Dashing Through the Snow

How many of your colleagues do you think you could convince to enter a 56-mile cross-country ski race? One? None? Well, this week the Bonnier staff in Sweden entered a team of 25 in Vasaloppet, the country’s most prestigious winter endurance race—and they’re actually out to win.

Women's and youth races have been going on since Friday, but the main Vasaloppet event (which is open to all) began this morning, and I’ve been watching it on TV in the airport, as I wait for my flight to Helsinki. With some training, I think I'd like to enter a race like this. I’ve never actually cross-country skied in my life, but the idea appeals to me, and I think I’d pick it up pretty quickly. I’d much rather use skis as transportation than as a way to break my neck sliding downhill.

Anyway, back to the Vasaloppet. It’s actually redundant to say “the” Vasaloppet, because the “-et” at the end of Vasalopp means “the.” But in English it sounds weird to leave it out. Anyway, some members of the Bonnier team are Vasaloppet veterans. Jonas Eriksson, VP of Bonnier Entertainment and his boss Torsten Larsson, head of Bonnier Broadcasting, Entertainment, and the evening newspaper Expressen, are ski-racing experts, with years of events under their belts. For Larsson, Vasaloppet is just a training race—he’s using it to prepare for his annual crosscountry ski-traverse of Greenland.

But Vasaloppet is a pretty big deal: over 44,000 people entered this year, if you count the smaller races as well as the 56-mile event. That’s bigger than the New York Marathon, which limits entries to 37,000. (To be fair, it’s not really accurate to compare them, since Vasaloppet send competitors out in flights over the course of four days. But still, 44,000 people is five percent of the Swedish population.)

The first Vasaloppet happened in 1922, when a newspaper editor named Anders Pers decided it would be fun to put together a race that roughly followed king Gustav Vasa’s “flight on skis from Mora towards Norway in 1521” (quoting vasaloppet.se on that one—the description doesn't make it clear whether he was fleeing or rushing to attack, although I suspect it was the latter). The first race was sponsored by Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest daily paper, owned by Bonnier, but these days it’s sponsored by deeper pockets like IBM and Volkswagen.

By tomorrow, we should know whether the Bonnier team won the race. I would be kind of surprised—even though we’ve got some experienced racers, it sounds like there’s a whole lot of competition. But, you never know!