When Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall raced to victory in the women’s team sprint at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, it was a breakthrough moment for Team USA, which had never won gold in a cross-country skiing event across 22 previous Winter Olympics. Four years later, at the Beijing Games, Diggins kept the momentum going by adding a silver and a bronze to the American trophy case, and she will once again be among the medal favorites at this year’s Milan Cortina Olympics as the cross-country skiing competition begins Friday.
The U.S. squad knows, however, that it can’t rely solely on generational athletes like Diggins to keep it in contention. That’s why, over the past decade, the Americans have taken two freight-sized steps toward keeping pace with the sport’s juggernauts.
In 2017, the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team unveiled its first-ever wax truck, a roughly $800,000 behemoth that is built on the chassis of a bus and serves as a traveling workshop to perform crucial maintenance on skiers’ equipment at races. The truck, which expands out to the sides, offers more than 500 square feet of working space, eight waxing stations and storage for about 1,000 pairs of skis, with a ventilation system to filter out any smoke or fumes. (It also features a coffee maker.)
Seven years later, the U.S. added a $200,000 grind truck, which resembles a U-Haul, to house a ski grinding machine—a “pretty heavy piece of equipment” that would otherwise be virtually impossible to transport, says U.S. head coach Chris Grover.
This year’s events in Italy—being held in Tesero, in the Alps between Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo—will mark the trucks’ Olympic debut because it would have been too difficult to get the wax truck from its permanent home in Europe, where most non-Olympic races are contested, to the last two Winter Games in Asia. Already, though, the U.S. team is having a hard time imagining racing without them.
“We’re playing catchup,” Grover says, “but this is one of the last pieces of the puzzle to compete with the big guys.”
To put it simply, success on the snow depends on proper ski waxing and grinding, with team technicians constantly navigating unpredictable weather and terrain conditions. Wax, applied to the bottom of skis, not only protects the equipment from damage by forming a barrier against dirt and rocks, but also gives skiers a speed boost by adjusting the amount of friction with the ground, helping them find the right balance between gripping and gliding through the snow. Grinding—in which the ski is essentially sanded on a machine to remove dirt, smooth the surface and flatten the ski—similarly allows skiers to tailor their equipment to the snow conditions to optimize their performance. It also prevents moisture from building up on skis, which would slow down an athlete.
The process differs quite a bit from Alpine skiing, a discipline that generally attracts more eyeballs than cross-country thanks to its speed, its TV-friendly format and its globally recognizable stars, like Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin. In Alpine, athletes’ sheer velocity going downhill makes friction less of an issue, whereas cross-country skiers have to travel both downhill and uphill. Misjudging that equilibrium can have catastrophic consequences, which Randall experienced when she was eliminated in the freestyle sprint quarterfinals at the 2014 Sochi Olympics by five-hundredths of a second.
“That was a really painful example of why skis are so important,” says Randall, who retired from competition in 2018.
Without a truck, ski maintenance was an arduous task. The team had to set up a temporary wax room at each competition, which required hours of labor moving equipment to and from cargo vans. Even after the space was finally set up, lighting and ventilation were a crapshoot. Grind stations, meanwhile, weren’t an option on the road at all because the size and weight of the machines meant they had to stay put. Grover, the U.S. coach, says the quality of the work environment loomed as a major obstacle to recruiting and retaining talented technicians.
Sweden was the first team to reset the standard, debuting its wax truck in 2008. Not wanting to be outdone by a Scandinavian rival, Norway, the all-time leader in Olympic cross-country medals, soon followed suit. Then, Grover recalls, “all of a sudden they started to spring up.”
Countries including Germany, Italy and Switzerland rolled out their own vehicles, but it was Canada joining the trend that lit a fire under Randall. “If we were going to put athletes in a position to win consistently, we had to have better resources,” she recalls. The three-time World Cup sprint champion started talking to Grover about building a U.S. truck to close the gap. But with cross-country on a “shoestring budget,” Randall had a metaphorical mountain to climb.
In 2015, while taking off a season during her pregnancy, Randall flew to Colorado and pleaded her case to the trustees at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the governing body that oversees the sport in America. That effort led to conversations with individual donors, and within days, Randall had rallied the support she needed, with contributions ranging from $50,000 to $250,000.
“I’d love to take credit for it,” Grover says, “but I think Kikkan probably gets the most credit.”
Since retiring from the sport, Randall has remained involved with the foundation as an athlete gift officer, and she made her mark once again by recruiting some of the trustees who funded the grind truck.
Today, Grover describes the sport as “an evolving arms race to some extent.” Sweden transitioned to a new truck after selling its previous one to Italy in 2024, and Norway and Finland both have decked-out trucks with expandable second floors, giving athletes a place to lounge in between races. Grover estimates the cost of those vehicles falls somewhere between $1 million and $2 million.
In the immediate future, the U.S. has no plans to make any significant upgrades to its trucks. It costs only about $20,000 to maintain both vehicles each year, covering servicing, maintenance, registrations, insurance and road taxes. The mileage on their odometers is also “nothing compared to what the trucking industry would put on a vehicle like that,” Grover notes, so the trucks are poised to last for years.
Still, a bigger truck “may be on the horizon,” Grover says, even if not in the next year or two. When the U.S. wax truck first hit the road, it had more workstations than technicians. Now, there are nine staff members in need of elbow room.
In the meantime, Grover has his sights set on continuing the Americans’ run of Olympic success. The investments in equipment will help, especially because the 2030 Games will also be in Europe, in the French Alps—an easy journey for the trucks. But having the sport’s best athlete doesn’t hurt, either.
“The common factor, I don’t know if it’s the wax truck,” Grover says with a laugh. “I think it’s Jessie Diggins.”