Most people, seeing other nations take the podium, wouldn’t think much of the result. But Shinn, a Rutland resident who writes for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s website, realized it was exponentially faster than any American time before.
“Whoa, do they have new skis?” she wondered. “Are they eating spinach?”
Shinn proposed answering the question in a book — “World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team” — and aiming its release for the 2018 Winter Olympics. But with only one national medal ever in the sport — Vermonter Bill Koch’s silver in 1976 — many had doubts.
Then this year’s women grabbed gold in the team sprint.
“Did we just win the Olympics?” Jessie Diggins, who trains each summer with Stratton Mountain School’s T2 elite team, gasped as she fell to the ground at the finish line Wednesday.
“Yeah!” replied teammate Kikkan Randall.
Shinn, covering the event in South Korea, suddenly was witnessing history. And, through her book, writing about how it’s made.
“From dragging their suitcases through the snow and slush at 3 a.m. in the grim city of Rybinsk, Russia, to hugging each other through pre-race breakdowns of confidence, they have learned to focus on the positives and help each other through the negatives of careers in a sport that garners few headlines in the United States,” she begins her 248-page University Press of New England paperback.
Shinn, a longtime freelance writer for several major national ski magazines, began her TeamUSA.org assignment in 2008 and has covered the Winter and Summer Games since 2010.
Although she travels the world, the writer appreciates reporting from home. Her first book, “Deluge: Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont’s Flash Floods, and How One Small State Saved Itself,” chronicled the state’s rebuilding efforts in 2011. Wanting to produce a second title, she knew she had close access to Diggins and Green Mountain State teammates Sophie Caldwell, Ida Sargent and Liz Stephen.
“American women had toiled for decades mostly in the middle of the pack or the back,” Shinn recalls.
Witnessing their progress, the writer began one-on-one interviews. Some observers may speculate their advances came because of Title IX, the landmark 1972 equal opportunity law that helped female school sports numbers shoot from about 300,000 participants the year of enactment to more than 3 million today.
Shinn heard the skiers cite something else: “Every time I talked to them, they credited teamwork.”
That sparked more questions: “How had these women learned to be good teammates? Was it the coach? Or the personality of the team leader/captain? Or the personality of each team member? And what did each person on a team do to keep a good dynamic?”
Shinn couldn’t find many books addressing the subject, so she decided to focus on it herself. Visiting the U.S. women’s training camp, she followed members as they roller-skied and ran during the day and took turns preparing dinner each evening.
“I was more successful at eating with them,” she writes, “than keeping up with them in the mountains.”
Shinn continued her research right up to filing her manuscript and flying off to cover this month’s Olympics in Pyeongchang. There, she reported on the team just missing the podium four times — in one event by a mere 3.3 seconds.
“It’s a sport where they really could view the glass as half empty — having had to overcome funding issues and injuries and illnesses in a brutally hard sport in which it takes decades to develop, and to compete against countries where doping has been rampant,” she writes in the book. “But these women perpetually see the glass as half full.”
Their cup runneth over with last week’s team sprint victory.
“What I learned is that there is an ‘I’ in team — a collection of the right individuals who work well together,” she writes. “They have figured out how to bring the best of themselves to this team, and they have created an environment where they feel at home, even when they are on the road for almost half of each year.”
Shinn is set to read from her book March 1 at Rutland’s Phoenix Books, March 8 at Woodstock’s Yankee Bookshop, March 28 at Middlebury’s Vermont Book Shop and March 31 at Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore.
The author lucked out on the photo selected long ago for the cover: It pictures the golden duo of Diggins and Randall celebrating a victory. But she left herself some wiggle room when finalizing the text.
“Through many ups and downs, they have had one goal in mind — to win an Olympic medal,” she writes in the preface. “But should they fall short of this goal, they know that the journey of creating this team has been worth it. It’s a dynamic that we all could learn from.”
