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)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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