Athlete Bios
Cross-country skiing
Randall: USA's best hope for cross-country medal
Last Updated: Friday, February 5, 2010 | 3:54 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
Kikkan Randall of the USA poses with the silver medal she won at the Nordic World ski championships on February 24, 2009. (NordicFocus/Getty Images)Kikkan Randall is a cross-country skier who is considered the United States’ best Olympic medal hope in the sport since Bill Koch won the nation’s first and only cross-country medal — a silver in the 30 kilometres — at the 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria.
Since her ninth-place finish in the freestyle sprint at her second Winter Olympics in 2006, Randall has won a World Cup race, in the sprint in Rybinsk, Russia, in 2007, and posted a second-place finish in the sprint at the world championships in the Czech Republic in 2009. She was the first American woman to grace the podium at a Nordic world championships.
She is also credited with being the first to win a World Cup. Alison Owen-Spencer of the United States won the inaugural women’s Nordic World Cup race series in Wisconsin in 1978, but the F.I.S., the international governing body of skiing, since has classified that as a test event.
The Vancouver Games will be the culmination of a 10-year plan that Randall, 27, devised when she was a 17-year-old high-school student in Anchorage, Alaska, making the transition from competitive cross-country running to cross-country skiing. She determined that it would take her a decade to become a polished competitor capable of contending for an Olympic medal. Randall’s plan was meticulous, but there was one detail she overlooked.
In 2010, the Olympic sprint will use the classical style and Randall has achieved her best results using the freestyle form. The techniques are as different as pool diving is from cliff diving, but Randall relishes the challenge.
She recognizes she is lucky to be competing at all. Twice in April 2008 she was hospitalized in Anchorage with blood clots in her left leg. Her doctors told her that in roughly half the cases involving patients like her, the clots travel to the lungs and are fatal.
The doctors’ diagnosis was May-Turner syndrome, a condition in which the left lilac vein is squeezed so tightly by the right lilac artery that the pressure impedes blood flow in the left leg. They suspected the birth control pills she was taking were a contributing factor. Randall, who married Canadian Olympic cross-country hopeful Jeff Ellis in 2008, was prescribed a blood thinner for several months but only takes blood thinner prior to long flights.
Two of her mother’s siblings were Nordic skiers in the Olympics: Chris Haines in 1976 (52nd in the 30 kilometres) and Betsy Haines (37th in the five kilometres) in 1980. Her maternal grandfather, Lew Haines, was athletic director at the University of Alaska-Anchorage and remained the gruff but proud driver of the Randall bandwagon until his death in May 2009.
She drives herself so hard that her running teammates in high school nicknamed her Kikkanimal. But Randall has a lighter side, as evidenced by the dark pink streaks in her hair. She dyes her hair so people can see that cross-country skiing is not the drab sport many Americans perceive it to be. She knows a medal of any colour would really drive home her point.
