By Miriella Jiffar
Cross-country skier Rémi Drolet, (ΦBK Harvard University) is chasing new heights in his athletic career, representing Team Canada for a second time at this year’s Winter Olympics.
Drolet gave strong performances while competing in the men’s 10km Interval Start Free and in the men’s 4×7.5km relay. Drolet and his teammates, Xavier McKeever, Antoine Cyr, and Tom Stephen, placed fifth in the relay. Their historic finish earned Team Canada its best-ever result in an Olympic cross-country relay.
A few seconds after they crossed the finish line, Drolet and his teammates realized what an amazing result this was.
“We went into it really wanting to fight as close to the front as we could, almost dreaming of a medal a little bit,” he said. “Putting ourselves in that mindset really helped us to fight with the top guys and push beyond what we’re usually capable of. We all skied amazingly well and left it all out there.”
After graduating from Harvard in 2024, where Drolet was the team captain of his ski team and recipient of the prestigious NCAA Impact Award, he decided the natural next step was to continue his professional cross-country skiing career. He joined the SMS T2 team in Stratton, Vermont, where he now skis year-round.
The Rossland, British Columbia native first started cross-country skiing when he was 11 years old, joining his school’s racing team. Drolet first made his Olympic debut in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard.
The skier had to take a year off school to train, qualify, and compete in his first Olympic Games — and it wasn’t easy.
“It took so much mental effort to even qualify…I barely made it,” he said. “It really took all the preparation I could muster to get on that team.”
This time around, Drolet said he’s been able to handle the pressure at the Olympics a little better, go into the races with a different mindset, and not put such high expectations on himself. He also had a familiar face in the Olympic village — his sister Jasmine Drolet (Dartmouth ’25) qualified for Canada’s cross-country skiing team this year.
In addition to competing on the Olympic stage, Drolet compiled an impressive record of accolades and accomplishments throughout his collegiate career.
During his time on the Harvard D1 ski team, Drolet was named the 2020 Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association Nordic Rookie of the Year, earned three-time First Team All-America honors, and won the men’s 20km Classic at the 2023 NCAA Championships.
Drolet decided to pursue higher education in the United States because of the infrastructure that existed for college sports with the NCAA that he couldn’t find in Canada. During his college search, Drolet looked for schools that had both a reputable skiing program and an academically rigorous physics program. Harvard checked both of those boxes.
“For me, it was important to keep my mind busy,” he said.
Although Boston was an unlikely choice, he recalled, since there are not a lot of places to ski in the area. What convinced Drolet to attend was how welcome he felt by other skiers on the Harvard team.
“Cross-country skiing is definitely an individual sport,” he said. However, because of how the college skiing circuit is structured, the team still scores points together. “That’s one of the things that fosters a really good community and creates a good team environment.”
While at Harvard, Drolet was determined to do well in his academics and his sport as a student-athlete. Concentrating in both Physics and Mathematics, some of his favorite topics to study were Conformal Field Theory and Lie groups & Lie algebras. He also contributed to research in statistical physics, quantum field theory, and wave turbulence.
“The opportunity to go to Harvard and learn from people that are way, way smarter than me, and just hold on for dear life,” Drolet said, was an especially meaningful experience.
While he was competing at a high level athletically, he was also excelling in the classroom, which led to one of his proudest achievements: induction into Harvard’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
“When I was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, it was a really special moment for me,” he said. “Throughout college, I spent a lot of time trying to find that fine line between doing well in academics and doing well in athletics.”
Now, when he’s not skiing, he uses his scientific background to work with data on optimizing sports performance for the company Tyme Wear.
One of the biggest highlights of his experience at this year’s Winter Games was seeing his SMS T2 teammates, Jessie Diggins and Ben Ogden, win individual medals.
“Having my teammates do so well, and thinking back to all the work that we put in together, and knowing that it was worth it… helped inspire me to put forward my best performances,” he said.
Photo Credit: Dave Holland / COC (Canadian Olympic Committee).
Miriella Jiffar is a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, concentrating in Magazine Journalism. She is a 2025 graduate of The University of Virginia, where she studied English, Cognitive Science, and French. She was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa there in April 2025. The University of Virginia is home to the Beta of Virginia chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.