So, in addition to working for FasterSkier, I’m also employed as an intern at The Nation magazine in New York City. For those of you who have never heard of The Nation before, it’s very, very important. We have lots of very important people in the office (some of them are on TV sometimes), we talk to other important people and write stories about them, and then even more important people read the stories in the magazine about the other important people.

Because The Nation is so important, it’s in New York City, since that’s where most of the important people in the world are and we want to have them within striking distance. (I know, Barack Obama is in DC and Bjorn Daehlie is somewhere in Norway, but really, most of them are here.) But due to the fact that there are so many other important magazines covering the same kinds of important topics as The Nation and trying to talk to the same important people, it can often be quite difficult to get through to the person you want to talk to. One of the more entertaining things that happens every day (at least for me…) is when another intern (there are nine of us) picks up the phone, makes a call, and then has to introduce themselves like four times in a row (because they get transferred and transferred and transferred, or even hung up on). Other times, people simply choose not to return your calls, like yesterday when I was trying to check a fact with a neoconservative think tank, or a few weeks ago when I called a mountaintop removal mining company to confirm the height of the machine was that was spewing mine tailings into Appalachian hollows and streams. (“The author says 20 stories, but I just wanted to double check…”)

Ski journalism, on the other hand, is a little easier. This might be partially due to the fact that US Ski Team Head Coach Pete Vordenberg doesn’t own any 20-story-high pieces of machinery spewing mine tailings into Appalachian hollows and streams, or because Kikkan Randall has not been involved in any extra-judicial executions in Iraq (at least I don’t think so–FasterSkier doesn’t use fact-checkers, so none of this has been confirmed independently). But it also might have something to do with the fact that people in the cross-country ski community don’t take themselves too seriously, and maybe even enjoy their jobs.

One excellent example of this is FIS Cross Country Race Director Jürg Capol. Recently, I needed to get in touch with Jürg for a story, so I e-mailed him a list of questions. Two days later, having received no response, I tried him again. Still no response. I figured that as an important member of the international cross country skiing community, he probably felt that he didn’t have to bother with pesky American reporters. So I called up FIS headquarters in Switzerland, fully expecting to get transferred to a Swiss-speaking secretary and put on hold until the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Instead, I was greeted by a very pleasant (if initially Swiss-speaking) receptionist, who, entirely unsolicited, offered to give me Jürg’s cell phone number since he wasn’t in the office. This is quite noteworthy, given that at The Nation and other important New York places, to get an important person’s office number–let alone their cell–you have to have serious street cred, or even–dare I say it–huge baller status. And yet to get the hotline to the FIS Cross Country Race Director, I didn’t even have to give my name. All of this leads me to believe that someone has a highly inflated sense of self-importance: It’s either me, for thinking that it’s a big deal to get to talk to the FIS Cross Country Race Director, or it’s all of these New York weenies who think it’s really important to keep their telephone numbers a big secret.

In any case, Jürg’s easygoing attitude is further and perhaps best illustrated by his profile on Twitter, in which we get such lighthearted posts as “flying home:) vancouver 2010, not even 8 month to go” and then, slightly more ominously, “still at the airport, plane has technical problems, hope, they wonna solve asap…” While it is rare to get insights like this into the mind of such an important figure, even more unprecedented are intimate photographs like this one.

If only he were sitting on a 20-story-high piece of machinery spewing mine tailings into Appalachian hollows and streams instead of a toy motorcycle. Then, I’d have a story.

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