team member (oh, and World Junior Champion) Ben Ogden for the men, and APU skier and US National Champion Becca Rorabaugh for the women. In fact the women’s “Elite 8” in particular was stacked with 5 Dartmouth skiers, 1 UVM skier, 1 Middlebury skier, and emerging local legend Karin Rand.
This leads you to two key, interchangeable concepts:
- The fastest skiers are likely to be some of the “best” skiers, in terms of technical skill and pure skiing control and agility (not just fitness)
- The best skiers in terms of fitness are also highly likely to be the skiers with good technical skill and agility
A cross country ski course used to be incredibly technical. Imagine a time when a 30km race was just a 50km loop in woods…the best example is from the Lake Placid Olympics. Not the Disney-glorified 1980 games…think WAY back to 1932. The Sentinel Range, that collection of jagged mountain peaks that you see across the fields from the Ski Jumping complex, was the 50km race course. Ascent about 2000′ feet, traverse a mountain range, and ski down the necessary 2000′ to get back to the normal elevation of a finish line. That’s the vertical ascent of a Ski-Mo race, the endurance of a Nordic race, and the unforgiving downhill drama of an Alpine race all together. As the generation of skiers old enough to remember the days recall, “back then, there wasn’t cross country skiing or downhill skiing…just SKIING.”
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Classic skiing didn’t necessitate wide trails and buffed-out snow. Case-in-point is the Bogburn, possibly one of the last remaining holdouts when you can transport yourself back to the era of wooden skis, twisting pine courses, and harrowing hairpins on shaky legs. But skating brought with it wide trails required for FIS mass start events. Think of Gatineau or even the trails on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City.
Transitions continued to shape the sport though. Sprint racing entered in the late 90s as an exhibition-type format. It was implemented into the World Cup shortly thereafter. Sprinting was first included in the World Championships in 2001, and then the Olympics in 2002. High speed, tight turns, sketchy downhills, and rapid acceleration were back, baby!
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It only took a decade or so of sprint racing on the World Cup scene before Red Bull took notice and started their “NordiX” event. It may not have garnered the popularity of their Crushed Ice hockey events or the famous Rampage mountain bike competition, but it was out there and people were taking notice. All of a sudden the crazy turns and bumps and jumps Kochie was hitting became staples in events for skinny skis.
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And that all led to the biggest stage yet for combining freestyle elements with Nordic skiing: the Youth Olympics. At the event in Lillehammer, Norway, one of the most iconic ski venues ever, the best young skiers in the world competed on a grueling sprint course with elements taken straight out of a Red Bull ad. This event is what really spread the “cross” element in a viral way, as a few more courses and events began popping up. It was a spectacle to see it all on the Olympics stage, for sure.
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Which brings us back to Cochrans! How many times have I said it, either in person or on this blog? When it comes to cross country skiing, New England is the Scandinavia of America. And Vermont is the Norway within that Scandinavia.
This Sunday was another marker of that concept. Pennie Rand, Jimmy Cochran, and the whole crew out at that hill made the most awesome race around. It rivals the Bogburn. It MIGHT top the Stowe Derby?? This race is nuts. It’s more vertical (at least by the looks of it) than the Red Bull NordiX, it’s longer, it’s got more grueling climbs, and it brought out 200 competitors this year. All of the VT clubs were there. Ford Sayre was there. Dartmouth was there. CSU was there. Dublin was there. NYSEF was there. Sounds familiar? That’s right, this was essentially a full Eastern Cup combined with a spring party and pancake shindig. You could’ve had a Team New England reunion only a few weeks removed from Junior Nationals, because basically every member of the squad was present.
These were some of the best skiers in the country going head-to-head and having a blast. U16 skiers were in the same waves as World Cup skiers. High School racers versus NCAA champions. All together, all sending it.
The hype was real! And the participation and engagement for this type of sport is a big box you can check on the list of “why New England is the strongest region in the country”. It’s not just our awesome access to trails, clubs, competition, and resources. It’s local events like this where community members like Pennie have a vision and are willing to put it all together to make something like this happen…and the ski community that comes out to shred when it happens!
We’ve got a lot of skiers who excel at this sort of race…Hanna was the top Vermonter at U16 Champs for the skier cross event that they included for the first time this year. Timmy, Jenny, Ali, and Hanna all hit the top-10 at Easterns in the same event. It was the strongest event for many of us, and there’s plenty of reasons why! This is a growing aspect of the sport, and we practice “Kochie” elements of skiing week-in and week-out. Whether it’s building jumps or skiing the glades at Bolton on skinny skis, the kids in this club have grown up doing this sort of thing. This is the first generation that will see skier cross events on the World Cup level, and I’m sure Justin Beckwith will have a race like this implemented as an actual Eastern Cup in only a matter of years (or months?). This is the first generation of skiers that will see those events, and also the first that is competing in them with regularity, already. New England is setting the bar, and you can bet we’re going to be right there getting ready to stay at the forefront!
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And check out out this video of the event from Carly Trapeni! Thanks for capturing us at our finest moments Carly:
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