Olympic Trainers

Long ago, I would occasionally get together with my friend Jeff at the Alaska Club and we would pump a little iron together.  Jeff was a lot stronger than I was because he'd pumped a lot more iron in his time than I had in mine. While I had been spending my days skiing around in the forest, Jeff had been the starting center on a Division 1 college basketball team, and basketball is a sport where they pump a lot of iron. Another reason he was stronger than me was because he was (and is) six feet nine inches tall.  And it just seems natural to me that someone so big and tall is going to pump more iron than someone who was a foot shorter and weighs about half as much.

Nevertheless, because I'd once been on an Olympic Team, and because Jeff was better at pumping iron than me, and because it was natural for Jeff to show me new techniques for pumping more iron, he always went around telling everyone around us at the gym that he was an "Olympic Trainer". If you knew (or know) Jeff and his general demeanor, you'll know that it was pretty damn funny when he went around mentioning offhandedly to everyone within earshot in the gym that he was an "Olympic Trainer".

Here's Jeff. In Prince William Sound. I think we were doing summer biathlon training.

But Jeff isn't the only Olympic Trainer I know.  Andrew Kastning is now, as of last week, an Olympic Trainer.  And even Marine Dusser, in her very first year as a college ski coach, is an Olympic Trainer too! That's because our own Seawolf Casey Wright was named to the Australian Olympic Team last week, making both of our Seawolf ski coaches Olympic Trainers!

Skippy has come a long way to make this dream a reality. Growing up in the Yarra Valley, known mostly for its chardonnay, it was a long drive for skiing with the family on weekends during Australia's relatively short winters. Eventually she got to the point where she knew that if she was going to really improve, she would need to leave home and follow the snow - in the northern hemisphere for our winters and then returning to Australia for their own winters. By Skippy's account, she had strung together eight straight winters without a summer by the time she joined us here in Alaska a couple years ago and enjoyed a little warm summer weather for a change. Since coming to Alaska, she has improved steadily, and recently started thinking that if she could continue to improve, she could potentially make the 2022 Olympic Team. But last spring, after a couple of particularly good sprint races, it started to seem that perhaps qualifying for this Olympic Team might be a possibility. She put all her effort into the summer dryland training season, working out with APU - a team that has a lot of skiers on the '18 Olympic team, including Skippy's Australian Olympic teammate Jessica Yeaton. Several of APU's skiers are legitimate medal contenders, including Kikkan Randall and former Seawolves Sadie Bjornsen and Erik Bjornsen. Obviously, it never hurts to spend the summer training for the Olympics with medal contenders.

During the fall I could sense Skippy's excitement for, and nervousness about, the coming racing season. She knew she had a good chance of qualifying for the Olympics, but she also knew that she was going to have to improve over the previous year and that an Olympic berth was not hers to lose. Rather, it was hanging out there - a possibility - but she was going to have to put all the pieces together if she was going to get that spot. There were questions about what avenue for qualification would be most prudent, as there were a limited number of opportunities to meet the qualifying criteria and she would have to make some tricky choices about where and when to race. And there was the question of whether it would be more likely to qualify via distance races or sprint races; Skippy thought meeting the criteria would be more likely via the "distance" route. But at a FIS sprint race in Fairbanks just before Christmas, she met the standard and suddenly things were looking really encouraging. I'll always remember driving the team van up the hill to the DiFolco's house in Fairbanks through falling snow, a couple hours after that race. I asked Skippy, who was sitting in the back seat, whether her race had qualified her for the Olympics. She responded, very hesitantly, that in fact it had. But it was obvious that she didn't want to celebrate it or discuss it too much, because she didn't dare start thinking that she was headed to the Olympics just yet. I could tell that she was excited, but was trying her hardest not to count her chickens before they'd hatched, and was determined to keep her thoughts in check and avoid getting carried away with a bunch of Olympic daydreams, in case things didn't work out in the end. So I tried to avoid bringing the topic up with her over the next month, regardless of how curious I was about her standing. Skippy knew things were looking very promising, but didn't want to let herself believe it until the official naming of the team last week. 

I know Skippy gets a little homesick from time to time, but she has said many times that coming to Alaska has been a critical ingredient for her improvement and her recent Olympic Team qualification. Having found it necessary to live several different places to follow her athletic dreams over the years, she's got groups of friends and family on two continents claiming her as "our Olympian." 

Congratulations to the Olympic Trainers, Andrew and Marine! And congratulations to Casey Wright. It's quite an accomplishment to become one of the very best athletes in your country and wear the national colors in the Olympics. Very few people have the talent, the desire, and the work ethic to become an Olympic athlete. Casey ought to be very proud of this accomplishment. Her teammates, coaches and friends certainly are!