Fairbanks skier Ari Endestad turns 25 this week, and until this month more than five years had passed since he last climbed a podium as a top-three finisher in a significant cross-country ski race.

He waited even longer to earn a podium finish in a SuperTour race.

So waiting an extra 10 or 15 minutes to learn if he’d won a photo-finish to capture his first SuperTour victory was not an ordeal. He bided his time happily and without stress, knowing that win or lose he had just registered his career-best result.

Endestad eked out the narrowest of victories — .01 of a second — by out-lunging Zach Jayne of the University of Utah at the finish line of the SuperTour freestyle sprint final last Friday at Kincaid Park. Several minutes passed before race officials declared Endestad the winner.”

“I honestly thought that Zach had out-lunged me,” Endestad said this week. “After the finish I was asking around what people thought and no one had a clear opinion either way, it was just too close to call.

“I felt happy either way and wasn’t too stressed waiting it out. I knew it was still my top performance at a SuperTour ever, either 2nd or 1st. When I heard Adam Verrier over the PA announcing the (technical delegate’s) decision for the winner in a dramatic drawn-out fashion, I knew I had it.”

The triumph capped a successful start to the season for Endestad, who grew up in Fairbanks but has spent the last few winters in Anchorage racing for UAA and, after graduating from college, for APU’s elite ski team.

He placed third in a classic sprint Dec. 6 at Kincaid, marking his first time on a SuperTour podium. Two weeks earlier, he won an FIS 10-kilometer freestyle race at Kincaid Park, beating a strong field that included many of the SuperTour racers who spent much of December in Anchorage.

Endestad’s last podium finish in a big race came at the 2020 U.S. Junior Nationals, where he claimed the 10K classic title. He advanced to senior-level racing after that, and although he registered maybe a dozen top-10 finishes at the SuperTour level, podium results eluded him.

Until now.

“I think the podium results are a testament to what the APU Nordic Ski Center Elite team has been building through our training group this past summer and for many years before that,” he said. “I’m surrounded by the same guys that push me everyday in practice on the SuperTour podium. It’s pretty awesome. Lots of good laps with these guys on Eagle Glacier this summer.”

On the day of his sprint victory, Endestad was one of four APU skiers to make the six-man final. Michael Earnhart took the bronze medal, Hunter Wonders placed fifth and Derek Richardson was sixth.

The week before when he grabbed third place in the classic sprint, three APU skiers and one UAA skier made it to the six-man final. UAA’s Erling Bjoernstad was the winner, followed by Earnhart, Endestad, Wonders and two skiers from the Bridger Ski Foundation club in Bozeman, Montana — fifth-place Reid Goble and sixth-place Graham Houtsma.

“I’m just super thrilled to be skiing well at home right now with so many friends, teammates and supporters around me,” Endestad said. “I’ve been waiting a long time for days like these so to have it all come together over these past weeks has been really special.”

Next up for Endestad and other Alaska skiers are the U.S. National Championships in Lake Placid, New York, where some berths for February’s Winter Olympics will be at stake.

Endestad sits in fifth place in the men’s SuperTour standings, fourth among Americans. Wonders, who won both 10K races and was top-five in both sprint races at Kincaid, is the leader, followed by Earnhart, Jayne, Bjoernstad (who is from Norway) and Endestad.

Swirbul back on top

Now you see her, now you don’t. Now she’s back again.

Retirement didn’t last long for Hailey Swirbul, the APU skier who quit world-class skiing after a successful 2022-23 season that saw her make the podium in a World Cup relay race.

She lasted about two years in retirement, during which she earned a private pilot license, worked as a civil engineer-in-training (her words) at an Anchorage firm and did some ski patrolling in Colorado and some coaching in Anchorage.

She returned to elite skiing this season, and she’s chronicling her journey in The Daily Hailey, an engaging and well-written blog on Substack (haileyswirbul.substack.com).

In four SuperTour races this month at Kincaid Park, she reached the podium three times — as the winner (by more than a minute) of the 10-kilometer classic on Dec. 14, as the bronze medalist in the freestyle sprint Dec. 12 and as the silver medalist in the classic sprint on Dec. 6.

Here’s an excerpt from her blog, where she talks about her third-place freestyle sprint finish:

“My body started to feel a little bit better each heat, which was nice, but the really fun part was getting to be in a skate sprint heat with a bunch of fast women where people were stepping on each others’ skis or poles or boxing someone out or forcing someone to take the wider line or slingshotting past someone after tucking in the draft or skiing technical corners elbow to elbow with other competitors, all to result in a sprint finish and a lunge across the line. Now THAT is fun!!! And dramatic!! That’s what racing is all about!

“I haven’t gotten to feel that feeling since I retired from ski racing. It’s such a unique thing to get to experience in this life: being in the fight like that. It was something I truly took for granted before, and I didn’t even realize how much it would make me come alive and enjoy sport and competition again until that skate sprint day on Friday. No, I didn’t have a great day because I felt my strongest ever or smoked the whole field (definitely not), but I walked away from that day, in third place, just gushing about how fun and cool it is to get to go toe to toe, turn on those primal competitive instincts, and just compete.”

Swirbul, 27, is a 2022 Winter Olympian who ranks second in the SuperTour standings heading into the Jan. 4-9 U.S. National Championships. Lauren Jortberg, a Colorado skier who trains in Quebec, leads the standings after three golds and one bronze at Kincaid. Two other Alaskans hold down fifth place (Renae Anderson of APU) and sixth place (Marit Flora of UAA).

By the time the national championships happen, several Olympic berths are expected to have been clinched by skiers competing in World Cup races in Europe, most notably Olympic medalist Jessie Diggins of Minnesota.

But should the U.S. Ski Team choose to send a full team to Italy — a likely scenario — Swirbul could be in the mix for another Olympic appearance.

Germain still looking sharp

Maxime Germain, the West High graduate who is quite literally aiming for a spot on the U.S. Olympic biathlon team, was part of America’s fourth-place relay team Sunday during World Cup racing in Hochfilzen, Austria.

Germain, 24, has been one of the team’s top skiers and shooters this season. His three-day weekend in Austria had a less-than-stellar start, but he got better with each race.

He placed 54th in the 10K sprint, just good enough to qualify for the next day’s 12.5-kilometer pursuit race. There, he jumped 19 positions to finish 35th, third among the Americans. In the relay, he skied the second leg; he cleaned all five targets in standing and, with the aid of three spares, knocked down all of his targets in prone.

The Americans — led by Campbell Wright, who was seventh in the 10K and eighth in the pursuit — finished fourth in the relay, behind Norway, France and Sweden. Their time of 1 hour, 13 minutes, 9.3 seconds put them nearly 72 seconds behind the Norwegians but just 8.8 seconds behind third-place Sweden.

“Today we saw the U.S. men with fourth place, just nine seconds out of a medal,” Lowell Bailey, director of high performance for U.S. Biathlon, said in a statement from the team.

“I think that result is a harbinger of things to come, but overall it is really just momentum building. The top teams didn’t do us any favors either. We had the best guys on the start list who were all performing at their best, people weren’t messing up today. Our team showed the depth that we know them to have.”

Before the Americans can start thinking about the Milan Olympics, they have more World Cup racing to focus on. On Friday the men’s team begins three straight days of racing in Annecy-Le Grand Bornand in France.

For Germain, the races mark a homecoming. Though born in Alaska, he spent his childhood and early teens in Chamonix, France, before returning to Alaska to finish high school. Chamonix is about 90 minutes away from this weekend’s races.

“I’m so looking forward to racing on home turf,” he said on Instagram.