A crowd waits at the bottom of a run in Steamboat Springs, Colo. on March 6, 2024, during the NCAA skiing championship. (Talus Schreiber/Sko Buff Sports)
Last month, the University of Colorado Boulder completed a 51-point comeback on the final day of competition to take home the 2024 NCAA Skiing Championships. It was the Buffaloes first championship in nine years, and the second-biggest comeback on the final day in the history of the sport.
The Buffaloes finished the competition with 569.5 total points compared to runner-up and four-time defending champions Utah Utes with 567.5 total points. It was the smallest margin of victory since 1983 when the sport became co-ed.
“It feels surreal,” CU head coach Jana Weinberger said. “That was very close, very nerve-racking, everybody did what we had to do. We came back from our not-so-great day on Thursday and it turned out well.”
Before the final men’s competition, the Buffaloes brought down the 51-point lead to only 17 points with the help of performances from the women’s side. Hanna Abrahamsson finished fourth, Anna-Maria Dietze finished fifth and Weronika Kaleta finished ninth to bring the Buffaloes back within winning distance.
For CU Boulder, Mangus Boee helped them claim the title as the senior won the 20k men’s freestyle with a time of 55 minutes and 38 seconds. With the win, Boee also secured his third individual national title.
“This whole year, I knew I had it in me, but the skis weren’t good one day or I just didn’t have the shape that day,” Boee said. “So just getting both right on the last day of national championships is a dream come true.”
The eight-time All-American championship is also the 105th individual ski championship in school history, the most by any school in the country. CU Boulder’s Will Koch finished the race third and Johannes Flaaten finished 11th, to help clinch the title over Utah’s sixth, seventh and eighth-place finishers.
“I’m not shocked, I’m just super happy we made it and it actually happened,” Boee said. “It’s one thing to be capable of doing it, it’s another to go out and do it. We win as a team and lose as a team… We’ve had a few championships the past few years where there were some what-ifs, and to be honest, I thought we may have another one. But as a team we mobilized, ended up on top and it worked.”
Win the win, CU Boulder Coach Weinberger is now the first female coach in the school’s history to win a national title and the second female coach in history to be credited with a ski national championship. She has also been a part of the three biggest comebacks in the history of the sport on a collegiate level. In 2006, she won both Nordic women’s competitions which clinched the title for CU after a 52-point comeback, in 2013 as an assistant coach she helped bring the team back from a 54-point lead, and she helped orchestrate the comeback win last month. She is the first person in school history to win a national championship as an athlete, assistant coach and head coach.
“I feel like the emotions are higher today then they were when I was an athlete back in 2006 or as an assistant coach,” Coach Weinberger said. “I’m just really glad that Anna-Maria and Magnus, who have been here for five years now, get to leave with a ring, it’s been such a drought for us.”
Sophomore Magdalena Luczak competes in the NCAA Skiing Championship in Steamboat Springs, Colo. on March 6, 2024. (Talus Schreiber/Sko Buff Sports)
For CU Boulder, the nine-year drought of ski national championships was uncommon. As a school with the most individual national titles and the second most team titles, they have seen much success in the sport since it began at the collegiate level in 1954. For the Buffaloes, their previous longest streaks without a national championship were from 1960-71 and 1982-91. The team’s best run came from 1972-79 in which the Buffaloes won in eight straight years. They also won three out of five years from 2011-15, but that was their last championship run before the win last month.
CU Boulder’s 2-point victory over Utah came down to every single race on the final day of competition. If any of the Buffaloes finished lower than they did, the title wouldn’t have been theirs. The team needed not just good finishes but wins to secure the title, and in the form of Filip Wahlqvist’s slalom win and Boee’s 20k race win, they did. It was almost a disaster for the Buffaloes after their subpar performances in the opening days of the competition, but they ended strong and with important wins that secured the school’s first ski national championship in nine years.
The Buffaloes have now won 21 ski national championships, the second most in the history of the sport. They finished the year with four individual championships, two from Magdalena Luczak, and one from Boee and Wahlqvist. Additionally, the Buffaloes finished with 10 of their 12 competitors given All-American awards, with seven reaching first-team status.
The final standings of the competition had CU Boulder at the top with 569.5 points followed by Utah’s 567.5 points. The University of Denver finished far behind in third with 491 points, followed by Dartmouth’s 399 points and Montana State’s 329 points.
After a long drought, CU Boulder returned from competition with one of their most successful seasons in school history with multiple wins from multiple All-Americans, and the all-important national championship trophy.
Contact CU Independent Assistant Sports Editor Eli Gregorski at elgr9735@colorado.edu
