Minneapolis: A City on the Periphery, Ready for Center Stage

by Luke Dykowski • 17.02.2024
Minneapolis Diggins
After four years of anxious anticipation – and four months of perilously-low snow – a city at the edge of the American consciousness, and a community of skiers unfamiliar to European athletes, will find themselves under FIS’s carefully-aimed cameras. Last in the United States in 2001, and canceled on Shutdown Friday of the 2020 pandemic, the Cross-Country World Cup is coming to Minneapolis. Hosted by the Loppet Foundation, the world’s best will race at Theodore Wirth Park – an oasis of oak savannah just minutes from downtown.
After four years of anxious anticipation – and four months of perilously-low snow – a city at the edge of the American consciousness, and a community of skiers unfamiliar to European athletes, will find themselves under FIS’s carefully-aimed cameras. Last in the United States in 2001, and canceled on Shutdown Friday of the 2020 pandemic, the Cross-Country World Cup is coming to Minneapolis. Hosted by the Loppet Foundation, the world’s best will race at Theodore Wirth Park – an oasis of oak savannah just minutes from downtown.

“It’s been an incredible journey,” Claire Wilson, Executive Director of the Loppet Foundation, tells me. When I call to interrupt her preparations, it’s the evening of Friday, February 9th – one week since FIS officially cleared the event to proceed. In the crawling evening chill at Wirth Park, the snow guns will roar to life as soon as the temperature drops below freezing. When she heard the good news, “I cried,” Wilson confesses. “I burst into tears. Everyone was very emotional.” With close to 30,000 tickets distributed to spectators from 35 U.S. states, Wilson and her team are determined not to endure another torturous cancelation. They are determined to put their city – and its unique community of skiers – in the long–awaited spotlight.

Minneapolis is not hard to locate on a map. Start at bawdy, bombastic, brass-stained New Orleans, and follow the Mississippi River northwards for just under 2,000 miles. Get off on your left where icefloes grate against sleeping grain barges, and where you begin to hear surnames like Eriksson, Nilsson, and Karlson with perplexing frequency. If you run into schoolchildren named Inga or Bjorn, you’re in the right place.

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Minneapolis
Wintertime in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photo: Josh Hild/Pexels

However, few outside the region know much about Minneapolis, the half a million souls who call it home, or its conjoined sibling, St. Paul. The image of a clutch of glass and steel towers, clinging to the underbelly of the endless Northwoods and scoured by wind from the equally-endless Great Plains, looms large in the mind’s eye and through the front window of an approaching car. A grim narrative purports to summarize the scene: It’s insidiously cold; it’s inundated with snow; the people split their time between the sauna-ing and shoveling, shuffle along ice-slick sidewalks under androgynous layers, and punctuate their sentences with the inquisitive and affirmative, “Oh, yeah?”

This – as any self-respecting Minnesotan will tell you – is not entirely true. There is more to the Twin Cities and the state, even if ‘more’ comes with qualifications. The boasts must include parentheses: Minnesota is home to America’s second-largest state fair (after Texas), its second-most lakes (a claim bitterly contested by Wisconsin), and the most (alleged) birthplaces of Paul Bunyan, the (fictional) lumberjack folk hero. Robert Zimmerman went to college at the University of Minnesota (he dropped out, moved to New York, and changed his name to Bob Dylan); the state has produced two U.S. Vice Presidents (but no Presidents), and Minneapolis-St. Paul were the lifelong homes of that undefinable (and briefly unpronounceable) musician, Prince.

And the weather isn’t that bad. When summer comes to the Twin Cities, their shaded parkways roil with the swollen greenery of an urban forest. Bald eagles wander above the slow-rippling Mississippi, and runners stride seamlessly from a dense network of footpaths into the patchwork lakes that cool the southern neighborhoods.

In autumn, the Cities are washed in a sea of arboreal color that rolls down from Canada, announced by the first tendrils frost on unruly front gardens and on the railings of the Stone Arch Bridge.

In winter, those towers of steel and glass aren’t an unforgiving grey. They reflect the delicate blues and golds of a subzero sunset so brilliantly, you can feel the breath catch in your throat before it has the chance to freeze to your cheeks.

And, in winter, there’s skiing.

Minneapolis: Primate of the American Skiers

In the United States, cross-country skiing has never assumed the definitive significance it holds in Northern Europe. It has not even approached the popularity it enjoys in Central or Eastern Europe. Piotr Bednarski – a former US Biathlon coach and, since 2012, coach of Minneapolis’ elite youth ski team, Loppet Nordic Racing – summarizes the pervasive misconception: Cross-country is “walking on skis in the woods. It’s not cool, it’s not fast, and it’s not a real sport.”

There are limited opportunities to correct this perception. American skiers are scattered, snow-chasing itinerants.

Pockets of fanatics in the forest maintain seasonal contact along the crumbling highways of the Midwestern hill country. Mountain citadels in Vermont, Montana, Idaho, and untouchable Alaska cultivate emerging talent with spartan rigor. Colleges’ select squads grapple with one another in generational rivalries, cheered on by dedicated parents and the odd wool-stockinged wildman, who comes and goes on wooden skis and bamboo poles.

Minneapolis is different. Along with St. Paul, the city stands as the undisputed Primate of American cross-country skiing. It boasts among the most robust snowmaking systems in the world: Four manmade networks in the metro area, each exclusively dedicated to cross-country skiing, and each with at least five kilometers of snowmaking. In a normal winter, when drifts threaten to swallow homes and unwary postmen, Wirth Park grooms 30 kilometers of additional, natural snow trails. The Loppet Foundation alone is responsible for a total of 60 kilometers throughout in the city – not to mention the proliferation of local parks who handle their own maintenance. You could ski over a dozen different locales before repeating a route, and before leaving the Twin Cities.

For Bednarski, access to such a sprawling network of trails has a clear effect on the sport community. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, more than anywhere else in the country, “Skiing is part of the social fabric.” While Sun Valley or Stratton produce no shortage of elite athletes, when it comes to the sport “as a cultural phenomenon, this is the place.”

Ahvo Taipale agrees. A self-described farm boy from Finland, he came to the University of Minnesota to study Agriculture in 1971 – and stayed to build Finn Sisu, a flagship ski and sauna store from which he retired only last year. Although under energetic new ownership, signed bibs still crowd the shop’s walls, with the likes of Dæhlie and Diggins scrawling messages to “Ahvo – the Finn!” Across the street, college professors trace shuffling tracks around the Les Bolstad Golf Course Trails, groomed by the University of Minnesota.

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Ahvo Minneapolis
Ahvo Taipale. Photo: Private/Finnsisu

Although Taipale is quick to disclaim that the Twin Cities have had a “tradition” of cross-country skiing since the 1940s, he was undoubtedly at the forefront of its expansion through the 1980s – both as a business owner, a championship-winning coach at the University of Minnesota Nordic Ski Team, and a perennial trail-clearer with municipal park boards. He recalls being an exchange student living across the freeway from St. Paul’s Battle Creek Regional Park: “I was impressed with how beautiful, how nice of a park it is, and at that time, I decided it would be an excellent ski place. Little by little,” he began to cut his own trails through the woods.

Eventually, the local government took heed. Today, Battle Creek – across town from Wirth Park – has 1.4k, 2.5k, and 3.3k snowmaking-equipped racecourses, all with FIS homologation on the way. Taipale hopes elite events will follow. “The Twin Cities metro area probably has better access to Nordic skiing than any other location in the world,” Taipale tells me. “We have extremely plentiful trail systems.” While a visitor to Holmenkollen, that sepulcher of Norwegian sport, must travel to the city limits to reach tracks, “We have them in our backyard. That is not the case anywhere else.”

Margie Freed, a Minnesotan racing for the U.S. Ski Team on this North American tour, believes this weekend’s athletes and viewers “will be surprised to see the city skyline from the top of the trails at Theodore Wirth.” The high point of Sunday’s 10k race will reveal just how close the course is to downtown – a view that is still arresting for Claire Wilson: “Every time I crest that hill before I go down Drevil’s Drop, I can’t believe it. It’s so beautiful.”

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Margie Minneapolis
Margie Freed (USA) during a sprint race at the Canmore World Cup 2024. Photo: Modica/NordicFocus

With such readily-accessible trail infrastructure comes broader access to the sport, and an enthusiasm unparalleled elsewhere in the country. A persistent rumor may be added to the list of almost-superlatives: Minneapolis is home to more cross-country skiers than any other metropolitan area in the world (after Oslo). Ski marathons in and around the Twin Cities – from their own City of Lakes Loppet, to Minnesota’s Vasaloppet USA, to Wisconsin’s American Birkebeiner – position them as a gateway to regional competition, and leave winter-sport deeply ingrained in civic life. For Freed, it’s a matter of perspective. Because these trails might lack the dramatic “scenery or pretty mountainscapes” one could find in the East or West, their users develop “that true love to just ski” – an iconoclastic dedication to the sport itself, without a reliance on visual distractions.

Arriving as a graduate student in the early 1990s, Bednarski was captivated by “the sheer number of people that were excited about skiing” in Minneapolis. A case in point: When Bednarski co-founded Loppet Nordic Racing, he hoped its young athletes would be viable national competitors within five years. Within twelve months, the LNR Boys were the top club at U.S. Junior Nationals; the LNR Girls were second.

While Bednarski can’t recall the exact number, admits he’s “pretty sure LNR has won more single-gender and overall club Junior National Championships than any other club.” For the Loppet Foundation, however, the celebration is brief before it’s time to “get back to work” for the next race, the next season, the next generation of athletes.

World Champions at Work

Caitlin Gregg exemplifies this mentality. She and her husband, Brian, could be considered the closest thing the Midwest has to a cross-country Royal Family. The two are routine presences on SuperTour and ski marathon podiums across the United States; Caitlin Gregg has won five American Birkebeiners – more than any other skier, ever.

Gregg recalls coming to Minneapolis in 2004, to train with the Loppet Foundation. It was immediately clear that the athletic community was “as much involved in developing the passion for skiing as in producing results. The two energies go together.” Despite being one of the country’s top youth prospects, “The attitude [towards her] was, ‘That’s great, but are you going to come out and help build the infrastructure, build the community?’”

In a metro area with such a high density of trails, there is always grass to be planted, overgrowth to be cleared, and schoolchildren to be coached – and even World Championship medalists are expected to do their part. Gregg vividly remembers returning from winning Bronze at Falun in 2015. Theodore Wirth Park was convulsed with activity, and a shovel was waiting for the hometown hero. Gregg laughs as she describes the welcome message: “We need help repairing the course for this Junior National Qualifying race coming up!”

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Jessie Diggins (USA), Charlotte Kalla (SWE), and Caitlin Gregg (USA) (l-r) during the award ceremony at the 2015 World Championships in Falun. Photo: Christopher Kelemen/GEPA/Bildbyrån

It’s this communal approach to success that makes the Twin Cities a vibrant and motivating place to train, for athletes at all levels of competition. When park infrastructure needs maintenance, local volunteers and visiting Olympians swap their Atomics for axes and wax boxes for wheelbarrows to do the work together, getting “covered in dirt.” Seasoned coaches and top talents take the lead in the Loppet Foundation’s year-round programming, which provides trail running, mountain biking, and skiing instruction and engagement students and adults across north Minneapolis, including for communities historically underrepresented in trail sports.

And, there is always someone to train with. “I cannot emphasize enough how much having other skiers to share every workout with means to me,” Gregg says. In a city that oscillates from blistering cold to suffocating summer heat, there are “familiar faces loving it” every day – and encouraging one another to get moving. For developing Minnesota athletes, that community starts young. Skiing is a school-sponsored activity. Classmates and teachers introduce one another to the intricacies of waxing, striding, and toe-throwing; a skier may get a celebratory assembly if they qualify for the State Championships. “I stayed with the sport mostly due to the friendships I had within it!” Margie Freed tells me. With a “great group of friends and teammates” jumping from soccer, to running, to skiing as the months changed, “We had a lot of fun in every sport season.”

Gregg describes how four distinct seasons, a high density of outdoor enthusiasts, and a sprawling urban playground create ample opportunities to “be creative and resourceful.” She relishes the challenge of finding the longest incline along the Mississippi River bluffs, the “perfect rollerskiing loop” through a quiet neighborhood, or the latest bike path expansion – it keeps training dynamic, collaborative, and evolving.

Beyond Wirth Park’s Loppet Foundation, ski clubs abound. Occupying a full spectrum of competitive and recreational focuses, they share a profound appreciation for the access to sport Minneapolis and St. Paul pr2ovide – and the access to strong social bonds sport itself facilitates.

Ryan Hunwardsen is the President of the Twin Cities Ski Club, a team catering to athletes ages 21-35. Members range in ability. Some rank among the region’s top marathon skiers; others are young professionals new to the city and sport. This variance “makes it a comfortable place to either learn how to ski, or to push yourself competitively,” Hunwardsen says. Completing a challenging workout together, and sharing a conversation or a drink afterwards, creates lasting friendships. It also encourages deeper investment in the sport beyond the racecourse. Many TCSC members will be among the volunteers at Wirth Park next weekend. Others coach at nearly a dozen area high schools: When I speak with Hunwardsen, he’s in the middle of waxing his students’ skis for the upcoming High School State Championships. For him and his teammates, the Twin Cities are “a hub for skiing, and people really embrace winter” as a season for athletic development and social engagement.

Cometh the World Cup, Cometh the Hour

Zak Ketterson hopes that this embrace of winter will be on full display this weekend. “It’s easy to think of the United States as having its interests set on other sports,” he concedes. It will be surprising for the world’s fastest “to come and see that there is this massive crowd that cares about a niche sport like Nordic skiing.”

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Zak Ketterson (USA) during the 2024 Goms World Cup sprint. Photo: GEPA/Oliver Lerch/Bildbyrån

For Ketterson himself, the Minneapolis World Cup “feels almost like a championship event.” Having begun his ski career in the Twin Cities metro, he’s thrilled by the prospect of racing in front of friends, family, and the community where he learned to become a lifelong athlete: “It’s been circled on my calendar this entire year.” While the journey home has been jarred by “ups and downs” – a bout of Covid-19 made Ketterson’s qualification for Minneapolis “really come down to the Sprint start in Oberhof” in January – he is excited to bring elite racing to an audience with a predominantly local view of the sport. As he recalls from personal experience, “When you win the Minnesota High School State meet and think, ‘I might be the best 16-year-old in the world,’ you don’t realize how many kids from how many other countries are doing that same thing!”

Some of those erstwhile kids – now in their professional prime – will be tackling terrain intimately familiar to this weekend’s audience. Caitlin Gregg counts “seeing the Strava data” among one of the event’s underappreciated prospects: As Klæbo attacks a pitch, or Diggins navigates a dexterous descent, even seasoned spectators will be encouraged to take a new line on a downhill, or V2 a bit longer on their next workout.

Each of the athletes and community leaders I spoke with stressed the importance of this weekend’s races for the next generation of U.S. skiers. Ketterson and Piotr Bednarski both identify the lack of exposure to championship-level racing as one of the most significant differences between the American and European Nordic communities. Navigating by Randall’s pioneering charts, Diggins’ glitter-bright star, and even by the emerging horizon-glow of the deeper U.S. Men’s and Women’s Team rosters, young American talents rarely see a viable, long-term future for themselves in cross-country skiing. Saturday and Sunday could begin to change that. “All it takes is one of those kids who comes to watch the Minneapolis races deciding they want to be a skier,” Ketterson tells me. Recalling the intoxicating furor of her first World Cup event, Gregg agrees. “You’re taken in by the lights, the cameras, the billboards – it leaves you feeling inspired and motivated.”

All eyes, of course, will be on the American athletes themselves. Sunday’s 10k Freestyle seems to hold the most promise, particularly after Diggins’ 20th career victory at the 15k Freestyle in Canmore, with Sophia Laukli and Scott Patterson both taking 8th.

Saturday may prove trickier. As Kristine Stavås Skistad duels with a rotating cast of Swedes, and whoever can cling most closely to Klæbo taking 2nd and 3rd for the Men, the Stars and Stripes may be hard pressed to find the podium. But miracles can happen, particularly when you mix hometown talent with tens of thousands of fans driven rabid by snow-drought. And, Americans have a deep and abiding love for an underdog story.

I suppose I am hardly immune from that sentiment. Despite rhapsodizing Minneapolis as the Primate of the American Skiers, the Nordic Rome to which all well-groomed trails must lead, I have, after all, referred to her here as a City on the Periphery: The knowledge that Minneapolis is a chilly afterthought to most of Americans seems to go hand in hand with the lingering sentiment that North American Nordic is an afterthought to the European ski federations.

It is well-known that, while U.S. and Canadian athletes are enjoying an ecstatic homecoming after months of (often self-financed) racing abroad, some national teams – to the consternation of their own athletes – have elected to slash their squads and rely on their Red Group skiers. As a guest on the Skirious Problems podcast, Canadian Antoine Cyr confessed he found the federations’ decisions “ridiculous”; host Mika Vermeulen wondered how the World Cup’s dominant nations were not “ashamed of themselves” in alleging “‘Oh, we don’t have the money,’ when they’re [expletive] drowning in money?” In our conversation, Ketterson confirmed that “a lot of deserving athletes are getting left behind” on this North American tour, “just because their country didn’t decide to bring them” – choices that do a “disservice” to both spectators and the financial future of FIS.

Will a U.S. podium, a win – the outcome for which 30,000 full-throated Americans will be howling themselves hoarse this weekend – change this? Will it be some offering on the cross-country altar, assuring the continued triumph of the United States’ sweat-stained heroes in their trials abroad, and rolling the great eye of the hesitant federations’ Fates towards the Western Hemisphere?

Perhaps. But David Johnson offers a counterpoint to this underdog vision. A cross-country ski coach for some 35 years, and twice Vice-President-then-President of the Minnesota State High School Coaches’ Association, Johnson – like Hunwardsen – takes a break from waxing an arsenal of students’ skis to speak with me. He doesn’t hesitate to identify Jessie Diggins as having “the biggest impact” on American, and Minnesotan, skiing. But he doesn’t say a word about Diggins’ results – past or pending. For Johnson’s kids and fellow coaches, “It’s her attitude, win or lose” that models grittier training, stronger friendships, and more rewarding competition: “She nails it every time.”

That attitude, win or lose, reflects the spirit of the Minnesotans welcoming the world to their backyard.

That attitude, win or lose, is not an indifference to winning. It is not a shield against hardship, or a balm to frustration. In a country and a sport which place overwhelming emphasis on being the best, it is a commitment to doing one’s best – as a teammate, a leader, a mentor, a host. As not simply a racer, but a skier.

It’s a commitment that led the Loppet Foundation to, in Claire Wilson’s words, “risk heartbreak again” after the 2020 cancelation. It’s a commitment that overcame a Christmas rainstorm and an inconceivably-warm January, when “the whole community rallied to save the trails” at Wirth Park. It’s a commitment that 24 Americans made, to qualify for the first World Cup on home soil in a generation; it’s a commitment that so many thousands of donors and sponsors have made to financially support those ambitions. It’s a commitment to shoveling sod and hacking down buckthorn when you’d rather be celebrating; to coaching in the wind-scoured night when you’d rather be warm in bed; to showing up for those who look up to you, and those you look up to, even when you’re afraid of disappointing yourself.

It’s a commitment to delivering excellence, exuberance, and unforgettable hospitality in a most adverse and unusual year.

It’s our commitment to cross-country skiing, beyond the racecourse. It’s our commitment that makes this sport – this obsession! – so much more than “walking on skis in the woods.”

This weekend, Minneapolis will not claim some long-denied place in the Nordic world. We have already defined our own. The stage is set, our verses are memorized, the murmuring audience hushes in anticipation. Let the spotlight fall where it may – win or lose, we’ll nail it every time.

Piotr Bednarski, Margie Freed, Caitlin Gregg, Ryan Hunwardsen, David Johnson, Zak Ketterson, Ahvo Taipale, and Claire Wilson contributed to this report.

Luke Dykowski is the Nordic Coordinator of the Midwest Collegiate Ski Association. The former Co-President of the University of Minnesota Nordic Ski Club, he attends law school in Washington, D.C.

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FACTS Minneapolis World Cup Season 2023/2024

  • When: Saturday, February 17, to Sunday, February 18, 2024
  • Who: Elite national skiers – women and men
  • Where: Minneapolis, USA
  • What: FIS Cross-Country World Cup in Minneapolis, USA

PROGRAM

Saturday, February 17: Sprint Freestyle (More details can be found here)

  • 17:00 CET: Sprint Qualification F, Men
  • 17:00 CET: Sprint Qualification F, Women
  • 19:30 CET: Sprint Final F, Men
  • 19:30 CET: Sprint Final F, Women

Sunday, February 18: 10km Interval Start Freestyle (More details can be found here)

  • 17:30 CET: 10km Interval Start F, Men
  • 19:45 CET: 10km Interval Start F, Women 

After Minneapolis, in the USA, the World Cup returns to Scandinavia to end the season with weekends in Finland (Lahti), Norway (Oslo and Drammen), and Sweden (Falun).

Read More: World Cup calendar for the 2023/2024 Winter Season 

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