LANDGROVE, Vt., and TESERO, Italy — On Tuesday, Ben Ogden fulfilled a promise to his 15-year-old self.
He had just finished second in the cross-country skiing classic sprint, making him the second-ever man to win an Olympic medal for the U.S. in the sport and the first in 50 years, after Bill Koch did it for the first time in 1976.
After receiving his medal, Ogden, 26, did a backflip off the podium, his signature high school move he vowed he would do if he ever found himself on the sport’s biggest stage.
But no athlete’s career starts when they’re standing on the podium, medal in hand, or even when they’re 15, dreaming of the Olympics. For Ogden, it started years before that, in small-town Vermont, with a father who taught his son to ski and believed in him years before Ogden did himself.
The hills of southern Vermont are rolling, green in every direction in the summer and snow-capped in the winter. They’re not like the harsh Rockies of Colorado or Utah, where plenty of American ski and snowboard Olympic medalists have been made, raised on roads that cut through the peaks, challenging nature.
The Green Mountains are hospitable, with local farms and longtime delis and small towns where everyone knows everyone, nestled in valleys along a portion of the Appalachian Mountains, perfectly fit for cross-country skiing.
This is where Ogden grew up, next door to the Koch house. As a kid, Ogden and his friends would ski through trails and hit jumps that Koch, one of cross-country skiing’s pioneers, built in his backyard. Ogden’s father, John, worked in custom cabinetry and would assist his neighbor with his cross-country skiing innovations, once helping Koch build a workout machine using ropes and pulleys to help strengthen a skier’s double-poling technique.
“I spent a lot of time at the Kochs’ house, but going to the Kochs’ house was always outside,” Ogden said. “We were always outside, skiing or building trails or doing whatever.”
John served on the boards of multiple local ski teams and coached generations of kids who came through the Bill Koch Youth Ski League, including his son. To Ogden, his father was the ideal coach, toeing the line between serious training and having fun, inventing games for kids to play on skis in the woods.
“Every practice just like ended with everybody being exhausted, wet, cold and really having had a good time,” Ogden said.
When Ben Ogden was a teenager, John was diagnosed with cancer. While undergoing treatment for nine years, he watched from afar as his son began competing for the U.S. on the World Cup circuit in 2019.
Up until that point, the U.S. men had struggled to find the same success as the women’s program, on the heels of Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall’s historic cross-country skiing Olympic gold in 2018, the first medal since Koch’s silver. But the U.S. development team saw promise in a group of young men who were just getting started: Ogden and others such as J.C. Schoonmaker and Gus Schumacher.
Results take time, though. That first year, Ogden finished 66th, 70th and 72nd in three World Cup appearances.
“He (John) would send me these texts, or when we’d talk on the phone, he would lump me in with the best in the world. He’d lump me with Johannes,” Ogden said, referring to Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, the most decorated men’s cross-country skier of all time. “He just sort of thought of me and all these top-tier skiers as being sort of the same. And I didn’t believe it at first.”
Ogden celebrated Tuesday’s win with a backflip. (Alex Pantling / Getty Images)
In 2021, Ogden started to see results. He finished top 10 in the World Cup for the first time with a ninth-place performance in the men’s relay, alongside other up-and-comers, including Schumacher. In 2022, he posted his first individual top-10 finish with a pair of seventh-place performances in sprint races. He was named to the 2022 Olympic team, where he finished 12th in the sprint, the U.S. men’s best-ever individual sprint finish at the games at the time, and ninth in the team sprint with Schoonmaker. That year, he also won his second NCAA title for the University of Vermont.
At that point, John was still undergoing cancer treatment. He watched his son compete in the Olympics from a hospital bed in Dartmouth, N.H.
Before races, Ogden would sometimes get nervous — not about the skiing, but about the discomfort, the unique pain that comes with cross-country skiing, one of the most grueling physical sports out there.
In those moments, Ogden would recall a conversation he had with his father while in middle school, before a mile run.
“He said it probably is only six minutes of pain; you can sort of endure anything for six minutes,” Ogden said. “That one’s always sort of stuck with me because I think he proved to me over the next, like, decade in his struggles with cancer and his treatment process that, yeah, you can, you can deal with a lot more than six minutes of pain, actually.”
In 2023, Ogden posted his best results on the World Cup circuit yet. He finished the season with the green bib, awarded to the fastest World Cup skier under the age of 23, and in December, he reached his first podium with a third-place finish in a sprint in the Tour de Ski.
That same year, his father died.
“I just wanted to show him what I was capable of,” Ogden said in August. “He believed in me more than I believed in me most of the time. And ever since then, I constantly think about him on the start line.”
This past August, Ogden was living at home, training alongside Diggins, Julia Kern and other members of the U.S. cross-country ski team, a portion of whom train in southern Vermont during the summer, before heading off to Europe for the racing season.
Landgrove, Vt., where Ogden grew up, has a population of 177 people, per the 2020 census, most of whom know Koch, knew John and follow Ogden’s career with the pride of a small town.
The Ogden home, built by John, sits up a gravel road. It’s part new, part 1800s-era restored barn, with wood beams charred in places from a fire many decades before. Expansive windows look out onto Vermont’s rolling hills, where Ogden was spending his summer roller-skiing the same roads, running the same trails and biking the same routes he took as a child.
In the long hours spent training, Ogden thought about his dad and the small Vermont community that follows his races abroad. Ogden also thought about the Olympics: not just making it — he already did that — but the podium.
“It’s pretty incredible, the power that can have over you, just to get out the door, and on the rainy days and stuff,” he said.
Ogden’s furious finish in the sprint ended a 50-year drought for U.S. men’s cross-country at the Olympics. (Federica Vanzetta / Nordic Focus / Getty Images)
Ogden is known to relax by knitting during the competition season. However, during the summer, when he needed a break from offseason training, Ogden made use of his engineering degree at the family’s barn, which was also originally built as a hay barn in Pennsylvania in the 1800s. In the early 2000s, John went with a group to Pennsylvania, took the barn apart, put a note on every single piece, loaded it onto a truck, drove it up to Vermont, and put it back together.
These days, Ogden uses his degree to house the old cars he is refurbishing. He has spent three years restoring a 1973 Land Rover, taking apart pieces, putting notes on them, replacing rusted parts and putting them back together again.
“When my dad died, it was just so powerful for me to just disconnect from the world a little bit. I’ve always been able to just get really lost in projects,” he said. “… That’s super powerful for me, because ski racing isn’t always great. Sometimes you just gotta wanna take a break from it. So it’s pretty sweet to have little projects where I can just like get a mental reset, and a Land Rover is full of them.”
When the 2025-26 World Cup season kicked off in November, Ogden had clear goals.
One was to improve his racing strategy. Throughout his career, Ogden, a strong sprinter, would often post podium-worthy performances in qualifying, quarterfinal and semifinal rounds before running out of gas in the final. His superpower lies in sprinting up hills, but sometimes he would make his move too early, dictating the pace off the start but getting caught at the finish.
“I mean, how many times have I toed the line in a semifinal or final with my heart rate pinned and my lactate in the triple digits? At some point, you’re just like, all right. I gotta pace myself a little bit here,” he said this week in Italy. “As fun as it is to just go crazy in the qualifier in the quarterfinal, at some point you gotta start putting your sights on the podium.”
He also wanted an Olympic medal.
Ogden entered the Games ranked top 10 in the World Cup sprint standings — not an underdog, not a long shot. But he hadn’t posted an individual podium so far this season, only a team sprint bronze with Schumacher. Like years past, he would throw down fast qualifying and heat times, but get outsprinted in the final. During the Tour de Ski in Val di Fiemme — the Olympic venue — in early January, he qualified in eighth but finished 17th, failing to advance from the quarterfinal.
For a moment on Tuesday, it looked as if things could be heading in that direction. In the classic sprint, Ogden qualified in second and posted the fastest time in the quarterfinals. However, in the semis, Finland’s Lauri Vuorinen outsprinted him in the final stretch, securing the second spot in the final. Ogden was left relying on the “lucky loser” position, given to the next two fastest times across both semifinals.
“It felt really long, honestly,” Ogden said of those five minutes while he waited to find out his status in the final. “I don’t ever try and count on lucky loser anymore. But thankfully, it worked out and had some legs for the finals.”
As the final approached, Ogden told himself: Just three minutes of pain.
And it was as John Ogden foretold it, years before: Stands packed with fans, family and friends in the crowd, and his son, sprinting up the hill, on the Olympic stage, shoulder to shoulder with Klæbo.
In true Klæbo fashion, the world’s best men’s cross-country skier soon left his competitors behind, winning his second gold of the Games.
But there, next to him on the podium, was Ogden, wearing silver.