Anchorage Daily News

Kikkan Randall's historic World Cup win on Sunday was years in the making -- not only for Anchorage's Randall, but also for the entire U.S. Ski Team, which has struggled to compete against the traditional European and Russian powers.

"It's an immense deal," U.S. Ski Team Nordic director Luke Bodensteiner said in a phone interview from Utah. "It's huge for everybody -- huge for the team, huge for the ski community. It's been long time in the build."

Norway, the dominant force in cross-country skiing, has a combined 767 men's and women's top-three finishes in World Cup events. The United States has 14, two by Randall, the only American woman to reach a World Cup podium.

"Frankly, we're just figuring the sport out now," Bodensteiner said. "They've been ahead of us for a long time in terms of research and science-based understanding of the sport and how that impacts training and athlete development."

In addition to Randall's win, Andy Newell of Vermont finished seventh in the men's sprint and won the B race. Anchorage's Lars Flora finished 63rd.

Bodensteiner said it takes 10 years of training to become a world-class skier. In 1998, possibly the nadir of U.S. cross-country skiing, no American cracked the top 30 at the Nagano Olympics, and "quite a few results were dead last."

Since then the United States has made an investment in technology and research to aid skiers, Bodensteiner said.

"You need to sink a lot of hours of training into your body, it's such a fitness-based sport," he said. "These athletes are among, if not the, fittest athletes in the world.

"To be good, you need to train a lot. It takes a number of years to build yourself up to that level where you can handle that kind of training in a year."

Randall, who will turn 25 New Year's Eve, has exhibited the willingness and desire to make the commitment to become an elite athlete, her father Ronn Randall said.

"The desire I saw there as early as seventh grade," he said. "I developed a confidence in her that she had an instinct of what she needed to do, and she was willing to work hard at it. Anything after that kind of followed that pattern."

Ronn Randall remembers a story of when Kikkan was about 13. She was an alpine skier at the time, but wanted to enter a race in a series sponsored by Mat Maid.

"It was really for upper-level racers for the most part," Ronn said. "Her coach was against it, thinking she would get blown out. She got in the race, and I don't even remember what her finish was, certainly she didn't finish in the upper levels, but she came out of that race telling me that she completely understood what (she) had to do now.

"She was there, she wasn't afraid of it, she was excited by it. At that moment I knew she could go beyond any apprehensions and fears."

Over the years Ronn has witnessed his daughter achieve and surpass a number of benchmarks, like a ninth-place finish in the 2006 Turin Olympics followed by a fifth-place showing at a race in Norway.

"The Olympic sprint and the one in Norway right after were seminal moments when she made the next step up to a higher level," he said. "The way I describe this one is, the cork is out of the bottle. Now she knows she can compete at this level, she can win, and now it's just a matter of conditions and her health and all these other factors that fall in. She knows now she can contend."

Kikkan Randall, who is now third in the World Cup sprint standings and 15th overall (sprint and long distance combined), attributes her success in part to a new training regimen this offseason at APU's Nordic Ski Center.

"This is my first year working with (coach) Erik Flora at APU," she said via cell phone from Munich, Germany. "I've done some new things with my training. The positive team atmosphere we had going this year (and) the new innovative workouts we were doing, really took my speed and fitness to the next level."

Bodensteiner thinks there are more levels Randall has yet to reach.

"We expect Kikkan to be around for quite a few more years," he said. "We really expect her to keep competing through the next Olympics (and) in Russia in 2014."

Randall's win Sunday reinforced that idea, and staked her place in the pantheon of American female cross-country skiers.

"It places here on top," Bodensteiner said. "Clear as that."

Find Andrew Hinkelman online at adn.com/contact/ahinkelman or call 257-4335.

UPDATES: Read Kikkan Randall's Web log, and pass along your congratulations.

www.kikkan.com