Luke Bodensteiner
Q&A with former Olympic skier from
Wisconsin and current director of USSA Nordic
By Kevin Olson Luke Bodensteiner represented America's best hope for international cross country skiing success in the first half of the 1990s.
The West Bend, Wis., native posted the best results of any American in that timeframe. He competed in both the 1992 Albertville Olympics and the 1994 Lillehammer Games, with his best finish coming in his first Olympic race – 27th in the 30K classic at Albertville.
Along the way, he captured two national championships in 1994 and one in 1995. He won two NCAA championships while racing for the University of Utah (1993 and 1994), with his '93 win marking the first time an American won the
title since 1974. He also won the Wisconsin High School State Championship three times and is a four-time Junior Nordic Skier of the Year.
 Bodensteiner abruptly left racing midway through the 1996 season and signed on as cross country program manager for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) that spring.
Today, Bodensteiner, 29, coordinates the United States cross country program from top to bottom at USSA's offices in Park City, Utah. He recently was named nordic director, a newly created position responsible for the nordic combined and jumping, as well as cross country. He's also a trustee of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Games, a delegate to the International Ski Federation and vice-president of the Soldier Hollow Legacy Foundation, a group hoping to preserve the
Olympic cross country ski venue after the games are over.
I caught up with Bodensteiner earlier this summer when he was in the Twin Cities scouting out potential event venues for his programs and participating in a coaches clinic. I asked him about his past, his current position with USSA and a range of other topics.
How did you get started in cross country skiing?
We moved to West Bend from Florida when I was four, and that's  pretty much how I got started skiing. My dad was pretty active and got into skiing as a way to beat the winter. Sometimes he had to drag my butt out the door. He had to get me into it that way at first. Who was your first coach in organized skiing?
Lee Borowski. He's a great guy. He definitely had a positive influence on my life in a lot of areas, not just skiing. As far as skiing goes, he's an incredible technician. He brings his physics background into ski technique, and he's got a pretty good way of presenting it that makes sense to an athlete, makes sense to a young kid, especially. It's hard to get physics principles and how they relate to
skiing through to a kid. He's got a good sense of doing that, and a pragmatic sense about training. He's not nitpicky about training. He's nitpicky about technique, that's for sure. He's really precise on that. But he's got a good sense as to what has to be done. He's a fantastic coach.
Did you ever check in with Lee as your skiing career progressed?
I did that a few times before going over to a big international competition. I'd just have him check up on me,
because when you get into the season, the last thing you're thinking about is technique. You're thinking so much about training, and your recovery and what the next race is, and you can lose sight of your technique. And it's easy to lose sight of it when you're skiing well, because you're going fast, and you don't think there's anything wrong with your technique. So it's always good to go back and get a check-up. It's hard to believe:
you're skiing fast, and you have bad technique. But it can happen.
Looking back, do you have a few moments in your racing career that really stand out in your memory?
Definitely, quite a few races. One was a race in Anchorage at the '94 Olympic trials. I was just skiing at a level where I felt I was so much better than anyone else in the field – skiing in a zone where the hills don't
hurt and you can really ski however you want. Even though it was 20 below and just miserable out there, it was actually really fun.
Racing in Albertville was a real breakout race for me. Being in the top 30 as a 21-year-old in the Olympics was something that I'll remember for sure. I was 27th in Albertville in that race. I raced in seven different events in those two Olympics, and that first one I raced was the best one I had.
Probably the race I remember most, though, was the Birkie. I was 17 years old, so it must have been '87. It was actually the Kortelopet. I was having a pretty good race there, and I came through at 'OO,' and I came through in the lead. I had two Swedish guys who were like Worldloppet champions right behind me, and there was about a 100-meter break between us and everyone else. I came to 'OO,' and I didn't really
know where the finish was. And what happened was, the Swedish service guys who were giving feeds to these two stepped across the cut-off to go to the Kortelopet, and I missed it. I had no idea. I kept on skiing, and about 2K later, I was just going. "I missed the finish line," totally blew it off. So I just skiing the whole Birkie and ended up getting disqualified. I ended up finishing ninth, but they threw me out.
Was it worth the DQ?
Yeah, it was. If I knew I was going to ski the whole thing, I probably would've skied a little different race. I don't know if that would've been good or bad. It was fun, kind of pushing the pace of the field.
Why don't you compete anymore?
I just lost the competitive fire. I raced hard and seriously for 10 years, and I got to a point after '94 where I'd go into World Cup races and I'd be pulling on my race bib that morning, and I'd be saying, "My goals
don't lie here anymore." That definitely affected my performance. You've got to have a strong head to be good in this sport, and when you don't care so much about winning anymore and you start caring about other things in your life, then it's time to quit. I always said, and that's how I am, when I'm not enjoying it anymore and I'm not continuing to meet my goals competitively, then I'm going to get out and do something
completely different. Of course, what I'm doing now isn't totally different, but in a sense it is. I stopped skiing in '96 in the middle of the season, and haven't raced since then. But I still love to ski. I ski every day all winter, and of course, my work keeps me active in skiing.
Do you do any racing at all?
Actually, I do one race a year. It's a telemark race at Crested Butte. It's an uphill-downhill race that's pretty
fun. It starts out about 10,000 feet and you do about a 15-minute climb on skins, and then you come just blazing down the mountain. It's a blast. I ski every day in the winter. I go out and I don' t ski much more than five or 10K after work. Otherwise, I'm up in the mountains telemark skiing.
What's your job title at USSA?
Cross country program manager. I'm actually just about to switch jobs there to become the nordic director.
It's a new position. My responsibility then will be over nordic combined and jumping as well. It'll be a little restructuring within USSA. You know, try to drag some of the resources that are common to all the nordic sports. Ski jumping is definitely different than cross country, but we're the nordic team. When we go to world championships, it's the Nordic World Championships. There's a lot of resources like PTs (physical
therapists) and wax teams, and we really maximize what we can do for each team by pooling our resources.
When did you come on board in that role?
In the spring of '96, right after I stopped racing. I'm in charge of the cross country program, basically from top to bottom, all the way from youth ski leagues through all the events we do, especially the Nor/Ams, and National Championships and JOs (Junior Olympics). I do the budgeting, how we structure our teams, and
selection criteria, coaches and officials education programs, and basically, oversee the staff that puts together our education programs and our elite team programs.
Do you oversee the U.S. team coaches?
Yes. Christer Skoog is the coach. He used to be a trainer for the Swedish team. He's been with us since right after the Olympics in '98. And then we've got Miles Minson, he's our development coach. And the
way we operate is, he'll move up with his athletes. Right now, he's got Chris Cook, Chris Freeman and Rob Whitney and those guys, and as they move up, after the Olympics, he'll move up into that head coach role.
USSA has been criticized for not paying enough attention to cross country. What's your view now that you're on "the inside?"
It's true. The perception is pretty well founded. In the early to mid-'90s, cross country had a tiny budget and
really no program going and no organization. Since then, we've been able to take a stance within the whole organization that USSA is there to win Olympic medals. When we had a new CEO, Bill Marolt, come on, he said, look, bottom line here is we're going to win Olympic medals. And we've taken on the philosophy, it really doesn't matter where those medals come from. Cross country's got 30 medals sitting on the table at
the Olympics. So if we're ever going to be the best ski team in the world, which is what we want to be, then you can't ignore that, you can't ignore those 30 medals.
That, combined with the Olympics coming to Utah, has really been a shot in the arm financially. Everybody wants to have a piece of the Olympics and get on board, so we've, in the last three years, been able to increase our budget about 125 percent. We're operating with twice the budget compared to when I was a
team member. Now we're able to do some good programs and have a good development program to get kids into Europa Cup races before they go off to World Cup, and make a good domestic series and make the steps a kid has to take up the pipeline smaller and easier to achieve. That's the cornerstone of what we're trying to achieve – we expect kids to win at every level as they move up. Part of doing that is not only
making the demand on the athlete, but making the level small enough that they can do that. They win at Junior Olympics and they win at Nor/Am and then they go to Europa Cup before they go to World Cup.
So now you have a much different perspective?
Ever since Bill Marolt, an ex-Olympian in alpine, has come on, we've had a lot more success in helping everybody understand that skiing's skiing. Whether it's jumping or freestyle, or whatever it is, you know
we're out there to win, and an alpine medal isn't worth any more than a snowboard medal. It's not worth any more than a cross country medal. With his arrival, USSA's had a turn-around in its attitude.
Why were only three athletes named to the 2000 U.S. ski team (Marcus Nash, Justin Wadsworth, Nina Kemppel)?
The problem that I believe we had for a long time with the ski team was that we've got to have this national
team and put enough kids on there so that one or two are going to come up and be the best. When I was on the team, there were 17 athletes at one point. What happened was, when dividing up your resources, you're not doing 100 percent for any single athlete. What we said was, let's have our best athletes get exactly what he or she needs to be the best. In order to do that, we're going to have to set some pretty high standards to
be on this team. The standards we set show that if a kid meets those criteria to be on the team – or the other way to get on the team is through coach's discretion – if a kid gets on the team, then we know that that person is on track to meet our goals. Our goal at this point for Salt Lake is to have one athlete in the top 10 in one race. We structured it a little bit differently, too, in that we have three people on the national
team, but we also have eight kids on the development team. We've never really had a development team before. So we're really funding, at a high level, 11 athletes.
Who's up and coming in the United States?
On our development team we've got Chris Cook, Chris Freeman, Andrew Johnson and Rob Whitney for the guys, and Aubrey Smith, Kikkan Randall, Melissa Orem on the women's side. Then we have one other
woman, Rebecca Quinn, who's awesome, and would be a part of that group. But the way we set up our development team, we have three training centers, and they have to operate out of one of them. We really try to stick these kids into a residence center with other good athletes and with a good coach, so we don't lose control of them and they don't lose sight of what the job is that has to be done. She got married and is
on her own, and she's going to try to do it her way, which is fine. But we don't give her the kind of support that we give these kids who are out there 100 percent.
We have some great juniors coming up, and all those kids have a ton of potential and can be really good. Last year at the Junior Worlds, we had our best results ever as far as the team goes. A lot of that is because the sprint race is coming on now. That's an event that's almost made for American skiers. We had seven of
our eight athletes in that sprint race in the top 20. We had three of the four top qualifying times. Chris Cook had the fastest qualifying time in the world, and tactically, he didn't have the experience to take it through to the final. But after that race, everyone was congratulating Miles (Minson) and saying you've got a heck of a team coming on.
So we're excited about it. Those are the kinds of results we're looking for so we can justify putting a high
level of funding into those athletes. I mean, those guys have a lot of opportunity now, but at the same time, we're putting high standards on them. They have to meet all sorts of markers, not only in results, but in how they train and how they prepare psychologically and their technique so they're brought under a pretty intense system of evaluation. But they know how they're going to be evaluated, and they know what they have to do to become champions.
What's your prediction for the United States on the international scene?
I think this season, Marcus (Nash) is going to come back. He had some health problems last year. He'll be in the top 15 at World Championships, probably in the sprint race. Nina (Kemppel), she's coming back into her old form, too. She'll have a top 20 result, most likely in the 30K at World Championships. Then this
group of younger kids is going to Europa Cup, and they'll ski seven Europa Cup races. We'll have three to four podium results there. That would be fantastic when we can go over at the 'B' level with young skiers and be on the podium at Europa Cup. That's a big step.
What about the overall World Cup?
I think Bente Martinsen (Norway) will win again. She's prepared better than anyone for altitude, and that's
going to pay off in January when the World Cup comes to Utah. The guys' side, it's hard to judge because there were so many races, and a lot of guys got pretty burned out at the end of the season. Preparation is going to be a little different with the World Championships in February and the World Cup in Utah in January. I think they'll take more of a focus on how they'll do in January and keep it through February and
not worry so much about the World Cup this year because everyone's scared about the altitude in Utah. Bente Martinsen is going there twice this summer to train at altitude. I think the focus for most of the teams is going to be how they can optimize their preparation for Utah and do well there, then worry about the World Championships. I don't think there's going to be an exciting men's World Cup this year.
How do you explain the struggles American skiers have had on the international scene?
I think for the most part we've had a tough time in our organization at the top. I think we've had a lot of good athletes come up. One thing we've been lacking at the grassroots level has been coaches' education. That's one thing we've been struggling with a little bit. We've tried a number of different methods to get the
message out and educate the coaches to make sure they're training young athletes, high school athletes, at a high level. It's something we still haven't solved at the higher levels. We've never done Europa Cup before, and we've never had a good domestic elite-level race series. It's always one big competition a year and that's Nationals – that lasts for nine days, usually in January. That's pretty much been the season. Then they
go and do these marathon races – they're fun races, but they're not elite-level, development races by any means. Now we've added a good domestic race series that the athletes can go to, win prize money, and feel good about what they're doing. They're with the best athletes around the country all year long now. They're banging heads all year long.
The way we started to select teams forces them to be good at that level before moving up. It used to be you
could go to Nationals make the Olympics and ski the Olympics and that was the jump. But now there's much more of a system to work through. It places higher demands on the athletes, but also gives more rewards. Now the path is clear to get up to the different teams; they can win some prize money and get some pretty good recognition.
We've also done a better job administering our whole system, especially our teams. We're able to travel
with PTs, have athletes get massages, work with doctors and do a lot of good sports science testing. One thing we've been careful about is we know there's a certain business end of the sport and there's a coaching end of the sport, and we don't mix those two. In the past, the mixing's happened where either the administrators, who are supposed to be taking care of the business end, influence what the coaches are
doing and not really letting the coaches do what they're trained to do. Or the coaches get distracted and get too involved in the business end and forget about the coaching job that needs to get done. That's something we really stress now in our organization. The coaches coach. They don't do anything else. And the administrators administrate, and that's it.
Is it working?
It's starting to show in junior results. Our coaches didn't have direct coaching influence over them, but
they've educated the coaches that have. The competition system we have now is more exciting, more motivating for an athlete. They can go to a ski race and realize this isn't a joke, and it's a good sport to be involved in. The rewards are out there, and they can see where it's taking them.
Do you see yourself in your current position long term?
I do, yeah. I'm pretty committed, at least through 2006. My position's going to take on a different flair now
with nordic combined and jumping, and I don't really know how that's going to affect what we do. We're on a good upswing now. We have the momentum behind us. I think it's important to keep consistency in the organization. When new coaches come in at the bottom end, we tell them to expect to be there 12 years or 16 years as they work up through being an assistant coach to development coach and finally to national
team coach. We want to train people on the job as assistant coaches and keep them in the organization so that we're not seeing big changes in the program when we have any staff changes. The core of what we do stays the same. When we have head coaches heading off to World Cup or World Championships, they're our most experienced coaches in the nation. That's the way it should be. Our staff's really committed to getting the job done.
Do you have any other work-related or ski-related aspirations?
In my free time, a group of us in Heber City and Park City have started the Soldier Hollow Legacy Foundation. Soldier Hollow is destined to be mothballed after the Olympics. The Olympics are going to kick off a $40 million sports endowment. That was a piece of legislation by the Utah state government, but the legislation was written before Soldier Hollow was built. Originally, the Olympic venue was supposed to
be closer to Salt Lake City, and it was in an environmentally sensitive area. They were going to basically tear everything down and let the trails regrow. That was moved to Heber City and still, legally, Soldier Hollow is not part of that $40 million endowment. It sounds like the easy way to do it would be to get them to change the law to write Soldier Hollow into it. But the $40 million is barely going to be enough to keep
the bobsled runs and the speed skating oval open, so we're feeling a responsibility to the other Olympic sports.
We're building a method to ensure that Soldier Hollow survives. We signed a contract with the state park (it's on state park land) to run it as a touring center after the Olympics. We got that much done. They're building us a nice ski lodge to use afterwards. The next big phase is to get the program endowed so we can
have good junior programs there. We've hired an executive director, we're hoping to hire a coach this fall, and then build that endowment. Our goal is to continue to have World Cup races every other year and have good athlete development programs. We have 400,000 school kids within an hour-and-a-half drive. It's a lot like Minneapolis in that regard. There is a big population base that can be introduced to the sport. So that's my pet project now and it's been a lot of fun.
Do you still keep up with the Midwest ski scene, like the Birkie?
I try to. I haven't really paid much attention to the details of the Birkie. They know best. They know when the good weather's going to happen and where the good courses are. It's such a huge tool for North America as far as getting kids into the sport and getting them excited and keeping their parents in the sport. I'm sure they'll make good decisions about it all. That event's going to stay healthy forever.
Will you ski the Birkie again?
Definitely, I want to get back to ski it someday. I don't know when it's going to happen. I am going to back in there, somewhere, starting in wave nine.
What's the most important piece of training/skiing advice you can give to the citizen racer?
Be out there having fun, and don't get so wrapped up in the technical details that you forget why you're
doing it. That's sort of what happened to me. The last phase of my skiing career, you can analyze to death. You want to ski good, but you want to be out there enjoying yourself and not worrying about weight shift so much that it eats up your enjoyment of being out there and really remembering why you ski. Guys who are out there training, guys who are out there, like Justin, and having fun every day and not worrying whether
he's going two hours and 20 minutes or two hours and 45 and not worrying so much about how many hills he's going to hit or things like that – he's saying, "I want to climb that mountain today and come out on the other side." Guys who train like that are always the best because they're the ones who have the smiles on their faces when they're out there racing – and that's the most important thing for sure
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