Top Five Fridays: October 31, 2025
Over 75 years after the first skijoring race was held, the sport is making its professional debut this season. More on that in highlight #3! Image: PRO Skijoring on Facebook
#1: FIS Alpine World Cup Recap: U.S. Women’s Team Opens the Season in Dominant Fashion:
Paula Moltzan, burning a turn on her way to a second place finish in Soelden to start the season. Image: U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team on Facebook
Hello, and welcome to Top Five Fridays, the October 31, 2025 edition! This week, we’re excited to bring you a recap that we’ve been waiting all year for. No - we don’t mean a super spooky Halloween edition of Top Five Fridays, although it is that too. This week, we’re celebrating something even more exciting: the official start of ski season! Last weekend, not only did the FIS World Cup hold its first races of the season, but two resorts in Colorado also celebrated opening days, marking the official beginning of the 2025-2026 ski season! We’ll share all of the details that we can about those two stories, before moving onto coverage from two additional forms of ski competition: professional skijoring, and freeride. Let’s dive in.
This week, in Soelden, the World Cup Alpine Race season officially got underway as the ski area in Austria successfully hosted a men’s and women’s GS event. In recent years, the timing of this initial event has been called into question as its chances of actually being held have been reduced to something of a coin flip thanks to climate change. This time around though, the coin came up heads and both races were successfully held.
On the women’s side of things, this was excellent news as Team USA started the season in dominant fashion. As you might expect, all eyes were on Mikaela Shiffrin coming into this one as questions remain after last year’s tumultuous season. After missing a majority of the season due to injury, Shiffrin found herself in uncharted territory as her GS ranking coming into Soelden had slipped all the way down to 30th. For comparison, she hasn’t been ranked lower than 7th in GS since 2014, and has been in the top 3 in eight of those seasons. Beyond being a statistical anomaly, her ranking also had real world implications coming into this race as it meant she was given a higher bib number, thereby a worse starting position and worse conditions on the course than she’d seen in over a decade. In addition to overcoming the mental and physical challenges presented by her injury, Shiffrin would also be facing technical challenges in this season’s opening race.
With all of that in mind, it’s with immense excitement that we share the results from the women’s race. Leading the pack for the American women wasn’t Mikaela Shiffrin, but Paula Moltzan, who started the season off in incredible fashion, earning a second place finish - an early reminder that the women’s team is loaded with talent. Just two spots back from Moltzan was Shiffrin, who earned a 4th place finish - boosting her ranking in the discipline from 30th to 4th in just one race, immediately eliminating the high bib number issue. Then, two spots behind Shiffrin, was Nina O’Brien in 6th, followed by Katie Hensien in 12th, AJ Hurt in 13th, and Elisabeth Bocock in 19th. For those doing the math at home, that puts six U.S. athletes in the top 20, five in the top 13, and three in the top 6. If the World Cup calendar were to end today, the U.S. Women’s Team would win the season in resounding fashion. While that would be pretty cool, we’re far more excited by the potential that this team has on the whole heading into the Olympics. If the race in Soelden has shown us anything, it’s that the U.S. Women’s Alpine Team is set to make an incredible splash on the world stage.
On the men’s side of things, there’s a bit less to celebrate. In that race, River Radamus was the sole U.S. athlete to earn points, coming in 21st. In comparison to the women’s results, this might seem incredibly underwhelming, and it is. But, there are some factors to keep in mind here. First of all, GS isn’t the specialty of the men’s team. While the Women have competitors in all disciplines, the U.S. men’s team have been far better at speed events like Downhill and Super G in recent years. Second, there’s a three week gap between the Soelden event and the next races in Levi, Finland, and a five week gap before the first speed events of the year in Gurgl, Austria. Because of that, it looks like the U.S. Men’s team sent mostly members from their B and C teams to compete and gain experience. While it’s not a move that resulted in podium finishes and flashy results, it does make good strategic sense in terms of developing athletes for the future of the program. With that in mind, while the overreaction would be to assume that the U.S. Men’s team won’t be competitive this year, the appropriate reaction would be to stick around and see what happens in Gurgl. You can preview that race here, and the Levi events here.
#2: Ski Season is Here! Keystone & Arapahoe Basin Celebrate Opening Days, With More on the Way:
A classic opening day scene occurred last Saturday at Keystone as the resort became the first to open for the 2025-2026 season. Image: Keystone Resort on Facebook
Next up this week is coverage of arguably the biggest news of the year, every year: ski season is finally here! Now, if someone was to ask you, “what ski resort is typically the first to open every year,” you would probably name a ski resort in Colorado. Wolf Creek, Arapahoe Basin - places like that. For the last few years though, ski resorts in the Upper Midwest and here on the East Coast have snuck in to steal the award by cranking out just enough snow during right weather windows to run a rope tow. As it turns out, that was the case yet again this season, as Massachusett’s Ski Ward ran their magic carpet for just one day, on October 18th. We admittedly did miss that highlight, but seeing as it was a one-off and the ski area isn’t currently open for skiing and riding, we wouldn’t consider it the official start of the season. That, in our eyes, didn’t happen until this week.
Last Saturday, on October 25, 2025, Arapahoe Basin shared via their social media outlets that they planned to open the following day, October 26th, at 8:30 AM, with the Black Mountain Express servicing the High Noon trail. Since last Saturday, the resort has remained open every day with access to just High Noon.
Not to be outdone however, and stealing a page from A-Basin’s 2019 playbook, nearby Keystone Resort pulled a fast one and quite literally stole opening day from A-Basin. Just a few hours after Arapahoe Basin announced their opening plans, Keystone followed suit, only they didn’t announce that they would be opening the following day - they announced that they would be opening an hour and a half later. Under two hours after their opening day announcement went live, Keystone fired up their lifts from 3 PM - 6 PM on Saturday, October 25th, ultimately becoming the first ski area in the United States to open (and stay open) for the 2025-2026 season. For the team at Keystone, it was an excellent way to get back at A-Basin for pulling the same stunt 6 years ago.
As for the rest of us? Well, ski season isn’t here quite yet, but it’s coming quickly. Elsewhere in Colorado, Winter Park has announced plans to open later today, while Loveland has fired up their snowguns ahead of an anticipated November 9th opening. Here on the East Coast, some weather forecasts are showing potential snow in higher elevations this weekend, while Vermont’s Jay Peak has announced that they’ll be firing up snowmaking equipment to begin preparing for the season ahead. All of this is to say, that while ski season isn’t here for all of us, it’s truly not very far away.
#3: It’s Official: Skijoring Has Gone Pro:
Skijoring. It’s wild, it’s wacky, it’s professional.
Moving right along, our third highlight this week is one that we think you’ll all enjoy quite a bit: starting this season, there will be a professional skijoring league. Now, before we get into some of the details behind this new league, we want to take a moment to make sure we’re all on the same page here as skijoring is certainly what one might call a niche sport. To put it succinctly, skijoring is the sport of ski racing, in which the skier holds a rope attached to a horse, controlled by a rider. Technically, it is a team sport.
While the concept of animal powered skiing has been around for hundreds of years and dates back to a time when Scandinavians would have reindeer pull them around on skis as a form of transportation, modern competitive skijoring wasn’t born until 1949, when two Colorado men took what was typically a demonstrative practice and turned it into a race. In the roughly 75 years since that initial race, both the format and the excitement surrounding skijoring have continued to evolve. In recent years, mountain towns all across the west have held annual races in which local skiers partner up with a local cowboy (or cowgirl), strap on skis, and rip through an obstacle-filled course as quickly as possible. In its present format, these competitions bring out a variety of skiers - some eager to win the event with the fastest times, and others more interested in seeing if they can complete a horsepowered backflip or flatspin. Regardless of each rider’s intent or success rate, the rowdy events have grown in popularity, with many calling them a rodeo on skis.
Now, for the first time ever, skijoring is going professional, with the introduction of PRO Skijor. This new league is based on two things: skijor racing, and a circuit that it’s calling the Frontier Tour. This tour, which operates in similar fashion to any other ski tour, will be a five stop circuit taking place across Utah, Montana, and Idaho, in which riders earn points along the way based on their results. At the end of the season, the circuit will move onto Salt Lake City, where qualified riders will take part in the championships.
In addition to formally organizing the sport for the first time, the PRO Skijor is also monetizing the sport in a real way. For athletes, a total cash purse of $250,000 is up for grabs across all stops. For the league itself, tickets will be sold at various price points, from general admission to VIP, and even tailgating tents. Ultimately, that last ticket type reveals quite a bit about what this league hopes to be: while the athletes competing on the tour will showcase serious levels of ski and horseback riding talent, the league hopes to carry on the high energy spirit that’s made skijoring so popular at local events. Not looking to take themselves too seriously, PRO Skijor stops are expected to be, for lack of a better term, a party.
All in all, it’s a pretty fun story to share and a league that we’ll certainly be keeping an eye on. In the world of skiing, there’s always a battle between letting the sport remain a pure, unadulterated escape from reality in which fun and goofiness prevail, and a sport in which athletes very seriously push themselves to the edge of their abilities. While we respect each approach, it’s refreshing to see a group attempt to create a new competitive league in which the underlying value is simple, chaotic fun. To learn more about this tour, including how you can sign up to compete, check out the PRO Skijor website.
#4: Freeride Double Update: Big Announcements from NST Ski & the Freeride World Tour:
Finally, rounding things out this week is a bit of a freeride double header as we caught a pair of stories that aren’t quite worthy of standalone coverage, but that we think you should definitely know about. First up on that list: a couple of big updates from the Natural Selection Ski Tour.
First things first, if you haven’t watched any of the footage from last year’s NST Ski event, you should consider putting everything you’re doing on hold and spending the next 4 hours watching this replay. If you can’t, then at least hit play on Sam Kuch’s winning run, attached to this highlight. We promise you won’t regret it.
We’ll wait.
… Ok great! Now that you’ve seen how insane last year’s event was, we’re excited to share two pieces of news. First, NST Ski will be returning to Alaska at the end of March to run it back. While we don’t know the specific venue for the event, it’s all but guaranteed that it will be different as one of the key elements for the NST is founder Travis Rice’s ability to discover unique zones. As such, you can bet that a team will be traversing Alaska this winter in search of the perfect venue for this year’s competition. As for the roster of invited athletes, we currently know that the six athletes who made it to the semifinals last year are being invited back. Specifically, that means Sam Kuch, Markus Eder, Craig Murray, and Colby Stevenson will be back to represent the men, while Manon Loschi and Michelle Parker will be back on the women’s side. Based on last year’s numbers, that leaves six additional roster spots for men, and two for the women.
Which, as it happens, brings us to our next piece of NST news: it’s sounding like there’s a chance that there will be a second event this season. While very few details are known, reports from both Downdays.eu and Powder Magazine suggest that at least some of these remaining openings will be filled through a first-stage qualifier event, details about which are coming soon. At the moment that’s all we know, but we suspect a pretty big update is looming. For now, check out Downdays.eu for the full scoop.
Finally, on the topics of roster spots and freeride events, we want to very quickly mention that the Freeride World Tour has just announced two wildcard athletes for the upcoming season. On the men’s side 2024 Tour Champion Max Hitzig has been invited back after being sidelined due to injury last season. Prior to his dominant 2024 campaign, in which he podiumed in five events and won two, Hitzig initially burst onto the stage in 2022 when he won the Fierbrunn event as an event wildcard. Now, four seasons later and just one removed from being crowned champion, Hitzig is back and expectations are high.
On the women’s side, Sybille Blanjean’s story is very similar to Hitzig’s. In 2022, she won the Xtreme Verbier stop in her debut season, before having a strong 2024 campaign in which she won the inaugural Georgia stop. Last season, she was sidelined due to injury, but has also been invited back to compete in this year’s tour. Like Hitzig, both expectations and potential are through the roof for Blanjean. To learn more about these two wildcards, check out the report from the Freeride World Tour.
#5: And Now, Your Edits of the Week: Chris Benchetler is Back With the Trailer for His Highly Anticipated Film, “Mountains of the Moon”. As You Might Expect, the Film Looks to be About Far More Than Just Skiing:
Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to work with Chris and his team to build the Mountains of the Moon website. If you’re so inclined, I’d love it if you gave it a look!