Skari, Bente

▪ 2004

      Norway's Bente Skari was almost untouchable during the 2002–03 World Cup cross-country skiing season. She entered 17 World Cup races and won 14, for her fourth overall crown in five years. She also went two-for-two at the 2003 Nordic world championships before dropping out because of illness. Then, on March 28, she said good-bye, retiring at age 30 after more than a decade of World Cup racing—with 42 wins (second all-time among women) and four World Cup titles, plus five world championship gold medals and five Olympic medals, including a 10-km gold at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. “My willpower and motivation are no longer strong enough to make me want to go on,” she told a farewell press conference. “I'm not the kind of athlete who does things halfheartedly.”

      Skari, the daughter of former Olympic ski medalist and International Ski Federation executive Odd Martinsen, was born in Oslo on Sept. 10, 1972. She skied during the 1992 season but was not an immediate hit on the World Cup circuit. She moved up during the 1994 Olympic season and won her first World Cup race in December 1997, but it was not until 1998, when she won a bronze medal at the Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, and finished the World Cup season number two in points, that she made an impact. She won the 1999 and 2000 World Cup overall titles, was second again in 2001, and won her last two years, 2002 and 2003. In mid-2000 she married Geir Skari, the 1996 National Collegiate Athletic Association cross-country ski champion for the University of Denver, Colo.

      Early in her career, Skari was almost one-dimensional—strong in classic technique (both skis in prepared tracks) but significantly slower in skating (freestyle or free technique, where skiers kick off to the side like a speed skater). She was hard to beat, however, in skating sprints, over a 1.5-km course where four skiers duel each heat. “I don't have confidence in the longer skate races,” she explained, “but when someone is right there with me, I don't want to lose and somehow I go faster, even skating.”

      Coincidentally, in her final season Skari emerged as an outstanding skater too. Of her 14 World Cup wins, 4 were in freestyle and 2 were in skiathlon, or double pursuit, a 10-km race that starts with 5 km of classic technique and rolls into a 5-km skate; skiers change equipment as they head into the final 5 km. She announced her retirement after winning her final race, the skiathlon at Norway's national championships.

Paul Robbins

* * *