Culture
American men can’t win Olympic cross-country skiing medals — or can they?
Ever since Jessie Diggins started collecting Olympic medals and crystal globes and staking her claim as the world’s top cross-country skier, she has made it clear that she wants her legacy to be something more than wins and appearances on podiums.
She wants to spawn a new generation of top American skiers, even among the men, who have yet to achieve the success that American women have.
Diggins could be on the cusp of doing that — with a major assist from Ben Ogden and Gus Schumacher, a couple of 24-year-olds who just might be on the verge of taking American cross-country skiing where it hasn’t been before.
These are the boys who have grown up watching Diggins’ every move, seeing her collect trophies and medals and, because of that, believing they could one day, too. These are the boys who are landing on podiums and fist-bumping Norwegians and Swedes at the end of races.
They hear half-drunk Scandinavians chant their names as they whiz by them on snowy tracks through the forests of Europe, especially Ogden. His mustache and full-gas-from-the-start style have caught the imagination of Nordic skiing fans in the sport’s spiritual centers in northern and central Europe. In American skiing circles, he gets compared to Steve Prefontaine, the mustachioed track star of the 1970s who ran like Ogden skis, with a caution-to-the-wind fearlessness that can hurt your lungs to watch.
It wasn’t long ago, like maybe even the summer before last, that Ogden, a 6-foot-4 Vermonter, would turn sheepish when people would ask him what he did for a living. Sometimes he would tell a half-truth, focusing on his studies as a part-time graduate student in mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont, as if racing on the World Cup circuit was a side hustle.
Not anymore.
“I’m just like, ‘I’m a skier, I’m a professional skier,’ straight up,” Ogden said during an interview this fall in New York, a couple of weeks before he and Schumacher headed to Europe for nearly five months. “I’m a lot more proud.”
After winning the coveted green bib as the fastest skier 23 and under during the 2022-23 season, Ogden got his first career podium in the first stage of last season’s Tour de Ski, a multi-race event that began with a sprint in Toblach, Italy, but COVID-19 and mononucleosis cut his season short. This season, he had the top qualification time in the sprint in Lillehammer, Norway, in early December, finished 15th overall in the Tour de Ski earlier this month and on Friday earned his second career World Cup podium with a third-place finish in the 10-kilometer skate race in Les Rousses, France.
As for Schumacher, last February the rugged Alaskan thrilled some 40,000 fans who lined the course of the 10-kilometer World Cup race in Minnesota, where he became the youngest American ever to win a World Cup and the first American male to win a distance event since 1983. He has three top-10 finishes already this season and is 12th in the distance standings.
“We used to celebrate top 30 (finishes), and the top 20 was crazy because you finish in the top 20, you get paid,” Schumacher said, sitting next to Ogden in a club chair at a midtown Manhattan hotel. “Now it’s top 10, because you finish top 10, you could have been on the podium, for sure. Depending how things go, you can win.”
Ben Ogden, left, and Gus Schumacher give the Americans a shot to end what will be a 50-year drought since the only U.S. Olympic medal in men’s cross-country skiing. (Michael Loccisano / Getty Images)
In all, six American Nordic skiers landed on the podium during the 2023-24 season, including Ogden, Schumacher and Diggins, who won the crystal globe for the overall title for a second time in the past four seasons.
As recently as 2018, the U.S. was looking for its first Olympic medal in cross-country skiing since Bill Koch won the silver in the 30-kilometer race in 1976. That was the lone American cross-country medal until Diggins started collecting them, first with Kikkan Randall in a team sprint in 2018 and then in two individual races four years later.
At 33, Diggins has won so many of the big prizes in her sport. She could retire tomorrow and call it an epic career. During a conference call with reporters before the season, she said being a part of the U.S. team, which largely spends the winter traveling and living together because it can’t go home between races, plays a major role in her decision to keep coming back.
“I love what I do, and I love who I do it with,” Diggins said. “It is hard to be on the road for four months. The idea of doing this together with this team and going after relay podiums and (the) Nations Cup, things like that when we group together, that to me is so exciting.”
In years past, and even in other sports, some men could resist seeing a female champion as a role model. On the U.S. Nordic team, Diggins functions as a team captain, big sister, den mother and chief glitter application officer. During Schumacher’s first few years on the World Cup, Diggins put him up in the house she would rent during the Christmas break.
He and Ogden are feeling a little more grown up after last season, the first when they felt empowered enough to start making some decisions for themselves, figuring out what might work best for them as individuals. They got COVID-19 at the same time in January. After their period of isolation ended but before they were ready to start competing and training again, they decided to head to Spain for a few days of warmth and sun on the beaches near Valencia rather than hunkering down in chilly Switzerland.
They’ve even discussed doing that again this season as a kind of midseason break that their European competitors get every few weeks when they head home.
“Just to, like, get away from the racing scene a little bit,” Schumacher said.
“We used to celebrate top 30 (finishes),” Gus Schumacher says of his progression in the sport. “Now it’s top 10, because you finish top 10, you could have been on the podium.” (Maja Hitij / Getty Images)
As skiers, Ogden and Schumacher come at the sport from opposite ends. Ogden excels in shorter races. He’s never really seen a race where he doesn’t want to burn from the beginning. Schumacher is better at longer distances. He specializes in pacing, in thinking his way through races.
“I think I made good progress by being a patient racer,” he said. “I like to look around during a distance race, take in my surroundings and think — which is not to say you don’t do that,” he said, as he turned to Ogden.
Ogden immediately interrupted.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
As they have improved, their peer groups have shifted some. It is the nature of cross-country skiing, with so much time spent battling with competitors on sometimes woodsy, isolated trails that you end up being most friendly with the people you finish with.
At first, beyond the U.S. team, they were most friendly with the lesser skiing nations. Then they got pretty friendly with the Swedes. Now they are getting to know the vaunted Norwegians, the kings of the sport.
Ogden’s father, who introduced him to cross-country, died during the 2023 offseason. When the season started up again, Norway’s Johannes Klaebo, pretty much the world’s best skier, was among the first to approach him and offer his condolences.
“That was pretty incredible,” Ogden said.
The relationship between the Norwegians and the U.S. cross-country team is a funny one. The Norwegians are constantly telling the Americans how they want them to excel, because they see the U.S. as a huge potential market. They know American success will be good for the sport. They got to witness that firsthand with the throngs of cross-country enthusiasts who greeted them in Minnesota, which produced some of the biggest crowds the sport had seen.
“Then we win and it’s like a national crisis for them and they fire their wax techs,” Schumacher said, only half-joking.
Like everyone this season, their eyes get big when they think about the world championships in February in Trondheim, Norway, the biggest event ahead of the 2026 Olympics in Italy. Can they medal in the relays or the team sprint there? Maybe. More individual podiums would be great, too.
Mostly, though, they want to make their presence felt. They want to be a part of the conversation and feel like every time they race, they can win.
“We want to be someone that people are looking out for,” Ogden said. “We do that for other people. Right now that’s becoming us.”
GO DEEPER
Jessie Diggins talks cross-country skiing’s most grueling test: the Tour de Ski
(Top photo of Ben Ogden racing during the Tour de Ski earlier this month: Grega Valancic / VOIGT / Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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