Rosie Brennan’s cross-country skiing career has been defined by determination, including what she endured over the last eight months and likely will continue to face in the lead-up to the 2026 Milan Cortina Games.
Brennan, a two-time Olympian, visited more doctors in the last year — she estimated 10 to 12, including a week at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota — than World Cup stops — seven.
She’s still searching for a solution to a mystery affliction.
Leading up to last Christmas, Brennan’s joints became achier. She got sore easily. She had random cramps. When she tried to give it her all in her lung-searing sport, her muscles shut down and she lacked energy.
“Impossible to race as a cross-country skier if you can’t really push hard,” she said. “So it’s been very strange. Possibly a post-viral thing. I’ve seen a million doctors. No one’s really had an answer.”
Brennan had similar feelings both leading up to the 2018 Olympics — it was later diagnosed as mono caused by the Epstein-Barr virus — and again during the 2023-24 season.
But this time is different. It cut short her 2024-25 season, has now lasted longer than before and could impact the start of the 2025-26 Olympic season.
“When your livelihood depends on your body, these are the things nightmares are made of,” she posted last January, when she took a midseason break to return to the U.S.
Now, Brennan is optimistic she’ll be on the start line for the World Cup opening races on Thanksgiving weekend in Ruka, Finland. What is less clear is how the three months will go in between.
“I have had weeks where things have been really good, and I felt normal, and then I gain a lot of optimism, of course,” she said. “Then it’s just like, the next day, things will just fall apart for a reason I can’t explain. Part of it is just going to come down to the cosmos.”
Brennan was at first persuaded to ski by her mom in eighth grade — a year after she watched 2002 Olympic competition in her native Park City, Utah, while school was out three weeks.
As a Dartmouth sophomore, Brennan made her World Cup debut in January 2009. She came back from being cut from the national team to make her first Olympics in 2018.
She came back from being cut from the national team again to make her second Olympics in 2022.
Erik Flora, who has coached Brennan in Alaska over the last decade, said her determination through the 2018 Olympic season, and losing her national team spot after that campaign, was defining.
“That can be a career-ending experience, spending several months training with mono, watching your Olympic performance disappear in front of you,” he said. “Rosie took the spring to rebalance and get her health back. Sure thing, she came back with full energy and full forward into summer training, then fall. At that point, not only did she step back to where she was, but she she made a huge step in her performance.”
In 2020, she earned her first individual World Cup victory at age 32. The next day, she won again.
She is most proud of another feat: making World Cup podiums in all four types of races that take different skill sets: sprinting in both the classic technique and freestyle as well as distance events (10km or 20km) in each technique.
“One of the things that makes her so unique is that she has believed and kept working, and she has incredible grit,” teammate Jessie Diggins said last fall. “Not that other people aren’t gritty, or that they don’t believe and they don’t keep working, but I think one of the coolest things about Rosie’s story is that she got her first World Cup wins in her early 30s. She put in the work for years and years and years to get there, and all the while was just quietly grinding away, doing the work, doing all these hard workouts. And then she had her moment, and she got to really blossom. And I think it’s a really cool example of you don’t necessarily know when you’re going to reach your full potential, and you should never give up until you get there.”
Brennan has competed in 28 total Olympic or World Championships races (individual, relay and team sprint) over the last decade. She or her team finished in fourth place on three occasions, in fifth place on five occasions and in sixth place on three occasions.
“I’m incredibly proud of everything I’ve done,” said Brennan, who is motivated in particular to be part of the first Olympic women’s 50km event in 2026. “I don’t feel I need (a medal) to make my career feel complete. Unfortunately, in the U.S., a medal is the only way to make money. So financially, there’s massive incentive.”
As Brennan said, her career has taken twists and turns she never anticipated.
She has endured fractured vertebrae and torn knee ligaments, plus a concussion from a car accident that totaled her vehicle.
She put in the work throughout the U.S. women’s cross-country team’s rise over the last decade and a half — in Hanover and now Anchorage and across Europe every winter.
“My dream is to end my career on my own terms, and that’s not this,” she said with a laugh. “So I’ve been fighting really hard to get to a place where I can race and have the closure I want.”
