A recent death hung over the proceedings, that of John Caldwell, who passed away last month, at the age of ninety-seven. He wrote the book on cross-country skiing in America—it was, in fact, called “The Cross-Country Ski Book”—and, after its publication, in 1964, it sold around half a million copies, helping to ignite a boom in the sport. Caldwell’s own progeny made up no small part of that explosion (his son and several of his grandchildren have competed in the Olympics), and at Vermont’s Putney School Caldwell coached America’s first cross-country superstar, Bill Koch, who won an Olympic medal in 1976. Koch was on hand in Lake Placid to give out awards; many of the Americans competing had grown up racing in the Bill Koch League, including Bill’s son, Will. The best of the current American men—Ben Ogden, who came away from this winter’s Olympics with a pair of silvers—grew up in the same rural Vermont Zip Code as Koch, and he spent a considerable portion of his early life skiing the back-yard course that Koch had groomed for himself and his neighbors. (Ogden explained to a Vermont Public Radio reporter after one race that he consumes “mostly maple syrup for training and racing fuel.”) The elder Caldwell went to Dartmouth, as did many of the American Nordic Olympians of the past six decades who gathered on the stage at Lake Placid’s Mt. Van Hoevenberg ski complex after the first day of the races; others hailed from Middlebury College, which also produced the American cross-country team’s current head coach, Matt Whitcomb, and even one of the announcers calling the races live for NBC, Chad Salmela.