Two Vermont Teens Take On the Cross-Country Junior National Championships 

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• Courtesy Of Dave Priganc
• Amelia Circosta

Tabor Greenberg's parents named him after a mountain, and he was on skis at 2 years old; Amelia Circosta didn't see cross-country skis until she was nearly 7. Greenberg grew up in an athletic family and excelled at sports; Circosta has been homeschooled by parents with little sports experience.

Yet the two Vermont teenagers share one key trait: They win.

Greenberg, 17, and Circosta, 16, are the state's best Nordic skiers in their age groups and potentially among the future standouts for U.S. teams. Circosta lives in Greensboro and skis for the nearby Craftsbury Ski Club. Greenberg, born and raised in Moretown, competes for Waitsfield's Green Mountain Valley School.

Both have qualified for the upcoming U.S. Ski & Snowboard Cross-Country Junior National Championships, to be held March 11 through 16 at Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, N.Y. "Van Ho," as the skiers call it, was the site of the Nordic races in the 1980 Winter Olympics. Greenberg is a returning champion, having won two races last year in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Junior Nationals are the gateway to bigger U.S. and international competitions. Doing well at Van Ho is an important step toward World Cup races and the Olympics, still several years away. Standout U.S. Ski Team veterans Ben Ogden and Brian Bushey, both Vermonters, excelled at this Nordic rite of passage, competing in 2017 and 2022, respectively.

Justin Beckwith, competition director of the New England Nordic Ski Association, said Greenberg "is on a steep trajectory" and is probably the top under-18 male athlete in the region. Circosta won't turn 17 until September but has been racing against older female athletes and beating them.

Both competitors have already raced internationally with the U.S. Ski Team this season: Greenberg took part in the Winter Youth Olympic Games in Gangwon, South Korea, where he brought home a bronze medal in the sprint competition, and Circosta raced in the U18 Nordic Nations Championships in Falun, Sweden, finishing seventh in the 10-kilometer classic. That's a strong result for someone competing against older athletes from Scandinavia and Europe, Beckwith noted.

On a January day, Circosta skied away from the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, followed closely by her boyfriend, David Northcott. With seemingly little effort, she skated into a training run. She is petite but powerful, with a muscular lower body honed by hundreds of hours on a bicycle.

Circosta spent her early childhood in Boulder, Colo. An indication of her competitiveness — what her mother, Renee, calls Amelia's "race face" — came at a tender age.

"When she was about 3 or 4 years old, she came up with this game where whoever laughs first loses," Renee recalled. "She would never lose. She had these little pigtails and chubby cheeks, and she's starting to stare, and her face would go to stone. I could never win."

In 2013, when Amelia was 6, her parents packed up her and her older brother, Leo, and moved to Greensboro. Renee and her husband, Gary, wanted to be closer to family in Massachusetts, but there was also an ulterior motive: They wanted to make life a bit harder for their kids.

Yes. You read that right.

Life in Boulder was chill and undemanding, Renee said. She and Gary yearned for their kids to be challenged, to work on the land, to see where their food came from. "We wanted to build their characters," she said, "and not just let them flit around in the bubble that was Boulder."

The family quickly sussed out that when you live in Greensboro, you ski.

"We got here, and we're like, 'Well, there's a lot of snow,'" Amelia said with a chuckle. "We understood that winters were long and there was an incredible [ski] facility here. And everyone told us it was a good way to meet people."

Renee and Gary, both nonskiers, decided to go with the snow and enrolled Amelia and Leo at the Craftsbury ski center. Since their kids were homeschooled, they could spend significant time there. What the Circostas lacked in expertise, they made up for in enthusiasm.

"I was shocked," Renee admitted. "How did we ever become a ski family?"

When Amelia joined the ski team at age 9, Craftsbury coach Anna Schulz noticed her right away, and not just because of her penchant for head-to-toe purple outfits. Her passion for skiing and training was palpable.

"It wasn't clear until she got a little bit older just how motivated and competitive she would be," said Schulz, who's been Circosta's coach for the past six years. "She's very low drama and good at objectively evaluating her performance. And that's certainly tied to mental toughness."

Circosta referred to this trait as the ability "to suffer."

"Even if you have, like, the physical capabilities to go faster, if you can't deal with the discomfort, that's going to limit you," she said. She smiled, adding, "I'm pretty confident with how much I can push through the pain."

In fact, Circosta lives with compartment syndrome, a painful condition that affects her legs. Massage helps, but so does that mental toughness.

Schulz also cited Circosta's ability to get over a setback. After excellent training last fall, including attending an elite camp in Utah, Circosta had a "mediocre" result at the team's annual Thanksgiving timed trial, Schulz said, adding that "the coaches were worried she might be doubting herself."

Then they read what Circosta had written in her training log: "Not the MOST optimistic start to the season but it could only have made me better, not worse."

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• Courtesy
• Tabor Greenberg

Despite their different beginnings in the sport, Greenberg similarly credits his success in Nordic skiing to a determined mindset. Being named for Mount Tabor, a 3,000-foot peak in Rutland County, might also help — though it took him a while to grow into the name.

"Tabor was just a small little whippersnapper when I first saw him; I think he was in sixth grade," said Colin Rodgers, Nordic program director at Green Mountain Valley School, where Greenberg is now a senior. "But he was super tenacious, and he definitely learned to be gritty when he was younger, and he's brought that to his athleticism. It's been fun to watch."

Greenberg was on skis as a toddler. His mother, Laurie, ran ultramarathons, and his dad, Reid, was a competitive Alpine skier into college, when an injury forced him to switch to cross-country. He later served as his son's first coach.

At the Youth Olympic Games in January, Greenberg affirmed his status as one of the top under-18 Nordic skiers in the country. He won the bronze medal in the skate sprint.

"I was super excited," Greenberg said. "I'm really better at distance than sprints, so it was really cool I made it on the podium."

Rodgers added: "He's really competitive with a lot of athletes that are substantially older."

There's that steely resolve again: "There's a lot of times when you're cold and tired, wet," Greenberg said. "So having good mental fortitude is definitely important."

Rodgers got a preview of Greenberg's toughness and stamina when, at age 14, he joined other team members for a 100-mile bike ride. The other riders finished the loop and returned to school, but the "whippersnapper" went AWOL, eventually calling Rodgers from the top of the Appalachian Gap pass on Route 17. That little detour translated to an additional eight miles up a steep road that averages more than an 8 percent grade and maxes out at 14.3 percent — comparable to the steepest mountain stages of the Tour de France.

Greenberg had a major breakthrough last year, when Rodgers took a group of under-18 skiers to Finland to race in the Scandinavian Cup. It was Greenberg's first taste of international competition. "He whupped up on the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, the Estonians there," Rodgers said. "I had seen some impressive skiing by Tabor, but that's when we knew he was, like, truly international caliber."

While Circosta is enjoying her skiing success, she's not planning to make it her profession. When she's not ski training, she spends 40 to 50 hours a week studying. So, she said, echoing Tom Petty, the future is wide open. "Whatever I end up doing, I'm not going to be sitting at a desk in an office," she said. "I've got to be outside."

Greenberg, meanwhile, will ski for the University of Vermont this fall and plans to race for many years to come. "I like the Junior Worlds and those kinds of international junior races, so I'd like to qualify for those and get top 10s or eventually even podium," Greenberg said. "Further down the line, the ultimate goal is to be racing World Cups at that level."

That attitude makes Beckwith downright giddy. "It's a testament to our arrival as a Nordic nation," he said. "It would not be improbable that a competitor from the 2024 Junior Nationals at Lake Placid could be a World Cup standout in a few years' time."