Lake Placid – The most anticipated weekend of the winter is upon us with an Olympic cast of athletes competing in the Stifel World Cup Cross Country Ski Finals. These season ending races are set for March 20-22.
Simultaneously, the ECAC Men’s Hockey Championships will be played on March 20-21 with the winner headed to the NCAA Championships. Princeton, Cornell, Clarkson and Dartmouth have advanced to Lake Placid.
In the case of the ski event to be held at Mt. Van Hoevenberg, much more will be evident than a collection of elite racers battling for season-long World Cup honors. That fact alone is drawing headlines in the ski world as the long season concludes in the United States for the first time in International Ski Federation history.
But now let’s add a group of competitors who wrote their own stories last month at the Winter Olympics in Italy.
American Jessie Diggins, the most successful cross-country skier in team history, has brought her four Olympic medals to Upstate New York to go along with three World Cup overall titles and seven World Championship medals. Her most recent Olympic achievement was bronze in Italy.
Diggins will end her storied career this weekend, and the Lake Placid faithful, including thousands of local and regional cross-country skiers and fans of the sport, are poised to give her a memorable and deserving send-off. This is set for Sunday at 4:30 in the cross-country stadium at Mt. Van Hoevenberg. It’s an event termed Last Lap celebrating Diggins and other retiring World Cup skiers.
Several of Diggins teammates are bringing Olympic medals of their own to the Lake Placid finals. Ben Ogden won an individual silver in February, and then teamed with Gus Schumacher for another silver medal before their Games concluded.
Searching for international stars is not difficult as Norway leads the field year after year in these Nordic events. The best of them is Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo (cover image), the most successful individual athlete in the Winter Olympics with 11 gold medals. Klaebo collected six of them just a few weeks ago in Val di Fiemme. However, there was some drama with Klaebo in the lead-in to Lake Placid.
On March 12, in a World Cup race in Norway, he collided with Ogden. Klaebo went down and suffered a concussion. He was a questionable participant in Lake Placid until several days ago when he confirmed his entry in the Adirondacks.
One special Olympic alumnus appearing in Lake Placid is Thomas Wassberg. The Swede was part of the closest cross country ski race in Olympic history when he defeated Juha Mieto of Finland in the 15-kilometer event here in Lake Placid. Wassberg’s margin of victory in 1980 was a scant .01 of a second over the 9.3-mile distance.
He’s not the lone Olympian from the past to be honored. The Mirror Lake Inn’s Andrew Weibrecht, now VP and Operations Manager of the AAA Four Diamond inn, captured silver and bronze medals in alpine skiing’s Super G. Weibrecht will be duly celebrated in the regional alumni group on Friday at 11:30 AM.
The weekend activities bring us to the cusp of ending the winter sports season in this Adirondack destination. But as the world’s top athletes depart in a few days, we are reminded that recreational skiers, be they Nordic or alpine, can make use of the same trails used by the best from yesterday and today. This is a statement that Lake Placid doesn’t take lightly, and an idea we hope you will consider.
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All images provided