Anchorage’s Luke Jager earned his third straight classic sprint national championship on Saturday, finishing atop an all-Alaska podium at Kincaid Park.

Jager, a member of the APU Elite Team, cruised into the 1.4K finals, winning quarterfinal and semifinal heats. He led most of the finals race, before Norwegian collegiate skier Andreas Kirkeng gained some steam on a downhill draft and passed Jager in the final stretch.

Jager’s time of 2 minutes, 55.93 seconds earned him the national title as the top American. APU teammate Michael Earnhart finished just a second and a half behind Jager, and UAA’s Murphy Kimball rounded out the top three Americans.

“Mike is a teammate and good friend,” Jager said. “So seeing him in the final, as cool as a cucumber and playing his cards right and being there at the right time, was awesome. Murphy, or Big Al as we affectionately call him, is super strong. He’s a young guy and is really impressive.”

It was the third straight national championship in the event for Jager. In 2023, he finished behind a pair of Norwegian collegiate skiers as the top American. And last year in Utah, he topped the podium with Earnhart coming in third.

Jager, a 2022 Olympian, has put an emphasis on effort in recent national championships and is glad the results have followed.

“You always try your best,” he said. “You can get really in the weeds with these things and think a lot about what it would mean to succeed or not succeed. At the end of the day, you just try your hardest and things usually work themselves out.”

Earnhart continued to improve his finishes on the national level, posting his best finish in a national championship to date. He said being part of the all-Alaska podium was a cool moment.

“It’s the people you see all summer training and all fall, so it’s good to be up there together,” he said. “We’ve all skied this course a lot, so it’s nice to have that home course make a difference.”

The podium finish completed an incredible year for Kimball, a former West High standout who is a freshman with the Seawolves. At 17, he competed in a World Cup race, the youngest American to qualify for such a race. By virtue of his podium finish in the open division, he also earned a junior national championship.

“I had a great year of training and I started college and it was a huge transition and a lot of new things,” Kimball said. “But I’ve just been doing the job every day and today is just incredible.”

Jager posted the two fastest times of the day. His 2:55.48 was a hundredth of a second faster than Kirkeng’s final time. Jager’s semifinal time of 2:53.28 was just two hundredths ahead of Kirkeng, who was skiing for Denver University. Kirkeng finished runner-up in the semifinal heat behind Jager.

Jager was strong early in each race, and while he knew there was a chance he’d get drafted at the end, he wanted to be clear of the pack if possible.

“This hill notoriously doesn’t have that big of a draft,” he said. “Usually if you’ve got good speed and you’re out in front, you usually stay in front.”

Jager grew up in Anchorage and has enjoyed racing in front of a home crowd on familiar turf. He placed third among Americans in Thursday’s freestyle 10K race.

“It was sweet to see so many people braving what is feeling right now like really cold weather,” he said. “It’s cool to be out here and part of the community.”

On the women’s side, Samantha Smith earned a national championship, finishing third in her heat behind a pair of international skiers.

Swede Erica Laven, skiing for the University of Utah, won the finals heat in a time of 3:25.03. Former UAF All-American Mariel Merlii Pulles, representing Team Birkie, finished in second.

Smith, who has competed at the World Cup level for the U.S., isn’t a one-sport star. She is in the midst of her freshman year at Stanford, where she competes on the university soccer team with her sister Logan.

She said the agility, balance and strength needed for soccer crossed over into skiing.

“There are some components that help a lot with skiing,” she said.

But she only had 10 days on skis going into the weekend’s action.

“It was definitely an interesting fall and this was the first time I was able to only focus on one thing,” she said. “Going into here, I only had 10 days on skis, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect at all.”

Smith was a winner in the sprint race at last year’s Super Tour stop in Anchorage and is a fan of Kincaid Park’s Gong Hill, which catapults racers cruising into the final straightaway at the finish.

“That is one of my favorites,” she said.

Action continues Sunday with a 20K mass start race, beginning with men at 11 a.m., women at 12:30 p.m. and U20 starting at 2 p.m.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy is in the last two years of his two terms as governor. He must be thinking of his legacy, of what he accomplished.

It’s time for all of us to give the governor a report card, too. Like a student in the final semester, it’s not too late to bring up the grade.

What’s on the legacy ledger so far? I see three negatives, one partly corrected. This was the governor’s disastrous first-term budget cuts, when he took a meat ax to state programs and the University of Alaska.

I think the new governor got bad advice. He changed out his advisers and reversed course on many of the cuts. He is now supporting the university, for example, in restoring its funding. But the damage was done.

Two other blemishes are still on Dunleavy’s ledger. One is his refusal, so far, to increase school funding to offset several years of inflation. He has agreed to one-time increments of money, but that doesn’t count. We can’t hire teachers with one-time money.

A second stain on the ledger is Dunleavy’s ambivalence toward repairing public-sector pensions. There is an exodus of skilled state and local government workers who are recruited to other states with better benefits and salaries.

But the governor has some positives, too. One is his record on energy. He has strongly supported innovations, alternative energy and conservation. His annual conferences on energy — another one is planned in June — have attracted a lot of attention.

I’m impressed with a focused drive in Dunleavy’s administration to establish carbon sequestration, both forest-based and by underground injection and storage. These will help the planet by storing carbon dioxide, a leading cause of climate change. They also give Alaska industries a way to burnish their image among major financiers who score their loans for management of carbon emissions.

The carbon programs are complex and it took a sustained, two-year push by the governor and his Department of Natural Resources to get buy-in from the Legislature.

Another plus for Dunleavy: The streamlining, long-delayed, of regulation of long-distance power transmission. That will make larger regional renewable energy projects possible because new power can be moved through the grid with less delay.

This took another two-year push to get the Legislature’s buy-in, and this time the governor’s office led the effort along with the Alaska Energy Authority. Getting Alaska’s utilities to work together was an accomplishment. It was like herding cats.

So far on the report card: Two positives and three negatives, one partly repaired (the big budget cut).

There’s still time for Dunleavy to repair his record on school funding and pensions. Another legislative session looms. However, I see potential for a third positive for the governor in his advocacy of food security and agriculture. Dunleavy has always talked about food security, and this year he has a proposal for a new state Department of Agriculture.

This has prompted some head-scratching because many Alaskans don’t even know we have farms and many children don’t understand where food really comes from.

The governor talks about food security, but I think of agriculture for its economic development potential. There’s business here, and jobs.

We now have a small agriculture industry that’s highly regional, in the Mat-Su, Kenai Peninsula and Interior Alaska, and it really springs to life in summer. Farmers are the ultimate entrepreneurs as the vibrant summer farmers markets in many parts of the state demonstrate.

Can we build on the energy and entrepreneurship Alaskans show in those farmers markets? They prove Alaskans will buy locally made products and pay a premium for fresh and quality food.

Consumers show this nationwide, too. I think Dunleavy is on to something.

What could a Department of Agriculture do that our present Division of Agriculture, now part of the Department of Natural Resources, doesn’t do? The division, which is based in Palmer, does a lot now. Its Plant Materials Center does research on crops and inspects for the quality of food products. The division also administers loans for farmers.

But the Department of Natural Resources has a lot of other things on its plate. DNR looks after oil and gas, mining, forest firefighting and caretaking of Alaska’s 100 million acres of state lands.

Plucking a division out of a department with a lot on its plate can have benefits. We saw this when the governor reorganized the former Department of Health and Social Services into two new departments. The new Department of Health was able to focus attention on public health.

Raising the profile for farming (this includes ocean farming, or mariculture) has benefits in focusing attention in the Legislature. I saw this in the last legislative session when several worthy farm-related bills didn’t get the attention they deserved.

“Food security” is a nice goal, but is it just a sound-bite? Some worry about this because Dunleavy has talked agriculture before and not much seems to happen. Just creating a new state department won’t change anything without specific plans, and budgets.

I have a list of things the governor could do. It starts with making sure food banks and food assistance have support. Dunleavy could also press school districts to buy healthy local food rather than the processed stuff kids are fed.

Also on my list: Jaw-boning managers of big grocery chains so they’ll give locally grown products more shelf space over their own corporate food brands. Alaskans will buy local, but they need to see the products on store shelves.

I remember when we had dairy farms in the Mat-Su and Interior. Juneau once had its own dairy. Alaska-made milk was in the stores. Now we have corporate dairies in the Pacific Northwest supplying our milk. The worst part of this is that imported milk often goes sour, even before the “sell by” date on the milk carton.

We must do better if we really want food security.

Tim Bradner is publisher of the Alaska Economic Report and Alaska Legislative Digest.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – After days of intense cold and sometimes dangerous wind chills, a warm-up is on the way for Alaska by early next week. Anchorage will go from daytime highs in the teens to highs in the mid-30s and a chance of rain and snow.

While the Interior will warm up, it probably won’t get above freezing anytime soon. Expect temperatures to warm to near 20 degrees by Tuesday of next week.

Before then the clear skies mean better chances to view the Aurora. The aurora forecast shows times for Friday and Saturday with KP index of 4 to 5, meaning active aurora. Don’t forget! We love to see your best photos and videos (or the aurora or just our beautiful state). Upload them at Alaska’s News Source.com.

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