Culture

American men can’t win Olympic cross-country skiing medals — or can they?

Published

7 hours ago

January 18, 2025

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)

Culture

How Silence Improves Pico Iyer’s Life

Published

15 hours ago

January 18, 2025

Press Room

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen

For decades, starting in 1991 after his house in Santa Barbara burned to the ground, the travel writer and essayist Pico Iyer has taken regular silent retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Northern California as a way to recharge himself through solitude. He writes about those retreats, and the lessons they’ve imparted, in his new book, “Aflame: Learning From Silence.”

Iyer joins us on the podcast this week to talk about his new memoir and his life’s journeys.

“I’m a writer, so I spend most of my day alone,” he tells the host Gilbert Cruz. “And it’s true that even from a young age, I only had to step into the silence of any monastery and convert, and I felt a kind of longing, the way other people feel a longing when they see a delectable meal or pistachio gelato or some such. But I’d always felt this longing.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Culture

Emma Raducanu and Iga Swiatek’s Australian Open match reunites two teenage Grand Slam winners

Published

22 hours ago

January 17, 2025

Press Room

Emma Raducanu and Iga Swiatek’s Australian Open match reunites two teenage Grand Slam winners

MELBOURNE, Australia — In 2020, Iga Swiatek won her first Grand Slam title at 19.

The following year, Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title at 18.

The pair of teenage major winners have followed divergent paths since then. Swiatek has added four more Grand Slam titles to her tally, spending over 100 weeks as world No. 1 in the process; Raducanu hasn’t reached the final of a single WTA Tour event, let aloneanother major.

Their Australian Open third-round match on Saturday is one of the most consequential of Raducanu’s career since winning the U.S. Open in 2021. She has gone deeper in a Grand Slam before, reaching the Wimbledon fourth round last year, but she has never played an opponent ranked higher than world No. 7 at a major.

Raducanu’s career record against top-10 players is 2-7, with an 0-3 head-to-head against Swiatek, but she has won her last two matches against top-10 opponents at Eastbourne and Wimbledon respectively. After a heavily disrupted 2024, 2025 brings an immediate test against one of the best players in the world.

Swiatek and Raducanu, now 23 and 22 respectively, took very different trajectories en route to their first Grand Slam titles. Swiatek’s breakout tournament at the 2020 French Open came on the back of numerous Grand Slam main draw match wins and a junior Wimbledon title, while Raducanu won the 2021 U.S. Open as a qualifier, a once-in-history tennis moment.

Raducanu laughed Thursday when talking about breakthroughs in the wake of beating friend Amanda Anisimova 6-3, 7-5 to set up the meeting with the world No. 2.

“I know that she was playing since a very young age and my hours in comparison were probably a bit comical when I was 17 or 18, playing six hours a week,” she said in a news conference.

“I don’t think it was the same trajectory.”

In that junior Wimbledon title run, Swiatek met Raducanu in the quarterfinals. She won 6-0, 6-1.

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Emma Raducanu has done all-or-nothing tennis. Now, can she just play?

The contrast has persisted since their respective first major titles, with Swiatek winning Grand Slams on multiple surfaces (clay and hard courts) while Raducanu either flattered to deceive in the wake of suddenly and infinitely increased expectations or suffered continual misfortune with injuries. Her career has been one of consistent rebuilds, while Swiatek has won at least one major in each of the past three seasons, picking up 22 singles titles and the 2024 United Cup’s “most valuable player” title after winning all of her singles matches.

In 2022, when Swiatek won both the French and U.S. Opens, Raducanu was having her first proper season on the WTA Tour — as a Grand Slam champion. Her results were good when presented as a rookie player trying to navigate a full season for the first time, with one semifinal and a couple of quarterfinals. They were less good by the normal standards of a Grand Slam champion. Raducanu ended the year ranked No. 75 after a first-round exit at the U.S. Open saw her lose 2,030 points and plummet from No. 11 to No. 83 in the space of two weeks.

It was a year of frequent coaching changes for Raducanu. Having won the U.S. Open with Andrew Richardson, she replaced him with Torben Beltz just two months after winning the title. By April 2022, Beltz was out and Dimitry Tursunov, who had worked with Annett Kontaveit while she reached No. 2 in the world, was in.

Tursunov didn’t continue beyond a trial period of a few months, telling Tennis Majors that there were “red flags” he could not ignore. Sebastian Sachs arrived in December 2022 and lasted until the following June, making it five coaches in less than two years for Raducanu. Richardson had replaced Nigel Sears in July 2021, just two months before her U.S. Open win.

“Anything that’s not necessarily serving me, I’m just pretty savage in terms of just prioritizing myself and focusing,” Raducanu said on Thursday in Melbourne. “Anything that wants to try and affect that, I don’t have time for it. No hate. I just don’t want to kind of let that in.”

Coaches are asked to put together PowerPoint presentations to explain their thinking — she has always had an incredible focus and demand for excellence. Even as a junior, she would seek out coaches who could help her with specific shots. She’s obsessed with the why of things and won’t just jump because she’s told to.

She said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in October 2023: “l ask my coaches a lot of questions. On certain occasions, they haven’t been able to keep up with the questions I’ve asked and maybe that’s why it ended.”

Beltz was brought in to improve her forehand and when that wasn’t happening, Raducanu saw little point in carrying on.

Emma Raducanu with Dimitry Tursunov at the 2022 U.S. Open (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

A big moment in the next Raducanu rebuild came at the end of 2023 when she hired Nick Cavaday as coach. The pair worked together when Raducanu was a junior and had discussed a possible partnership earlier in her senior career, with the timing on both sides not working out. He joined her team towards the end of a 2023 season that had been dominated by another recurring theme in her career: injuries.

She missed the majority of the season after double wrist surgery and an ankle operation, which together meant she played just five events and ended her season in April. While Raducanu was in the early stages of rehabilitation, Swiatek was scooping up a third French Open, her second in two years, and a fourth Grand Slam title overall.

Cavaday is still in place 13 months later, an eternity compared to how long her previous coaches have lasted. Raducanu responds to his clarity of thinking and style of communication, with a focus on offering evidence and data to support what he is saying. Cavaday’s technical expertise also allows them to work on specific shots — especially the forehand and serve — which has been a key factor in Raducanu’s previous coaching decisions.

At this year’s Australian Open, the forehand has been potent, but the latter is a work in progress. Raducanu will meet her opponent on Saturday with the more settled team, as Swiatek eases into life with Wim Fissette. Fissette has coached former world No. 1 players Naomi Osaka, Kim Clijsters and Angelique Kerber, winning six Grand Slam titles in total, and looks to be returning Swiatek to the devastating but controlled aggression that has seen her dominate the sport. Her succession of too-similar defeats under former coach Tomasz Wiktorowski, in which she descended into a tailspin of overhitting groundstrokes in the face of peaking opponents, looks a long way away.

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Emotional intelligence, data, and tough love: Who is Wim Fissette the coach?

Swiatek is yet to suffer a defeat to Raducanu; Raducanu is yet to win a set against her. They crossed paths in 2024 for the third time after the Brit moved her ranking up from No. 285 at the start of the season to No. 58 by its close. She met Swiatek at the WTA 500 Stuttgart quarterfinal, which Swiatek won 7-6(2), 6-3.

Raducanu entered the tournament as a wildcard because she is a brand ambassador for Porsche, who also sponsor the event. Later in the year, Raducanu posted a picture of herself driving her £100,000 Porsche Cayenne after rumours spread that the company had taken back a car they’d gifted her when she was spotted taking a public bus in London. In December, Raducanu told a small group of reporters that she would cut down on sponsorship days.

Last year also brought that run to the Wimbledon fourth round, but it was overshadowed by her decision to withdraw from her mixed doubles with the retiring Andy Murray to protect her wrist ahead of her fourth-round match.

Raducanu felt she had no choice. Murray was gutted. His mother, Judy, called it “astonishing” on social media. Raducanu faced a lot of criticism for doing what most players would have done in the same situation before she said tennis “doesn’t feel different at all” when asked about Murray’s absence at the U.S. Open. She added that the way tennis works means that even someone like Murray moving on is “old news the next day.”

Even without that episode, Raducanu has faced challenges in connecting with the wider sporting public. In Melbourne, she spoke about the Murray situation in a less matter-of-fact way than previously.

“Afterwards, I sent him a long message, basically: ‘If I caused any trouble I guess at Wimbledon, that’s definitely the last thing I want,’” she told a small group of reporters.

“He’s someone that I’ve grown up looking up to and I don’t want any bad blood or harsh feelings with him.”

GO DEEPER

Emma Raducanu and Andy Murray make up, Joao Fonseca learns on the court: Australian Open takeaways

Raducanu is aware of the importance of an athlete’s public image and met with a group of British journalists for an interview and an informal lunch in December in which she explained some of her goals for 2025. After hiring fitness trainer Yutaka Nakamura, who has worked with Grand Slam champions and world No. 1s Maria Sharapova and Naomi Osaka, Raducanu said: “I think I can become one of the best athletes in tennis. I think he’s really going to help with that.”

At that time, Raducanu had only just returned from a couple of months out after spraining foot ligaments at the start of September. She’d had a tricky period before that, too, opting against trying to qualify for the pre-U.S. Open hard-court swing and then arriving at the U.S. Open undercooked.

In her pre-tournament news conference, Raducanu spoke of how good she was feeling, but after losing to Sofia Kenin, Raducanu cried in her post-match duties. “I feel down, I feel sad,” she said.

Raducanu arrived in Melbourne under similar circumstances after a back spasm picked up while tying her shoelaces meant she arrived at the Australian Open with no match practice.

Both of her victories to date, against No. 26 seed Ekaterina Alexandrova and then former French Open semifinalist Amanda Anisimova, have been scrappy but clutch when necessary. She has won her last eight tiebreaks, including two against Alexandrova. Her tweaked serve has been shaky, but she has relied on her ground game and worked through physical issues to shield the problems with her serve. Raducanu received treatment on her back when 0-3 down in the second set against Anisimova, before winning seven of the next nine games to take the match.

Emma Raducanu has been impressive during her first two matches in Melbourne. (Shi Tang / Getty Images)

Her defensive tennis was outstanding against Anisimova, hustling across the baseline to draw errors by forcing one more shot out of an increasingly erratic opponent.

“I was able to get to some balls that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to previously,” Raducanu said afterwards.

When asked about their divergent paths over the past few years, Swiatek was philosophical. “Everybody’s story is different and everybody struggles with different stuff,” she said in a news conference on Thursday.

The expectation is that Swiatek will be too strong, but being in the position to take on the world’s best players feels like an important step for Raducanu.

“When we’re going to be out there on the court, whoever is going to play better will win, and that’s it,” Swiatek said.

(Top photo: Robert Prange / Getty Images)

Culture

Book Review: ‘Scattergood,’ by H.M. Bouwman

Published

1 day ago

January 17, 2025

Press Room

SCATTERGOOD, by H.M. Bouwman

Narrated by 13-year-old Peggy Mott, part of a loving, tight-knit farm community, H.M. Bouwman’s new middle grade novel brims from the get-go with engaging details — the particulars of milking cows, snooping on telephone party lines, bathing without indoor plumbing — that pull us easily into the frugal yet comfortable world of West Branch, Iowa, in 1941.

But Peggy’s world is about to change.

In the same week that a dreamy 16-year-old German boy named Gunther arrives at Scattergood (a local Quaker school turned hostel for refugees fleeing the Nazis), she learns that her 14-year-old best friend and cousin, Delia, has been diagnosed with leukemia. In short order, Peggy’s interest in Gunther leads her to another man at the hostel, a Dutch professor whose family, like Gunther’s, is “disappeared.” (“Even I knew what disappeared meant,” Peggy notes ruefully. “Hitler. The war.”)

Just as “the Professor” (with a capital P) refuses to give up the search for his wife and children, Peggy decides she will find a way to save Delia, who’s back in the hospital. Never mind that when she goes in search of a treatment for her friend’s disease she discovers pretty quickly that there isn’t one.

As Peggy scours the local library and the nearby college town of Iowa City for a cure, and then turns briefly to prayer, life continues in West Branch. Social dynamics shift and teen affections are rebuffed. People quarrel while pumpkins grow round on thick green vines.

Meanwhile, Delia grows sicker as Peggy and the Professor play chess and unpack their respective pain.

This mingling of tragic plotlines might sound a little heavy for middle grade readers, but in fact these intersections are the greatest strength of the book.

On its surface, “Scattergood” is both a cancer novel and a Holocaust narrative, but rather than weigh each other down these threads create a sort of shared logic — because while cancer and the Holocaust signal looming devastation, Peggy and the Professor continue to search, if not for a happy ending then for meaning and comfort within their pain. There’s a symmetry to that.

As Peggy exhausts the usefulness of science and prayer, she struggles to help her sick friend.

She writes Delia a note each day, which keeps her connected and forces her to see her own world more clearly: “Birds are the most beautiful animals, don’t you think, Dee? (Except chickens.) … Come home soon, strong and healthy, so you can watch them with me in the field behind your house.”

But letters can’t stop cancer, so when Delia leaves the hospital she asks Peggy for a different kind of help: “Find out something that can make me feel better. More — more ready.”

This is where “Scattergood” truly shines, because on some level it investigates not only whether we can survive great loss, but also how.

When Peggy turns to the Professor for guidance, he offers no satisfying answers, only Hasidic tales he himself doesn’t seem to believe. Then, in a sudden twist, Peggy’s first kiss sends her running once more to him, just as he has received terrible news from home. Swallowed by grief, he fails her, and what results is a sort of unleashing, as Peggy reels and acts out, setting off a chain of shocking and disastrous events.

Honestly, I was unprepared for this plot turn — blindsided. But then I stopped to think: Isn’t that precisely what happens in moments of tragedy? We falter in ways we couldn’t have anticipated, and emotions spiral beyond our control.

What is the proper response to a child’s pain at a time when she is growing into herself, seeking both care and independence? “I wondered,” Peggy tells us, “if there was any comfort that could last and that could be enough and that could work perfectly, without ruining everything around it.”

But that isn’t the end of the book! As we all must do in the aftermath of disaster, Peggy wakes the next day, picks up the threads of her story and continues. There is still tragedy to face, only now she faces it with a little more wisdom. The fact that she can’t fix everything doesn’t mean she can’t fix anything. As the Professor has explained it, “Free will versus providence. The age-old paradox … something that seems like a contradiction — but might not be.”

In this spirit of paradox, the end of “Scattergood” feels more like a beginning. Peggy has only just begun to understand herself, her power, her responsibility to others, and the journey ahead. The novel closes not with a prayer but with “a picture of a prayer, the kind of prayer you might make if you hoped, against your better judgment, that someone was listening.”

“Scattergood” is a brave, beautiful book, wise enough to reach for something beyond certainty.