U.S. Banker gears up for second, and final, Nordic ski world championships

The fraud risk analyst will represent Venezuela at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships 2025 in late February

Eduardo Arteaga is gearing up for his second, and last, Nordic ski world championships later this month.

It will be a bittersweet experience for Arteaga, a fraud risk analyst at U.S. Bank. He had hardly ever seen snow while he was growing up in Venezuela, and the first time he clipped into skate skis was a mere 12 years ago. By 2021, he competed at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in Germany as the sole member of the Venezuelan national cross-country ski team.

“Me becoming a world-class skier is a testament to the fact that if you want something enough, you can make it happen,” he said.

But finding the time to train at such an elite level simply isn’t sustainable forever for a father of three holding down a full-time job, especially when “I look at all of the people I’m competing against and I am old enough to be their father” said Arteaga, 47.

FIS, for its French acronym, International Federation of Ski, will be hosting the 2025 World Ski Championships in Trondheim, Norway. It will likely be an entirely different event than Arteaga’s last world championship’s experience. The 2021 competition was under strict Covid-19 protocols, which meant he had to be tested for the virus every 36 hours and there were no spectators to cheer the skiers on. And as the only competitor from warm-weather Venezuela, Arteaga was a media sensation and fielded inquiries from reporters around the world.

This time, Arteaga’s entire family, and wax technician who keeps his skis competition-ready, will be there to see him compete. The Venezuelan team will be twice as large as he will be joined by Guillermo Racero, another skier who lives in Austria and was born to a Venezuelan mother.

After years of cheering on their father at competitions, Arteaga’s children – ages 11, 9 and 7 – are now avid cross-country skiers themselves.

“I involve them as much as I can, but it can get very intense heading into races,” he said. After the world championship qualification event in Cable, Wisconsin, in December,  “I gave them all hugs and kisses and said I’m sorry for being such a crabby boy heading into this, but now I can get back to being your daddy.”

Arteaga, who is a dual citizen, grew up in Caracas. After earning his mechanical engineering degree, Arteaga came to the U.S. on a scholarship to pursue his MBA at Hamline University in the Twin Cities. He competed on triathlons and ultramarathons and occasionally snowboarded, but his obsession with Nordic skiing didn’t begin until a neighbor invited him to go skiing in his backyard’s Minneapolis Theodore Wirth Park.

In his role as fraud risk analyst, he teams with partners across the bank to “protect our customers and the Bank’s reputation, which is our most important asset.” He applies much of the same analytical discipline to his training regimen.

“There are multiple areas of your athleticism you need to work on to prepare – the agility, the cardio, the strength, the mental,” he said. “There are some things you can prepare for and predict, and then there are the elements like changing weather conditions and other skiers on course that you need to adjust to in a split moment.”

While the Norway event will be Arteaga’s last world championships, he plans to keep Nordic skiing as long as he can in citizen events, races, and World Master’s.

“I remember when we first moved to this neighborhood and The Loppet Foundation was hosting the World Masters Ski Championships and we saw all of these people who were 70+ years old coming down this big hill, so fast, and I thought – ‘I want to be like that,’” he said. “If anything, I hope my story will encourage more people to be outdoors and enjoy nature, no matter what the weather is like.”

The FIS World Ski Championships takes place every two years, and it allows the best athletes of every country to participate and earn an Olympic placement. The 2026 Winter Olympics will be held in Milano Cortina, Italy.