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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. So either they got to do worse or we have to do better.
– Ben Ogden, an arguably the American man with the best shot at a world championship podium.
We have to do better.
– Gus Schumacher, Ogden’s teammate and friend.
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.
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