Dartmouth Dominates the EISA Championships in Front of a Roaring Rikert Crowd
- mlwagner9
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
Rikert Outdoor Center, Ripton, VT
All photos courtesy of Phillip Belena
The roaring cheers from Rikert Outdoor Center might still be ringing in the EISA racers' ears, even a week after the carnival season came to a close with the EISA Championships. Hosted by Middlebury College last weekend in Ripton, Vermont, the final stop of the 2026 carnival circuit was truly a set of races to be remembered. Family and friends lined the trails with cowbells, posters, speakers, flags, horns, boomboxes, and yes, even chainsaws, which created a wall of sound unlike anything the EISA has seen all season. Quincy Massey-Bierman, a senior on the Middlebury ski team, explained that the rowdy scene was a strong motivation for her final two EISA race performances. "It was electrifying and inspired me to push myself to the limit," Massey-Bierman said. "It filled me with so much joy and enthusiasm, even in the tough races."
The final race weekend of the season kicked off with a 7.5k classic individual start on Friday. Blankets of gray clouds covered the sky as the EISA skiers prepared to take the line, hinting at the promise of a coming snowstorm. Each athlete skied three laps of Rikert's 2.5k Tormondsen Family Race Course, which demanded proficient kick wax to handle the course's steep climbs. Dartmouth senior Cooper Camp explained just how tricky the wax conditions were on Friday. "It was hard finding kick out there," Camp said, "but we ended up with some really good skis." Camp's teammate Aaron Power echoed the sentiment. "My skis were flying," Power added, even down Rikert's infamous sharp downhill corners.
Dartmouth's fast skis translated into fast results. By the end of the men's race, the Dartmouth men had swept the podium, becoming the only team other than UVM to do so this season. John Steel Hagenbuch led the charge, arriving to Rikert Outdoor Center fresh off of racing at the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympic Games. "It’s really good to be back," Hagenbuch said. "This was by far the best race for our team this season. Pretty much everybody had their season best result." True to his word, behind Hagenbuch, Aaron Power secured second place and Cooper Camp took third, both skiers claiming their first career EISA podiums. Overall, Dartmouth placed six men in the top ten, a dominant performance that set the tone for the rest of the championship weekend.
The clouds still loomed overhead as the women's 7.5k classic race began with wax conditions just as tricky as they were for the men. The Dartmouth women, matching their men's team's outstanding performance, placed five skiers in the top ten. Dartmouth's Ava Thurston, no stranger to the podium, took first place by over a minute, followed by Haley Brewster of UVM in second. Rounding out the podium was Dartmouth's Evelyn Walton, who earned her first career EISA podium at Rikert Outdoor Center. "It was so good, I'm so excited," Walton shared about her race. "It got us really excited to see the boys do so well before us."
A total of eleven Dartmouth skiers broke the top ten in Friday's 7.5k classic races, making the first day of EISA Championships a memorable day for the Dartmouth ski team. Walton summed up the day's triumph with a single sentence: "It was a really awesome day for the team." After the women's race ended, the long-awaited storm finally broke. The winds picked up and snow began to fall on Rikert Outdoor Center, leaving teams to wonder what conditions would await them on Saturday for the final race of the season.
When Saturday dawned, Rikert Outdoor Center looked like a snow globe. Snow had continued to dump throughout the night, resulting in a soft 5k course for the day's 20k freestyle mass starts. John Steel Hagenbuch took the men's race out hard, breaking away from the pack on the first of four laps. As the race progressed, Hagenbuch continued to increase his lead, proving his dominance from the start to the finish. A few skiers attempted to stay with Hagenbuch at the start, but paid the price during the rest of the race. Other skiers, like Hagenbuch's teammate Cooper Camp, said that he let Hagenbuch go. "I knew John Steel would mix things up in the field," Camp explained. "I didn't really want anything to do with that funny business. I just let him go on the first lap and found the guys I knew I'd probably be racing at the end."
Camp put together another outstanding performance, moving up throughout the race and out-sprinting his pack to claim second place. "I don't usually have the sprint finish," Camp said with a grin, "but I found a nice little inside line today." Scrambling with Camp at the finish was Dartmouth first-year Micah Bruner, who explained that "it was super motivating to be racing out there in a pack of Dartmouth guys, so I just went for it at the end." Bruner sprinted to his first career EISA podium, rounding out yet another Dartmouth podium sweep. With their outstanding performances at Rikert Outdoor Center, the Dartmouth men's team became the first of the season to take two podium sweeps in one weekend.
On the women's side, a strong lead group of skiers stayed together for the majority of the 20k freestyle race. Racing in a group can be chaotic at times, but the rowdy crowd at Rikert Outdoor Center made pack skiing in the women's race especially difficult. On the second loop of the Tormondsen Family Race Course, fans pressed in on both sides of the trails, forcing racers to a single lane of traffic. However, though the crowd's congestion led to tangled skis and tense battles for positioning lap after lap, the wall of noise provided a unmatched boost of motivation for each racer.
By the final lap, two familiar faces had broken away from the lead pack. Ava Thurston of Dartmouth and Haley Brewster of UVM flew past the roaring crowd as they raced head to head for the finish. By the time they reached the stadium, Brewster had taken the lead and out kicked Thurston by a single second. Bowdoin senior Emma Crum crossed the line twenty seconds later, closing out her EISA career with one final podium finish. As the women's race came to a close, the finishing pen was heavy with emotion. A few tears were shed, teammates hugged each other at the finish line for the last time, and seniors soaked in their final moments as racers on the EISA circuit. Sending a huge congratulations to the Class of 2026 on four outstanding years of racing!
A great season of carnival racing calls for an even greater final carnival, and Middlebury College delivered. Rikert Outdoor Center buzzed with energy throughout the weekend, and the roar of the crowd could be heard throughout the venue. The sounds of the crowd will surely be ringing in each racer's ear for another week, if not another few, and the memories will remain for a lifetime. Looking ahead, EISA skiers who qualified for the NCAA Championships will head to Midway, Utah, to compete on March 11-14. Best of luck to each EISA racer!
As always, thank you to the staff and volunteers at Rikert Outdoor Center for putting together an amazing final weekend of racing.... EISA racing is not possible without all of the help and support from the greater ski community!
⭐️ Full race results are available at bullitttiming.com
⭐️ Full photo sets can be downloaded at https://phillipbelena.com/eisa
⭐️ For more news & updates on EISA carnival racing, follow @eisaskiing on Instagram
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