On March 4, 2022, BSF Nordic skier Landon Wyatt won his first national championship in the U16 Men’s Classic 5km. Every athlete has a story behind the story, and Marshall Opel, one of the BSF Comp Team coaches, captured Landon’s journey to the finish line in the article below.
At the start of the 2020-21 season, BSF Nordic athlete Landon Wyatt broke his wrist. He took the injury in stride and kept training. But just as it was healing, he broke it again. Landon then spent the entire ski season training and racing with one hand. He pushed himself and his teammates as if nothing had happened.
By spring, Landon was back in the action, this time with two working hands. He worked hard all summer and fall, often hanging with older teammates on big workouts. By the time the 2021-22 race season came around, Landon was flying.
Landon won or finished on the podium in all six of his junior national qualifying races, making him the Intermountain region’s top male U16 athlete going into Junior Nationals in Minneapolis, MN.
It was Landon's first trip to Junior Nationals, where he and his teammates would line up against the best U16 skiers in the U.S. Landon skied to a respectable 20th place in the opening freestyle 5-km individual race and then took off in the sprint race finishing an impressive fourth place overall.
The mass start classic was the penultimate race of the week. Mass starts are always chaotic. Putting more than 70 strong U16 boys together is a guaranteed dog fight. The race featured two challenging laps of a 2.5-km course. Landon’s race started where his week began, somewhere around 20th place. Working his way through skiers, Landon lapped through the stadium a handful of seconds behind a leading group of five skiers.
At this point, Landon had already raced fantastically. Staying out of trouble, he had passed several of the top athletes from around the country. He just needed to hold on.
Towards the end of the lap there was a steep, several-hundred-meter climb nicknamed “rope tow hill.” The climb was lined with coaches, teammates, parents, and spectators all knowing it would be a critical moment in the race.
Just before a fast, sweeping downhill, Landon latched onto the back of the front pack of five. A 90-degree right turn marked the beginning of the climb. The lead group whipped around the turn and took up the three inside lanes. Meanwhile, Landon went wide. From the back of the pack, he set out in the fourth lane. At this point, the reasonable thing for Landon to do would have been to hold on, match the pace of his competitors, and try to get around a few of them to land on the podium, a huge result for his first Junior Nationals.
Landon wasn’t interested. He went on the attack. Raising his tempo to an all-out sprint, Landon pulled even with the front of the pack and then ahead. The top of the hill was a left turn, of which Landon was now on the inside line. He crested the climb with a small gap and stayed on the gas. A “toilet bowl” turn led racers into a short climb, then a series of rollers followed by a steep downhill, up over a bridge and into the stadium. In the final few hundred meters Landon’s competitors were still chasing him like rabid dogs, but it was too late. This was Landon’s race. Landon was National Champion.
