Kikkan Randall, a game-changer for American cross-country ski racing, has been selected for induction in the U.S. National Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame.

The Olympic gold medalist from Anchorage is part of the Class of 2025 announced Monday. The induction ceremony is April 11 in Snowbird, Utah.

“I’m feeling pride, I’m feeling honored, I’m feeling humbled,” Randall, 42, said on Tuesday. “In some ways I feel like I’m still too young to be at this point.”

It’s a deserving reward. Randall was a trailblazer during a career that spanned five Olympics, beginning with her appearance as a teenager at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and culminating with her gold medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics.

She recorded multiple “firsts” for the U.S. Ski Team, which for decades was an afterthought in cross-country ski racing. Her success and her personality — a perfect blend of confidence, competitiveness and camaraderie — turned the women’s team into an international force.

“I think the best way to describe it is the fact it opened the door to possibility,” Randall said.

Always the generous teammate, Randall credited some of her male counterparts — Kris Freeman, Carl Swenson, Andy Newell — for cracking the door open.

“They had started to show it was possible, and that definitely inspired me,” she said.

Randall found initial success in sprint racing — she was a three-time World Cup overall sprint champion — and became the leader of a women’s team that started to turn heads in the 2010s. Being one of the top skiers in the world “empowered my younger teammates,” she said.

“I’m just so excited for the fact we have more athletes believing what’s possible.”

Randall collected 29 World Cup medals, three World Championship medals and one historic Olympic medal in 17 years. In one of her final races, she teamed up with Jessie Diggins of Minnesota to win the team sprint at the 2018 Winter Olympics — America’s first gold medal in cross-country skiing.

She remains involved in the sport as the executive director of the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage.

She’s the sixth person either from Alaska or with strong Alaska ties selected to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame. The Hall was created in 1956 and has nearly 500 inductees, ranging from champion skiers to influential coaches to equipment manufacturers to marketing and media representatives.

Other Alaskans in the shrine, in order of their induction:

• Sven Johanson, 1975. Johanson excelled in numerous sports while growing up in Sweden and came to Alaska as a young man in 1951, but he’s best known for nordic skiing, biathlon and mountain running. He was a 1960 Olympian in skiing, and from 1961-73 he headed the U.S. Army’s national biathlon training center at Fort Richardson, where he coached numerous Olympians. He was a six-time Mount Marathon winner who twice broke the course record, with his 1957 victory breaking a mark that had stood for nearly 30 years.
• Tommy Moe, 2003. Moe stunned the world at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, where he won gold in the downhill and silver in the super-G. He earned seven World Cup medals and two World Junior medals during a decade-long career that included three Olympic appearances.
• Hilary Lindh, 2005. Lindh claimed a silver medal in the downhill at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, and finished her career with a complete set of mega-event medals — gold at the 1997 World Championships, silver at the Olympics and bronze at the 1996 World Championships. A two-time Olympian, she was at the top of her game when she retired a year before the 1998 Olympics.
• Doug Coombs, 2009. A pioneer in extreme and high-altitude skiing, Coombs was a two-time World Extreme Skiing Champion, with his first title coming in the inaugural event in 1991 in Valdez. In 1993, he and his wife, Emily, founded Valdez Heli-Ski Guides, one of the first heli-ski operations in the Chugach Mountain. Coombs, who sold the business in 2002, died in 2006 at age 48 when he fell from a cliff while skiing in the French Alps.
• Alison Owen, 2020. A star at Alaska Methodist University during the 1970s, Owen won the first World Cup race staged for women in 1978 at Telemark, Wisconsin, a feat no other American woman matched until Randall won a 2007 World Cup race in Russia. A two-time Olympian, Owen emerged as a top talent at AMU (now Alaska Pacific University), where she trained with coach Jim Mahaffey for several years during the 1970s.

Joining Randall in the eight-member Class of 2025:

• Chris Cushing, a ski resort planner from New Hampshire;
• Doug Pringle of California, a force in the development of adaptive skiing;
• Hugh Harley, a key industry leader for more than three decades at Rossignol and Nordica;
• Lindsey Van, a ski jumping pioneer from Utah who in 2009 won the first world championship held for women;
• Nancy Gustafson of Massachusetts, a three-time Paralympian who collected seven gold medals and three silver medals from 1988-94;
• Raelene Davis, marketing chief of Ski Utah for 40 years;
• Todd Richards, an X Games champion and member of the first U.S. Olympic halfpipe team in 1998. He’s been a television commentator for snowboarding at every Olympics since 2006.