Nordic Breakthrough: 1972 US Women's Oympic XC Team

It took until 1972 for the U.S. to field a women’s Nordic team in the Winter Games.

Jessie Diggins’s two medals at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing came 50 years after U.S. women made their Olympic debut in cross-country skiing. The challenges that Diggins overcame to win those medals—nerves, expectations, cold weather, food poisoning—could be a metaphor for the hurdles that American women faced in the lead-up to the 1972 Winter Olympics.

Nonetheless, the five American women who competed in Sapporo, Japan, saw their Olympic debut as an opportunity and an adventure, a chance to pursue the sport they loved around the world. At the time, they did not realize they were breaking trail for women like Diggins who would one day follow in their tracks.

The Long Uphill Climb to Competition

Although women have cross-country skied for as long as men—in 1206, for example, the Norwegian Birkebeiner warriors did not ski Crown Prince Haakon to safety during the country’s civil war on their own; Haakon’s mother, Inga, accompanied them—being allowed to compete in the sport was a long uphill climb.

Photo top: 1972 Olympic Team. Left to right, top: coach Marty Hall; middle: team manager Gloria Chadwick, Trina Hosmer, Barbara Britch and Martha Rockwell; front: Margie Mahoney and Alison Owen. Courtesy Barbara Britch Craig.

The reasons were many. Despite a lack of evidence, it was considered unhealthy and even dangerous for women to compete in grueling sports, a risk to “delicate” reproductive organs. It was also considered unladylike. Mothers advised their daughters against developing “manly” physiques lest it hamper their marital prospects. And it was unseemly for women to sweat—or, rather, be seen sweating.

Until 1952, the only Winter Olympic events for women were figure skating and Alpine skiing, neither of which was perceived as “sweating” or brutish sports. When reporters (all of them men) covered these sports, they referred to the competitors as “girls” and noted their hair color and outfits. Title IX legislation that would help women’s sports proliferate in the U.S.— first at the college level, then professionally—was still two decades away. And all the coaches, of course, were men.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the International Ski Federation (FIS) was more open minded about women competing in Nordic sports, and, in 1951, voted to include women’s cross-country skiing in the 1952 Olympic Winter Games. Twenty women from eight nations competed in a 10-kilometer race, with the Finns sweeping the podium. The U.S., however, would not send a women’s cross-country ski team to the Olympics for another 20 years.

The Americans Get Started

Even if it had been socially acceptable for women to exercise strenuously, cross-country skiing was little known in the U.S. in the mid-20th century. The tide began to turn in the 1960s. In Anchorage, Alaska, 1960 Olympic biathlete Dick Mize helped develop cross-country skiing as part of the junior high physical education curriculum, with races held every Saturday in winter. Meanwhile, in Wenatchee, Washington, U.S. Army biathlete Herb Thomas started a kids’ cross-country ski program, with one girl on the roster. And in Vermont, Martha Rockwell skied on the Putney School’s boys’ team, coached by Nordic combined Olympian John Caldwell, whose first edition of The Cross-Country Ski Book, credited with popularizing the sport in the U.S., hit the shelves in 1964.

By 1966, coach Marty Hall and U.S. Nordic director Al Merrill talked about forming a U.S. women’s team, with an eye on the 1968 Olympics. To make the national team, skiers had to race five kilometers in under 24 minutes, and in under 22 minutes to make the Olympic team. But no races yet existed for women to hit these marks.

At junior nationals that year, 13-year-old Alison Owen, from Herb Thomas’s program in Washington, qualified in the Pacific Northwest region, the lone girl on that team. But officials at nationals didn’t know what to do with her. They finally allowed her to race with the boys but stationed an ambulance nearby in case she succumbed to the effort.

To increase interest in cross-country skiing among women, Caldwell arranged in 1967 for three female Swedish skiers to tour the U.S., giving clinics and competing in races—and illustrating that women could be both beautiful and athletic. During their Anchorage stop, the Swedes beat every man in a five-kilometer race. But 15-year-old Barbara Britch, who had started skiing in 1964 at Anchorage’s Central Junior High School, was only three seconds slower than the third-placed Swede.

One month later, on March 10, 1967, in Duluth, Minnesota, 17 girls from around the country competed in the first girls’ races at junior nationals: a five-kilometer and a three-by-five-kilometer relay. Britch led a strong Alaska contingent, winning the five kilometer by more than two minutes; the Alaskans also handily won the relay. “I was amazed by the [the Alaskans’] racing skis, special boots and coaching,” recalls Owen. “Our skis were more like touring skis, obviously much slower.”

Other regions soon caught up to the Alaskans, and in 1968, five women were named to the first U.S. national team, including Britch (Owen qualified but was too young), with Hall as their coach. They participated in women’s-only training camps and that December, three of them traveled to Sweden for two weeks to compete in junior races.

In Sweden, the enthusiasm at the races was “shocking to the U.S. ladies’ team,” wrote Britch in a summary of her early ski career. Crowds lined the trails and filled the stadiums, and in the first race, the crowd at the back of the course sang the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann” as she skied by.

“I’ve never outright laughed during a race until then,” Britch wrote. “Nearly caused me to tip over and ski off the track.”

The Americans raced three times in Sweden, with Britch taking a first, second and sixth.

A Bigger World Stage in 1970

By 1970, the U.S. was ready to compete at the world championships. Britch made the team; a freshman in college, she had to drop out of the University of Vermont (UVM) to attend training camps and fundraising events in the lead-up to worlds. Owen, at age 17, was still in high school and remembers that her teachers did not know what to do with her. “I was missing so much school,” she recalls. “No men or boys were doing that. It was groundbreaking and breaking open people’s views of what was possible.”

They were joined by Rockwell, whose mother had encouraged her to ski again after she had raced against the Swedes on their 1967 “good will tour” and beaten everyone except the Swedes. The 25-year-old had won the five-kilometer and 10-kilometer races at the national championships in 1969. Rounding out the squad was Trina Hosmer, a talented runner who had started cross-country skiing in 1966 after her soon-to-be-husband and his Nordic teammates at UVM encouraged her to try it. After Trina graduated with a master’s degree in 1968, the Hosmers moved to Seattle, where Trina was training with the renowned Falcon Track Club. “I was fit—I just didn’t know how to technically ski well,” she recalls.

Before the team members headed to Europe, Sports Illustrated introduced them to the sporting world. In a sign of the times, sportswriter William Johnson referred to the women as “Nordic lasses” and “lovely little women,” and quoted one of them saying, “No boy likes a girl with biceps.” Johnson also noted the heavy odds faced by the women as they raced against competitors from countries where Nordic sport was part of the sociocultural fabric and/or that had institutional sports (and often doping) programs.

But Hall stood by the team: “These kids are so determined to do well that one of them—maybe Barbara Britch or Martha Rockwell—might finish in the top 10,” he told Johnson. “Don’t be surprised, they’re really in fine shape.”

En route to the world championships, the team stopped in Sweden for warm-up races. Hosmer remembers “being soundly beaten by this 40-year-old woman who was a schoolteacher and a mother and who was racing part-time.” But reflecting an attitude that pervaded the team, Hosmer did not view it as a negative experience. Instead, she realized that cross-country ski racing can be a life-long sport.

At the championships, the Americans were mostly outclassed by the competition—but not daunted (even after Hosmer was pushed off the course by a determined Bulgarian in the relay). Britch embraced the opportunity to race against the world’s best: “I knew that they were going to be a lot better than me, but I wasn’t intimidated,” she says. “I was fascinated to watch how they skied, how they trained, how they moved.”

For the young Owen, it was “a wake-up call for me, there’s a whole world out there.”

At Last, the Olympics

Two years later, the U.S. sent its first women’s cross-country ski team to the Olympics. Five tryout races were held in Vermont, with points given in each race and the overall totals determining the Olympic squad. Rockwell swept the races, with Britch finishing runner-up in three (she missed the 10-kilometer race due to illness). Owen, Hosmer and Margie Mahoney also scored podium finishes during the tryouts. From Anchorage, Mahoney had taken up cross-country skiing as a high-school sophomore in 1968 and then trained at Alaska Methodist University (now Alaska Pacific University), the first collegiate Nordic ski team for women, started by coach Jim Mahaffey.

From tryouts, the team traveled first to Chicago—where they picked up their Sears, Roebuck & Co. uniforms—then on to Sapporo. Only Hosmer had been to Japan (the previous year for an Olympic test event; she roomed briefly with 14-year-old figure skater Dorothy Hamill). But her teammates were seasoned travelers by now, too, accustomed to the challenge of language barriers and foreign customs. “It wasn’t overwhelming,” remembers Owen. “It was an exciting adventure.”

Before training and racing, the women waxed their own skis—the one pair they had brought from home or the Kazama wooden skis they were given in Japan. “I remember corking for hours,” says Hosmer of the process used to meld the wax into the ski base. “The idea was to hold [your ski bases] up to the lights and be able to kind of see your face [in the shine].”

The women marched in the opening ceremony, with Team USA–issued red capes. “We looked like Clara Barton,” quips Hosmer. The first women’s race, the 10 kilometer (all racers used the classic ski technique until the late 1980s), was held three days later, with Owen wearing bib No. 1. By the end, the Soviet Union’s Galena Kulakova had the number 1 by her name, winning in 34:17.82. Rockwell crossed the line in 16th place, about a minute and a half off the podium. It remained the best Olympic finish for an American woman in cross-country skiing for the next 30 years.

Owen was the next American finisher, in 35th place, with Mahoney and Hosmer in 36th and 41st, respectively. “I had to really work with myself to just do what I could do and not try to ski above myself,” Owen says. “I think I did okay for a 19-year-old not on drugs.”

Kulakova won the five-kilometer race as well, with Rockwell finishing 18th, Britch 31st, Owen 36th and Mahoney 39th—all within about two minutes of the top finishers.

“I felt like I had pretty good races,” says Mahoney. “I was disappointed in the results as always. You’re like, ‘How the heck am I this far behind everybody?’ … Turns out the Russians were doping, but we didn’t know that then.”

In the relay, Britch, Owen and Rockwell finished last, just one second behind Canada. The Soviets, of course, won.

The Americans were undeterred by the results. “It was just the excitement of racing—I loved it—and then getting to travel,” says Mahoney. For Hosmer, gratification came through the joy of skiing and the opportunity to do it every day for half the year.

Owen saw the 1972 Olympics as a breakthrough for women. “It was work for sure and many challenges to overcome,” she says. “But we had so much, and I would like to always remember to be grateful for what we had: our travel paid, team sponsors for uniforms, food and lodging paid, entry fees paid, people to help us, good ski equipment. And being the first at this was exciting to me.”

“Considering we skied in an unknown sport in the U.S. against professional athletes in Europe and the Soviet Union, I think we rose to the occasion,” adds Britch. “I’m proud of what we all contributed to the development of the sport and to women’s athletics.”

What Came Next for the Women

After the 1972 Winter Games, Britch never skied again. “It was an economic decision,” she says. She soon married and became a real estate broker, then pioneered lithium exploration.

Rockwell, Owen and Mahoney continued racing, with all three competing in one more Winter Games (1976 for Rockwell and Mahoney, 1980 for Owen). In 1978, Owen won what is now considered the first women’s World Cup race. At the end of that season, she was ranked seventh overall in the world, with five Russians and a Finn ahead of her.

Hosmer returned to running after Sapporo, and Olympic pentathlete Pat Daniels encouraged her to try out for the 1972 Summer Games in the 1,500. But Hosmer sustained a foot injury and stopped training. Had she made it, she would have become the first woman in history to compete in both the summer and winter Olympics. In 1997, Hosmer entered her first master’s cross-country ski world championships and has since won 60 master’s medals. 

Peggy Shinn has covered eight Olympic Games. Her book, World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team, was published in 2018.