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Truckee teenager stamps ticket to Scandinavian Cup

Ambrose Tuscano
Special to the Sun
Hannah Halvorsen, a 16-year-old Sugar Bowl Academy skier, qualified at U.S. Nationals to compete in the Scandinavian Cup in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden.
Courtesy Christopher Schmidt |

For American Nordic ski racers, U.S. Nationals is the one event each year that has the highest stakes and the fiercest competition. The weeklong, four-race event features the best American skiers vying for a rare chance to represent their country at the next level of racing.

For 16-year-old Sugar Bowl Academy student Hannah Halvorsen, U.S. Nationals was her one opportunity to join an elite delegation of American junior skiers to race against the best of their peers from all across northern Europe.

If she ranked as one of the top six girls in her under-18 age group after the first three races, she would qualify for the Scandinavian Cup competition in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden, in February.



Even though Halvorsen had qualified for the Scandinavian Cup trip the previous year, she was by no means guaranteed to make the trip again in 2015. With three races in five days determining the team, there was little room for error.

To make the challenge even more daunting, qualifying for the Scandinavian Cup wasn’t actually Halvorsen’s goal.



“Last spring, I told my coaches that I wanted to qualify for World Juniors,” she said.

World Juniors is the equivalent international competition to the Scandinavian Cup for skiers under age 20.

With big goals in the back of her head, Halvorsen found herself heading to U.S. Nationals in Houghton, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, during what was an extraordinary cold snap even in that frigid section of the country.

Temperatures were below zero each day, occasionally rising into the positive single digits.

Adjusting from balmy California weather might have made Halvorsen’s first race, a 10-kilometer freestyle, particularly difficult. She finished in a respectable 34 minutes, 25 seconds, but this was only good enough for 12th on in the early Scandinavian Cup rankings and 21st in the World Junior rankings.

Rather than being discouraged by her first race at U.S. Nationals, Halvorsen focused on the second race of the week, a classic sprint.

Sprints in Nordic skiing are actually several races rolled into one. In the first round each athlete skis a course of roughly 1.5 kilometers against the clock. Based on this preliminary round, athletes are ranked, and the 30 fastest advance to a second round, called quarterfinals.

In the quarterfinals, six athletes race the same course simultaneously. Only the top two in each quarterfinal heat are guaranteed to move on to the semifinals, where they compete yet again to decide who will make the A Final, racing for the top six places, and who will compete for places seven through 12 in the B Final.

In the preliminary round, Halvorsen finished 23rd overall, one of just four girls under 18 to advance to the quarterfinals. If her day had ended in the quarterfinal, it would have been a great result, and would have gotten her close to her goal of qualifying for the World Juniors trip.

However, Halvorsen wasn’t finished. Instead, she won her quarterfinal heat handily and moved on to a guaranteed top-12 finish, one of only three athletes under 20 still racing in the semifinals.

Still, Halvorsen wasn’t finished. In her semifinal heat, she finished a close second to former U.S. Ski Team member Rosie Brennan, thus advancing to the A Final. This time it was Halvorsen versus five women in their 20s, the second youngest a college senior.

Never mind that this would be her fourth time racing around this course in the frigid air. Like a true competitor, Halvorsen gave it everything she had, which was good enough for fifth place, heady results for a junior at U.S. Nationals.

“I definitely surprised myself by performing better than I believed I was capable of,” Halvorsen said afterward. “It was an exciting and somewhat surreal experience to ski right alongside some of the fastest girls in the country and make it to an A Final at the national level.”

Her coach, Martin Benes, who was with her in Houghton, said, “Hannah’s results at Nationals this year showed an improved consistency in her skiing and, equally important, big gains tactically and technically.”

He pointed to her performance in the sprint heats as the result of time spent practicing for exactly those situations. “She pushes herself all summer and fall for weeks like this,” he said.

Of course, even with one tremendous race under her belt, Halvorsen’s week was only halfway over. She still needed an adequate showing in the next event, the 5-kilometer classic, to secure her spot on either the Scandinavian Cup or World Junior trip, and then there was one more sprint race — in freestyle technique this time — to cap off the week.

Fortunately for Halvorsen, she was the fifth junior finisher in the 5K classic race, which not only earned her the first spot on the Scandinavian Cup trip, but also put her as the second qualifier for World Juniors.

Having achieved her big goal for the year, Halvorsen did two things that may appear surprising to many. First, she turned down the invitation to World Juniors, opting instead to return to the Scandinavian Cup trip for a second year. Halvorsen explained that she chose these races because she believes they’ll give her the opportunity to become a better skier.

“I hope that having a feel for these races will help guide me on how to ski at this level,” she said.

Factoring into her decision to turn down a trip to World Juniors was the fact that two familiar Truckee-area coaches would be accompanying the American delegation to the Scandinavian Cup races: Benes and former Truckee junior skier and current Alaska Pacific University assistant coach Sam Sterling.

The second surprising thing Halvorsen did was enter the final race at U.S. Nationals in spite of having competed in three intense races already that week.

In the freestyle sprint she again acquitted herself admirably, qualifying in sixth place overall, and eventually skiing into the semifinals, where she earned ninth place.

“I believe that competing at high levels is a great opportunity for every athlete because there is so much to learn from people who are faster, stronger and more experienced than you,” Halvorsen said.

Halvorsen’s success at U.S. Nationals has turned heads all across the country, but especially in the Truckee/Tahoe region where she lives, skis and studies.

Former Olympian Nordic skier Marcus Nash, also a Truckee local, said she “has proven that she has what it takes to be a top skier.” When asked about precedents for Halvorsen’s results on the national stage at age 16, he threw out a couple of names of American female skiers who had similar success at a young age: Nina Kemppel and Kikkan Randall, two of the most competitive Nordic skiers ever to hail from the United States.


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