Nordic Grows Up
Art: Jack Unruh
Three-time Olympian and former U.S. Head Coach Mike Gallagher said it best: “You can’t coach athletes by telephone. You have to look ’em in the eye to really gauge how they’re doing.”
That thinking was voiced in the mid-’80s when Gallagher was cross-country coach for the U.S. Ski Team, chasing athletes by phone from his home in Vermont most of each pre-season. It was a primitive time by today’s gotta-have-it/see-it/do-it-now standards — no cell phones, no instant video.
This “look ’em in the eye” philosophy is the unofficial raison d’être for establishing Park City as the heart of U.S. Nordic ski training. The 2002 Olympic legacy facilities at Utah Olympic Park and Soldier Hollow offer a nearly ideal stage for pre-season training in cross-country, ski jumping and Nordic combined, which blends cross-country and jumping. (Biathlon, by the way, is a separate federation based in Maine and conducts much of its training in the Northeast.)
The Nordic combined team was originally based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, but members had to travel to places like Lake Placid, Calgary, Norway or central Europe to get jump training. The program moved to Park City after the 2002 Olympics. Reduced travel meant increased training.
“I grew up in Steamboat, but if I was going to be best in the world, I knew I had to move to Park City. That’s where the jumps are, and I’d spend more time training than traveling,” says U.S. Ski Team athlete Johnny Spillane.
Within a year, Spillane was the sprint world champion, staging an epic final burst in Italy to stun three Europeans who were deciding how they would finish when the gritty Spillane stormed by for the gold medal at the 2003 World Championships.
Billy Demong, silver medalist in combined at the 2007 World Championships in Japan says, “Everything’s here. The jumps, the cross-country at Soldier Hollow with those paved roller-ski loops, the sports science testing ... [It’s] just a great package for all of us, and we do take advantage of it.”
The cross-country team established its Park City residency program in 1999. The idea was to get development-level athletes to train regularly with Coach Miles Minson. Andrew Johnson, then a promising racer at Vermont’s Middlebury College, was the lone athlete who came to town, after returning from an academic project in Scotland and Iceland. He’s since competed in two Olympics and three World Championships, and has won three U.S. titles.
The team holds much of its pre-season training and testing here in Park City, but as athletes mature, they’re given the option of spending the rest of their time elsewhere. Two-time Olympians Kris Freeman from New Hampshire and Alaskan Kikkan Randall, plus 2006 Olympian Andy Newell, a Vermonter who earned the first U.S. World Cup podium position in more than two decades in 2006, take the option and train at home.
“Really, this is one of the great ways the Ski Team works now, at least with the older guys,” Newell explains. “As you get older with the national team, you learn from your training, from keeping your training logs (and my logs go back to my first year at Stratton [Mountain School in Vermont], back to 1997-98). You learn how your body reacts to different kinds of training ... and we’re personalizing our training more.”
Freeman’s distance results are the best since Bill Koch in the early ’80s. Randall produced the top U.S. women’s Olympic result in history when she was ninth in the 2006 sprint in Italy and dug deep to turn in the first U.S. women’s World Cup top-three last January in Russia.
On the other hand, Park City’s Rosie Brennan was named to the U.S. team for the 2008 season and savored her time in team workouts this summer. She’s attending and will ski for Dartmouth College, but the chance to train with the national team during the summer was an over-the-moon experience for her.
Brennan didn’t start cross-country skiing until eighth grade, working with ex-Olympian John Callahan in The Utah Nordic Alliance (TUNA) program, moving up two years later to work with ex-U.S. Coach Gordon Lange and the National Sports Foundation (NSF), now called Park City Nordic. She blends Lang’s coaching tips with instruction from U.S. coaches.
All six members of the U.S. women’s jumping troupe came through the NSF program at Utah Olympic Park (UOP). “We grew up jumping at UOP,” says Jessica Jerome, a four-time U.S. women’s champion. “This is home and we’re comfortable here. It’s just very natural for us and now, having access to the Ski Team’s sport science and other facilities is so great.”
Adds first-year women’s Coach Kjell Ivar Magnusson, “They live here and they train here. They get to jump so much, and that’s what makes them so good. This is a great setup for the girls.”
When the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association’s national training and education center (The Center of Excellence) opens in 2009, it will be another industrial-strength tool for the team’s coaches and athletes. The $22.5 million, 85,000-square foot Center blends the best of high-performance athletic facilities including strength-training areas, a gymnasium, a climbing wall, ski and snowboard ramps, trampolines, a nutrition center and rehabilitation facilities. Plus, it will feature educational areas for athletes, coaches and clubs such as a computer lab, multimedia rooms for performance analysis and equipment workshops.
“This is exactly what we need. It will be a huge asset for us,” says Bill Demong. “In the last five or six years, we’ve seen our temporary training facility grow. Having in-house sport science, in-house testing and our own physiologists will improve our opportunities to succeed. This Center will set the standard for national governing bodies, not only in this country but around the world.”
Paul Robbins has been reporting on the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team athletes for more than two decades.
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