In skiing, where 'champions pull up champions,' U.S. women ahead of the men

Not to be too cheeky, but it’s getting a little awkward for the American men who make their living on Alpine and Nordic skis.

At the recently completed Alpine world championships, the American women captured four medals, two of them gold. The men left Saalbach, Austria, empty-handed.

Now cross-country skiing’s world championships are underway in Trondheim, Norway. While the women, led by Olympic and world champion Jessie Diggins, seem like a good bet to collect some hardware, the men haven’t landed on the podium at an Olympics or world championships since Bill Koch won the bronze medal in the 30-kilometer race at worlds in 1982.

And as much as the U.S. Nordic skiers compete and travel as a single team, the boys know the Koch data point better than anyone, and they don’t really want to hear about it for too much longer.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a rivalry, but as a men’s team, we aspire to do as well as the women do,” Ben Ogden, arguably the American man with the best shot at a world championship podium, said during a conference call with reporters from Norway this week. “So either they got to do worse or we have to do better.”

At this point, Ogden’s teammate and close friend, Gus Schumacher, chimed in. “We have to do better.”

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The skiers aren’t alone.

At the Summer Games in Paris last year, American women accounted for 67 of the country’s 126 medals. It was the fourth consecutive Summer Olympics where the American women outperformed the men.

In the Winter Games, American women have flipped the script during the past two decades. In Torino in 2006, U.S. men won 16 medals compared with eight for women. By 2014, the women had drawn even at 13 medals each. They pulled ahead in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018. And in Beijing in 2022, American women won 13 medals compared with eight for the men. And that was with Mikaela Shiffrin, the greatest skier of all time, suffering through the worst major competition of her career and winning no medals of any color at all. The U.S. also won four medals in mixed events.

It’s possible that Olympic sports are merely a reflection of one more data point in female performance on a wider scale. Women account for 58 percent of college students in the U.S., a gap that has widened in recent years. And they achieve more success while there.

According to a report last year from the Pew Research Center, 47 percent of women between the ages of 25-34 have attained their undergraduate degrees. Just 37 percent of men have. For women, that figure has climbed 22 percentage points since 1995, the Pew report found. The figure for men has risen just 12 percentage points.

But we digress. Back to the snow sports, which will move to center stage in the American sports consciousness next year as the Olympics get underway in Italy. And the person in charge of putting together the best possible team of skiers on the planet is Anouk Patty, a former collegiate skiing champion and business executive who is the chief of sport performance for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team.

Ben Ogden, right, competes Thursday at worlds. He and Gus Schumacher lead one of the strongest U.S. men’s cross-country teams in years. (Lars Baron / Getty Images)

Patty has thought long and hard about the gender gap in skiing, and she has plenty of thoughts on the matter — and on how to get the men up to where the women are right now.

Her first thought is the U.S. has long had a built-in advantage in women’s sports called Title IX, the landmark 1972 Civil Rights law that prohibited denying women the benefits of education programs based on sex. That meant schools had to offer sports programs for girls, and it jump-started a major cultural shift. Countless parents now wanted and expected their daughters to play sports just as their sons did.

That shift created a generation of female sports stars, from Serena Williams in tennis, to Angela Ruggiero in hockey, to Julie Foudy in soccer. Another generation of girls grew up watching and being inspired by them.

“Now those young girls are young women,” Patty said, “and a lot of other countries are just catching up, because for years we were one of the only countries where large numbers of girls, played organized sports.”

As it pertains to Patty’s sport, Alpine skiing, she said the women’s team has had a legacy of torch-passing. Picabo Street begat Lindsey Vonn, who has helped beget Lauren Macuga, a breakout star this season in the speed events and one of three sisters who should compete for the U.S. in snow events next year in Italy. Ally Macuga competes in moguls and Sam is a ski jumper.

Vonn, who has come out of retirement at 40 following partial knee replacement surgery and is back on the World Cup circuit, has a house in Park City, Utah, and spoke regularly with the younger members of the team, including Macuga, as she plotted her comeback. She has become a mentor to the younger skiers, as have Jackie Wiles and Breezy Johnson.

Shiffrin needed a little less coddling. She started winning championships when she was 16. She’s been the mentor and friend to her own cohort, including Paula Moltzan and Johnson, who are peaking now at just the right time. Johnson won her first top-level race this month, taking the downhill at the world championships.

The women, Patty said, have been a little better than the men at buying into what she described as “a culture where champions pull up champions.”

Chloe Kim, the two-time gold medalist in snowboarding at 24, invited Bea Kim, the team’s 18-year-old rising star, to train with her in Switzerland ahead of the season.

Kikkan Randall, the Olympic and world champion cross-country skier of the 2000s and 2010s, mentored Diggins, who is now doing the same for Sophia Laukli, 24, and Sammy Smith, 19. She has also done plenty of mentoring to Ogden and Schumacher, who are a decade her junior.

Lindsey Vonn, right, talks with Lauren Macuga after Macuga’s World Cup win in St. Anton, Austria, in January. Vonn is back on the team at age 40. (Joe Klamar / AFP via Getty Images)

The male Alpine skiers haven’t benefitted in the same way. The biggest men’s star of the past two decades, Bode Miller, was always a bit of a lone rider. Even during his career, he spent some seasons traveling separately from U.S. skiing, which he didn’t feel adequately supported its athletes. In retirement, he is busy parenting five young children.

Ted Ligety, the other big star of the previous generation, has also been less involved in mentoring the skiers who came after him than his female counterparts.

That’s been unfortunate, Patty said, because both Miller and Ligety shared a love and fascination with the sport that was infectious. They approached their craft with curiosity. They played and experimented with skis and training techniques in ways that junior skiers she has seen coming into the program don’t naturally do.

“The young ones are not as obsessed with it yet as those two were,” Patty said. “Bode had wacky ideas about conditioning, like dragging tires up hills. But no one was stronger on the World Cup. These guys have to embrace working out, and Bode and Ted did that really well.”

She said she has been trying to impress that idea on coaches at the club level, to help them understand what the expectations are and show young skiers how to get there.

It’s going to take time, she said. The men’s team coaching staff has turned over in recent years. And it takes a little while for the trust to settle in.

“If you believe in the idea that champions breed champions, we don’t have that with the men as much,” Patty said, especially in slalom and giant slalom, the technical races. “We need some strong super successful male athletes to pull up that next generation.”

And some good luck could help, too. Four different women landed on the podium during the Alpine world championships — Johnson, Shiffrin, Moltzan and Macuga. All were healthy enough to compete, hardly a guarantee in a sport with a 100 percent injury rate. Shiffrin was still recovering from a puncture wound suffered during a violent tumble in November and did not win an individual race, but she and Johnson took the gold medal in the team combined.

Perhaps Ogden can have the same good fortune. He had the flu 10 days ago but said he was recovered heading into the world championships. Not ideal, he said, but better than last year, when he had mononucleosis and had to cut his season short, or getting the flu during the competition.

“It turns out you don’t get to decide when you’re sick,” he said.

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(Top photo of Jessie Diggins competing Thursday in women’s sprint qualification at the world championships in Trondheim, Norway: Lars Baron / Getty Images)